Quotes about butcher (135 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

Dreams , Sleep

“The only good enemy of the Reich is a dead one. In particular I have to add, when I received an order, I always carried out this order with the executioner, and I am proud of that to this day…. If I had not done this, they would not have gone to the butcher.”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Argentina Audiotapes (1957)

Dead

“Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power.… The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors…and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks Against Going to War with Iraq (2 October 2002).
2000-03

People , World , Way , History

“No man who aims at making his life an harmonious whole, pure, complete, and harmless to others, can endure to gratify an appetite at the cost of the daily suffering and bloodshed of his inferiors in degree, and of the moral degradation of his own kind. I know not which strikes me most forcibly in the ethics of this question the injustice, the cruelty, or the nastiness of flesh-eating. The injustice is to the butchers, the cruelty is to the animals, the nastiness concerns the consumer. With regard to this last in particular, I greatly wonder what persons of refinement—aye, even of decency—do not feel insulted on being offered, as a matter of course, portions of corpses as food! Such comestibles might possibly be tolerated during sieges, or times of other privation of proper viands in exceptional circumstances, but in the midst of a civilised community able to command a profusion of sound and delicious foods, it ought to be deemed an affront to set dead flesh before a guest.”

Anna Kingsford (1846–1888) English physician, activist and feminist

Addresses and Essays on Vegetarianism (1912); quoted in Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb by Rod Preece (Routledge, 2002), p. 344 https://books.google.it/books?id=Mf6TAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA344.

Life , Food , Feeling , Communication

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Time Enough for Love (1973)

Problem , Change , Fight , Cooking

“We can at last describe his tie, an Easter gift from a dressy butcher, his brother in law in Onhava: imitation silk, colour chocolate brown barred with red, the end tucked into the shirt between the second and third buttons - a Zemblan fashion of the nineteen thirties.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Pale Fire (1962)

Law , Fashion

“O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, / That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!”

William Shakespeare Julius Caesar

Source: Julius Caesar

“What a kid I got, I told him about the birds and the bees and he told me about the butcher and my wife.”

Rodney Dangerfield (1921–2004) American actor and comedian

Variant: What a kid I got, I told him about the birds and the bee and he told me about the butcher and my wife.

Bird , Bee

“You see, Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her and destiny didn't feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew… God doesn't make the world this way. We do.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

God , Fate , World , Dogs

“Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"In a Post-Culture".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Books , World , Music , Winter

“Take away a man’s actual sense of manhood — which is conventionally based on the ability to work, to earn money, to be self-sufficient, to provide for children — and you’ve got to give them something else. And they did.This hideous religion that’s all over the country — these huge church-malls — that’s what substitutes for these lost towns. But that’s not a town. That’s a cult. A town is diverse, in a real way, not in this fake way we have now. A community is a butcher and a doctor, a minister, a town troublemaker. A "community" is not a bunch of people united by some grievance. That’s just self-righteousness — incredibly dangerous and antidemocratic. People have become so rigid; their opinions seem to them like themselves. When that happens (and it has happened) people can’t change their minds. If you are identified by your opinions — if that is the very basis of yourself — how can you change your mind?”

Fran Lebowitz (1950) author and public speaker from the United States

Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (August/September 2005).

Money , Children , People , Religion

“So he ignored the heat now and wondered about what he should do next. If he was going to show what he could do and really did it this time instead of saying he did when he didn't, he remembered that Bobo Kelton hung around the Rec Center a lot, every day, showing off as usual, laughing and sly, as usual. Jason looked at the clock. Ten minutes before three. Hot afternoon. He knew that Bobo would be at the Center. All he had to do was go there and wait. Across the street. A beautiful feeling of sweetness came over him. He lifted his head, let the feeling carry him for a while, like a fresh breeze in his heart. Then he went into the kitchen and took the butcher knife out of the drawer.”

Robert Cormier book The Rag and Bone Shop

Source: The Rag and Bone Shop (2000), p. 154

Beauty , Feeling , Time , Waiting

“Citizens, by what illusion could one persuade himself that you are inhuman. Your Revolutionary Tribunal has condemned three hundred rascals to death in a year. Has not the Spanish Inquisition done worse than that … Have the English assizes butchered no one in that period? … What of the kings of Europe, does anyone prate to them of pity? Ah, do not allow yourselves to grow soft-hearted!”

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767–1794) military and political leader

Speech to the National Convention (February 26, 1794). [Source: Charles Vellay (ed.), Oeuvres Complètes de Saint-Just, Vol. 2 (2 vols., Paris, 1908), pp. 236-237]

Death , Heart

“Begot by butchers, but by bishops bred,
How high his Highness holds his haughty head!”

Thomas Wolsey (1473–1530) English political figure and cardinal

Attributed to Cardinal Wolsey in English Etymology; Or, a Derivative Dictionary of the English Language (1783) by George William Lemon, "Alliteration".
Disputed

“One thing I have frequently observed in children, that when they have got possession of any poor creature, they are apt to use it ill: they often torment, and treat it very roughly, young birds, butterflies, and such other poor animals which fall into their hands, and that with a seeming kind of pleasure. This I think should be watched in them, and if they incline to any such cruelty, they should be taught the contrary usage. For the custom of tormenting and killing of beasts, will, by degrees, harden their minds even towards men; and they will delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures, will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind. Our practice takes notice of this in the exclusion of butchers from juries of life and death.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 116
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

Life , Death , Men , Children

“All the entertainment and talk of history is nothing almost but fighting and killing: and the honour and renown that is bestowed on conquerers (who for the most part are but the great butchers of mankind) farther mislead growing youth, who by this means come to think slaughter the laudible business of mankind, and the most heroick of virtues.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 116
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Context: All the entertainment and talk of history is nothing almost but fighting and killing: and the honour and renown that is bestowed on conquerers (who for the most part are but the great butchers of mankind) farther mislead growing youth, who by this means come to think slaughter the laudible business of mankind, and the most heroick of virtues. By these steps unnatural cruelty is planted in us; and what humanity abhors, custom reconciles and recommends to us, by laying it in the way to honour. Thus, by fashioning and opinion, that comes to be a pleasure, which in itself neither is, nor can be any.

Youth , History , Business , Thinking

“either you get eaten by a wolf today or else the shepherd saves you from the wolf so he can sell you to the butcher tomorrow”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

Source: I'm a Stranger Here Myself

Wolf

“The lamb misused breeds public strife
And yet forgives the butcher's knife.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Forgiveness

“Healing for me is being able to sit next to the butcher and say 'Yes, I’m sitting next to the butcher now,' instead of saying 'there is no butcher'.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

“i am going to bed. i will have nightmares involving huge monsters in academic robes carrying long bloody butcher knives labeled Excerpt, Selection, Passage, and Abridged.”

Helene Hanff book 84, Charing Cross Road

Source: 84, Charing Cross Road

“The Rudderless World is not shaped by vague metaphysical Forces. It is not God who kills the Children. Not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the Dogs…. It´s us. Only us.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

God , Fate , Children , World

“Let him go, Julian. His entire body isn’t worth one molecule of yours. (Grace)
(To Paul) Where I come from, we butchered worthless cowards like you just for practice. (Julian)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon Fantasy Lover

Source: Fantasy Lover

“Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

Source: The Old Man and the Sea

People , Heart

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, Chapter II, p. 19.
Source: The Wealth of Nations, Books 1-3
Context: But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.

Business

“well, death says, as he walks by, I'm going to get you anyhow no matter what you've been: writer, cab-driver, pimp, butcher, sky-diver, I'm going to get you”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: The Last Night of the Earth Poems

Death

“The man, who was probably an itinerant traditional circumciser from the blacksmith clan, picked up a pair of scissors. With the other hand, he caught hold of the place between my legs and started tweaking it, like Grandma milking a goat. "There it is, the kintir," one of the women said. Then the scissors went down between my legs and the man cut off my inner labia and clitoris. I heard it, like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs, indescribable, and I howled. Then came the sewing: the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia, my loud and anguished protests, Grandma's words of comfort and encouragement. "It's just this once in your life, Ayaan. Be brave, it's almost finished."”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

When the sewing was finished, he cut the thread off with his teeth.
Source: Infidel (2007), Chapter 2: Under the Talal Tree

Life , Women , Pain , Grandma

“I had wished to visit a slaughter-house, in order to see with my own eyes the reality of the question raised when vegetarianism is discussed. But at first I felt ashamed to do so, as one is always ashamed of going to look at suffering which one knows is about to take place, but which one cannot avert; and so I kept putting off my visit. But a little while ago I met on the road a butcher … He is not yet an experienced butcher, and his duty is to stab with a knife. I asked him whether he did not feel sorry for the animals that he killed. He gave me the usual answer: 'Why should I feel sorry? It is necessary.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

But when I told him that eating flesh is not necessary, but is only a luxury, he agreed; and then he admitted that he was sorry for the animals.
Source: The First Step (1892), Ch. IX

Feeling , Question , Reality , Suffering

“Even the free importation of foreign corn could very little affect the interest of the farmers of Great Britain. Corn is a much more bulky commodity than butcher's-meat. A pound of wheat at a penny is as dear as a pound of butcher's-meat at fourpence. The small quantity of foreign corn imported even in times of the greatest scarcity, may satisfy our farmers that they can have nothing to fear from the freest importation.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter II

Fear , Time

“… Assad’s survival—if Saddam Hussein’s murderous rampage in 1991 is any indication—will without a shadow of a doubt translate into hundreds of thousands of Syrian dead, mostly butchered after his victory has been assured. The comparison comes to mind because the two Ba’thi regimes of Saddam Hussein and Bashar Assad bear an unmistakable resemblance—they are mirror images of one another, one might say. Both are minority dominated, single party regimes originating in the same quasi-fascist pan-Arab ideology built on the principle that any form of disagreement is an act of “betrayal” to the “revolution.””

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Intervention In Syria is a Moral and Human Imperative", New Republican (February 24, 2012)

Betrayal , Victory , Dead

“It may indeed be doubted, whether butcher's meat is any where a necessary of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese, and butter, or oil, where butter is not to be had, it is known from experience, can, without any butcher's meat, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book V, Chapter II, Part II, Appendix to Articles I and II.

Life , Help

“Some young men could not afford to marry or were statutorily forbidden to do so, and then their visits to Japanese brothels engendered guilt as well as VD. The official attitude to taking brown mistresses was always ambivalent. It let the side down, but a sleeping dictionary was the only way to learn the language. Mr Butcher is good on all this, and he gives such tables as one headed ‘Ethnicity of Women from whom European Men Treated at the Sultan Street Clinic Contracted Venereal Disease, 1927-1931.’ The girls of Siam were the great infectresses, but the Malays came a close second. The Japanese, who had regular medical inspections and lived in brothels cleaner than hotels, were down with the Eurasians to 0.4% in 1931. This damnable sex, by no means to be tamed by quinine or cricket. Guilt guilt guilt….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

Women , Men , Disease , Sex

“I’ve lived on my own since I was 13 and not been to school and brought a son up who’s now 18 and run theatre companies and bought a butcher’s shop, learnt guitar by myself, taught myself to sing and that sort of stuff.”

Stella Vine (1969) English artist

Billen, Andrew. "I Made More Money As A Stripper..." http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article445303.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2, (2004-06-15)
On teaching herself to paint.

School , Singing

“I cannot kill. Unfortunately, there are so many who can and do kill. As I cannot kill I cannot authorize others to kill. Do you see? If you are buying from a butcher you are authorizing him to kill — kill helpless, dumb creatures, which neither I nor you could kill ourselves. So that I am for that reason a vegetarian, as most Russians are. For nine years I have been a vegetarian, and I shall be one — mind, I am a man with strong convictions — to the end of my life.”

Paolo Troubetzkoy (1866–1938) Russian sculptor (1866-1938)

From an interview. Reported in The Vegetarian Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 2 https://books.google.it/books?id=PjugAAAAMAAJ, 1907, p. 22.

Life , Strong

“…Sooltan Mahmood now attacked one of the forts in the Koombulmere district, defended by Beny Ray, the deputy of Rana Koombho of Chittor. In front of the gateway was a large temple which commanded the lower works. This building was strongly fortified, and employed by the enemy as a magazine. Sooltan Mahmood, aware of its importance, determined to take possession of it at all hazards; and having stormed it in person, carried it, but not without heavy loss; after which, the fort fell into his hands, and many Rajpoots were put to death. The temple was now filled with wood, and being set on fire, cold water was thrown on the, stone images, which causing them to break, the pieces were given to the butchers of the camp, in order to be used as weights in selling meat. One large figure in particular, representing a ram, and formed of solid marble, being consumed, the Rajpoots were compelled to eat the calcined parts with pan, in order that it might be said that they were made to eat their gods…”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Sultãn Mahmûd Khaljî of Malwa (AD 1435-1469) Kumbhalgadh (Rajasthan)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Death , God , Water , Loss

“It is common talk that every individual is entitled to economic security. The only animals and birds I know that have economic security are those that have been domesticated--and the economic security they have is controlled by the barbed-wire fence, the butcher's knife and the desire of others. They are milked, skinned, egged or eaten up by their protectors.”

Ray Lyman Wilbur (1875–1949) President of Stanford University

"Ray Lyman Wilbur", The Washington Post, June 28, 1949

Bird , Animals

“Since it's not considered polite, and surely not politically-correct to come out and actually say that greed gets wonderful things done, let me go through a few of the millions of examples of the benefits of people trying to get more for themselves. There's probably widespread agreement that it's a wonderful thing that most of us own cars. Is there anyone who believes that the reason we have cars is because Detroit assembly line workers care about us? It's also wonderful that Texas cattle ranchers make the sacrifices of time and effort caring for steer so that New Yorkers can have beef on their supermarket shelves. It is also wonderful that Idaho potato growers arise early to do back-breaking work in the hot sun to ensure that New Yorkers also have potatoes on their supermarket shelves. Again, is there anyone who believes that ranchers and potato growers, who make these sacrifices, do so because they care about New Yorkers? They might hate New Yorkers. New Yorkers have beef and potatoes because Texas cattle ranchers and Idaho potato growers care about themselves and they want more for themselves. How much steak and potatoes would New Yorkers have if it all depended on human love and kindness? I would feel sorry for New Yorkers. Thinking this way bothers some people because they are more concerned with the motives behind a set of actions rather than the results. This is what Adam Smith, the father of economics, meant in The Wealth of Nations when he said, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests."”

Walter E. Williams (1936) American economist, commentator, and academic

2010s, Markets, Governments, and the Common Good

Love , Hate , People , Cars

“Nixon: The only place where you and I disagree is with regard to the bombing. You're so goddamned concerned about civilians and I don't give a damn. I don't care.
Kissinger: I'm concerned about the civilians because I don't want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

In conversation with Henry Kissinger regarding Vietnam, as quoted in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. (2002) by Daniel Ellsberg
2000s

World

“Better than big business is clean business.
To an honest man the most satisfactory reflection after he has amassed his dollars is not that they are many but that they are all clean.
What constitutes clean business? The answer is obvious enough, but the obvious needs restating every once in a while.
"A clean profit is one that has also made a profit for the other fellow."
This is fundamental moral axiom in business. Any gain that arises from another's loss is dirty.
Any business whose prosperity depends upon damage to any other business is a menace to the general welfare.
That is why gambling, direct or indirect, is criminal, why lotteries are prohibited by law, and why even gambling slot-machine devices are not tolerated in civilized countries. When a farmer sells a housekeeper a barrel of apples, when a milkman sells her a quart of milk, or the butcher a pound of steak, or the dry-goods man a yard of muslin, the housekeeper is benefited quite as much as those who get her money.
That is the type of honest, clean business, the kind that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Of course as business becomes more complicated it grows more difficult to tell so clearly whether both sides are equally prospered. No principle is automatic. It requires sense, judgment, and conscience to keep clean; but it can be done, nevertheless, if one is determined to maintain his self-respect. A man that makes a habit, every deal he goes into, of asking himself, "What is there in it for the other fellow?" and who refuses to enter into any transaction where his own gain will mean disaster to some one else, cannot go for wrong.
And no matter how many memorial churches he builds, nor how much he gives to charity, or how many monuments he erects in his native town, any man who has made his money by ruining other people is not entitled to be called decent. A factory where many workmen are given employment, paid living wages, and where health and life are conserved, is doing more real good in the world than ten eleemosynary institutions.
The only really charitable dollar is the clean dollar. And the nasty dollar, wrung from wronged workmen or gotten by unfair methods from competitors, is never nastier than when it pretends to serve the Lord by being given to the poor, to education, or to religion. In the long run all such dollars tend to corrupt and disrupt society.
Of all vile money, that which is the most unspeakably vile is the money spent for war; for war is conceived by the blundering ignorance and selfishness of rulers, is fanned to flame by the very lowest passions of humanity, and prostitutes the highest ideal of men; zeal for the common good; to the business of killing human beings and destroying the results of their collective work.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), Clean Business

Life , Men , Money , War

“In 1945 I really believed that by the year 1952 no American could hear the name of Roosevelt without a shudder or utter it without a curse. You see; I was wrong. I was right about the inevitability of exposure. Like the bodies of the Polish officers who were butchered in Katyn Forest by the Bolsheviks (as we knew at the time), many of the Roosevelt regime's secret crimes were exposed to the light of day. The exposures were neither so rapid or so complete as I anticipated, but their aggregate is far more than should have been needed for the anticipated reaction. Only about 80 per cent of the secret of Pearl Harbor has thus far become known, but that 80 per cent should in itself be enough to nauseate a healthy man. Of course I do not know, and I may not even suspect, the full extent of the treason of that incredible administration. But I should guess that at least half of it has been disclosed in print somewhere: not necessarily in well-known sources, but in books and articles in various languages, including publications that the international conspiracy tries to keep from the public, and not necessarily in the form of direct testimony, but at least in the form of evidence from which any thinking man can draw the proper and inescapable deductions. The information is there for those who will seek it, and enough of it is fairly well known, fairly widely known, especially the Pearl Harbor story, to suggest to anyone seriously interested in the preservation of his country that he should learn more. But the reaction never occurred. And even today the commonly used six-cent postage stamp bears the bloated and sneering visage of the Great War Criminal, and one hears little protest from the public.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"What We Owe Our Parasites", speech (June 1968); Free Speech magazine (October and November 1995)
1960s

War , Secret , Books , Thinking

“You always had to pay the butcher.”

Robert Jordan A Crown of Swords

Gawyn Trakand
A Crown of Swords (15 May 1996)

“Arakawa: I'd follow three simple rules: 1) Never go within two kilometres of circus freaks. 2) Never go near the butcher shop in Dublith. 3) Always spend under 300 sen on snacks. That ought to keep me alive! [chuckle]”

Hiromu Arakawa (1973) award winning Japanese manga artist

Interview with mobuta.com (2004)

“It's true I've got no shirts to wear,
It's true my butcher's bill is due,
It's true my prospects all look blue,
But don't let that unsettle you!
Never you mind!
Roll on!”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

It rolls on.
To the Terrestrial Globe.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Past the flannel plains and the blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a. m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscatine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Tree , Grass , Water , Past

“Waiting in the wings, wishing to chop us to pieces, is Yankee steel butcher MacGregor. This 70-year-old multi-millionaire import, who massacred half the steel workforce in less than three years, is almost certainly brought in to wield the axe on pits. It's now or never for Britain's mineworkers. This is the final chance – while we still have the strength – to save our industry.”

Arthur Scargill (1938) British trade unionist

The Miner, quoted in Paul Routledge, "Pit strike would last 'very long time' warns NCB", The Times (8 March 1983), p. 1

Chance , Waiting

“When the Shah departed towards the close of the day, a false rumour was spread through the town that he had been severely wounded by a shot from a matchlock, and thus were sown the seeds from which murder and rapine were to spring. The bad characters within the town collected in great bodies, and, without distinction, commenced the work of plunder and destruction…. On the morning of the 11th an order went forth from the Persian Emperor for the slaughter of the inhabitants. The result may be imagined; one moment seemed to have sufficed for universal destruction. The Chandni chauk, the fruit market, the Daribah bazaar, and the buildings around the Masjid-i Jama’ were set fire to and reduced to ashes. The inhabitants, one and all, were slaughtered. Here and there some opposition was offered, but in most places people were butchered unresistingly. The Persians laid violent hands on everything and everybody; cloth, jewels, dishes of gold and silver, were acceptable spoil…. But to return to the miserable inhabitants. The massacre lasted half the day, when the Persian Emperor ordered Haji Fulad Khan, the kotwal, to proceed through the streets accompanied by a body of Persian nasakchis, and proclaim an order for the soldiers to resist from carnage. By degrees the violence of the flames subsided, but the bloodshed, the devastation, and the ruin of families were irreparable. For a long time the streets remained strewn with corpses, as the walks of a garden with dead flowers and leaves. The town was reduced to ashes, and had the appearance of a plain consumed with fire. All the regal jewels and property and the contents of the treasury were seized by the Persian conqueror in the citadel. He thus became possessed of treasure to the amount of sixty lacs of rupees and several thousand ashrafis… plate of gold to the value of one kror of rupees, and the jewels, many of which were unrivalled in beauty by any in the world, were valued at about fifty krors. The peacock throne alone, constructed at great pains in the reign of Shah Jahan, had cost one kror of rupees. Elephants, horses, and precious stuffs, whatever pleased. the conqueror’s eye, more indeed than can be enumerated, became his spoil. In short, the accumulated wealth of 348 years changed masters in a moment.”

Nader Shah (1688–1747) ruled as Shah of Iran

About Shah’s sack of Delhi, Tazrikha by Anand Ram Mukhlis. A history of Nâdir Shah’s invasion of India. In The History of India as Told by its own Historians. The Posthumous Papers of the Late Sir H. M. Elliot. John Dowson, ed. 1st ed. 1867. 2nd ed., Calcutta: Susil Gupta, 1956, vol. 22, pp. 74-98. https://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/h_es/h_es_tazrikha_frameset.htm

Pain , People , World , Family

“A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes.”

Daniel Handler book The Vile Village

Lemony Snicket
The Vile Village (2001)

People , Horse

“I have just this moment heard from the front — there is nothing yet of a movement, but each side is continually on the alert, expecting something to happen.
O Mother, to think that we are to have here soon what I have seen so many times, the awful loads and trains and boatloads of poor, bloody, and pale and wounded young men again — for that is what we certainly will, and before very long. I see all the little signs, getting ready in the hospitals, etc.; it is dreadful when one thinks about it. I sometimes think over the sights I have myself seen: the arrival of the wounded after a battle, and the scenes on the field, too, and I can hardly believe my own recollections. What an awful thing war is! Mother, it seems not men but a lot of devils and butchers butchering each other.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Letter to his mother (22 March 1864)

Men , War , Thinking , Time

“Once I saw the village butcher [in his youth, in Russia] slice the neck of a bird and drain the blood out of it. I wanted to cry out, but his joyful expression caught the sound in my throat... This cry, I always feel it there. When, as a I drew a crude portrait of my professor, I tried to rid myself of this cry, but in vain. When I painted the beef carcass it was still this cry that I wanted to liberate. I have still not succeeded.”

Chaim Soutine (1893–1943) painter

remark to his friend and biographer
Source: Soutine et son temps, Emile Szittya, La Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris, 1955, pp. 107-108; as quoted in Chaim Soutine, Catalogue Raisonné, eds. Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow, Klaus Perls, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, p. 16

Youth , Feeling , Bird , Painting

“Questioning the status quo can result in banishment, imprisonment, ridicule or being burned at the stake, depending on your era, your locale, and the sacred cows you wish to butcher.”

Gene Spafford (1956) American computer scientist

The Pursuit of Knowledge, from Genesis to Google http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200501/msg00031.html

Question , Dependency

“I commend our soldiers for their gallantry and bravery and for fighting for our freedom. I want to know if our soldiers were killed in a legitimate encounter or were they again butchered like pigs like what happened with our five marines.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Official Website of the Senate of the Philippines http://www.senate.gov.ph/press_release/2011/1020_escudero1.asp
2011

Freedom , Fight

“When he halted near Kumbhalmîr which was a very big fort of that province, and well-known for its strength all over Hindustãn, Devã the Vakîl of the Governor of Kumbhã took shelter in the fort and started fighting. It so happened that a magnificent temple had been erected in front of that fort and surrounded by ramparts on all sides. That temple had been filled with weapons of war and other stores. Sultãn Mahmûd planned to storm the ramparts and captured it [the temple] in a week. A large number of Rajpûts were made prisoners and slaughtered. About the edifices of the temple, he ordered that they should be stocked with wood and fired, and water and vinegar was sprinkled on the walls. That magnificent mansion which it had taken many years to raise, was destroyed in a few moments. He got the idols broken and they were handed over to the butchers for being used as weights while selling meat. The biggest idol which had the form of a ram was reduced to powder which was put in betel-leaves to be given to the Rajpûts so that they could eat their god.”

Nizamuddin Ahmad (1551–1594) historian

Sultãn Mahmûd Khaljî of Malwa (AD 1436-1469) Kumbhalgadh (Rajasthan)
Tabqãt-i-Akharî

God , War , Water , Fight

“A dead cow or sheep lying in a pasture is recognised as carrion. The same sort of a carcass dressed and hung up in a butcher's stall passes as food! Careful microscopic examination may show little or no difference between the fence corner carcass and the butcher shop carcass. Both are swarming with colon germs and redolent with putrefaction.”

John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) American physician

Source: Quoted in Romance of the Cow https://books.google.it/books?id=HSHOAAAAMAAJ by Dahyabhai H. Jani, The Bombay Humanitarian League, 1938, p. 81.

Food , Lying , Dead

“Hmm…hmm. A stag hunt. To what elaborate lengths the equestrian classes go in order to draw out the simple business of butchering venison.”

Avram Davidson book The Phoenix and the Mirror

Source: The Phoenix and the Mirror (1969), Chapter 6

Business , Drawing

“The problem that confronts most of us is whether the individual is merely the instrument of society or the end of society. Are you and I as individuals to be used, directed, educated, controlled, shaped to a certain pattern by society and government; or does society, the State, exist for the individual? Is the individual the end of society; or is he merely a puppet to be taught, exploited, butchered as an instrument of war? That is the problem that is confronting most of us. That is the problem of the world; whether the individual is a mere instrument of society, a plaything of influences to be moulded; or whether society exists for the individual.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1950s, The First and Last Freedom (1954)

War , World , Education , Problem

“From that point, my universe went on crumbling; new cracks appeared all the time. I could see that the pleasant securities of childhood, all of those warm little human emotions, all of those trivial aims and purposes that we allow to rule our lives, were an illusion. We were like sheep munching grass, unaware that the butcher's lorry is already on its way. I got used to living with a deep, underlying feeling of uncertainty that no one around me seemed to share. It was rather like living on death row.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Alien Dawn (1998), pp. 12-13

Death , Way , Feeling , Grass

“Temptations came to him, in middle age, tentatively and without insistence, like a neglected butcher-boy who asks for a Christmas box in February for no more hopeful reason than that he didn't get one in December.”

Saki (1870–1916) British writer

"The Reticence of Lady Anne"
Reginald in Russia (1910)

Age , Hope , Boy , Christmas

“The butchering of harmless animals cannot fail to produce much of that spirit of insane and hideous exultation in which news of a victory is related altho' purchased by the massacre of a hundred thousand men. If the use of animal food be in consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

"On the Vegetable System of Diet" (c. 1815; published in the 1920s), in Complete Works, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, Volume 6 (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), pp. 343-344, original emphasis

Men , Disease , Peace , Food

“I got a clear impression that he'd cheerfully send off a regiment to be butchered if it served his purpose. He wouldn't think twice about it, either. he called soldiers "interchangeable parts.”

John Jakes (1932) American historical novelist and fantasy writer

North and South Trilogy (1982-1987), Answer the Drum

Thinking , Parting

“Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Mahatma Gandhi, June 1946, in an interview with Louis Fischer. Rabbi Stephen Pearce, Torah Offers Ethics, rules, so all is fair in love and war, September 2000, http://www.jewishsf.com/bk000901/torah.shtml . Quoted from Hinduism and Judaism compilation https://web.archive.org/web/20060423090103/http://www.nhsf.org.uk/images/stories/HinduDharma/Interfaith/hinduzion.pdf The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950) by Louis Fischer. The quote is in the context of Gandhi's argument to his biographer that collective suicide would have been a heroic response that would have "aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence".
Posthumous publications (1950s and later)

Time , Sea

“I'd never show up a pitcher by standing in the batters box and watching how far the ball goes like a lot of players do now. But it made me feel good to know I could hit a ball longer than anyone else. It tickled the hell out of me. It was like playing in a golf tournament and hearing all the ohhs and ahhs when you hit a good drive. I mean, every time I swung at it I was trying to hit it longer than the time before. I'm sure that was why I struck out so much, but I'd get a kick out of it. Poor Casey would get so mad. He'd say, "Hey butcher boy, just make contact."”

Mickey Mantle (1931–1995) Professional baseball player

But he couldn't get me to change. In fact, Whitey told me just last year that I'd shut my eyes just before I lunged.
As quoted in "IT'S OUTTA HEEERRE!!!: A New Generation of Sluggers Invites Tape-Measure Comparisons" http://articles.latimes.com/1986-07-21/sports/sp-26487_1_home-run.

Feeling , Boy , Hell , Change

“Poor devils! Where do these unfortunate creatures come from? On what butcher's block will they meet their end? What reward does municipal munificence allot them for thus cleaning (or dirtying) the pavements of Paris? At what age are they sent to the glue factory? What becomes of their bones (their skin is good for nothing)?”

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) French Romantic composer

Pauvres diables!... D'où sortent ces malheureux êtres ?... À quel Montfaucon vont-ils mourir ?... Que leur octroie la munificence municipale pour nettoyer (ou salir) ainsi le pavé de Paris ?... À quel âge les envoie-t-on à l'équarrissage ?... Que fait-on de leurs os ? (leur peau n'est bonne à rien.)
Les Grotesques de la Musique (Paris: A. Bourdilliat, 1859) p. 89; Alastair Bruce (trans.) The Musical Madhouse (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003) pp. 54-56.
Of critics

Age

“Cossacks, I must tell you that you are the butchers of the Russian workers. Will you continue to be so in the future, or will you acknowledge your own wickedness and join the ranks of the oppressed? Up to now you have shown no respect for the poor workers. For one of the tsar's rubles or a glass of wine, you have nailed them living to the cross.”

Maria Nikiforova (1885–1919) Revolutionary, anarchist

Speech to cossack cavalry loyal to the White movement.
[harv, Archibald, Malcolm, http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/marusya.htm, Atamansha: the Story of Maria Nikiforova, the Anarchist Joan of Arc, Black Cat Press, Dublin, 19, 2007, 9780973782707, 239359065]

Wine , Future

“Luther's Qualifications. Luther had a rare combination of gifts for a Bible translator: familiarity with the original languages, perfect mastery over the vernacular, faith in the revealed word of God, enthusiasm for the gospel, unction of the Holy Spirit. A good translation must be both true and free, faithful and idiomatic, so as to read like an original work. This is the case with Luther's version. Besides, he had already acquired such fame and authority that his version at once commanded universal attention.
His knowledge of Greek and Hebrew was only moderate, but sufficient to enable him to form an independent judgment. What he lacked in scholarship was supplied by his intuitive genius and the help of Melanchthon. In the German tongue he had no rival. He created, as it were, or gave shape and form to the modern High German. He combined the official language of the government with that of the common people. He listened, as he says, to the speech of the mother at home, the children in the street, the men and women in the market, the butcher and various tradesmen in their shops, and, "looked them on the mouth," in pursuit of the most intelligible terms. His genius for poetry and music enabled him to reproduce the rhythm and melody, the parallelism and symmetry, of Hebrew poetry and prose. His crowning qualification was his intuitive insight and spiritual sympathy with the contents of the Bible.
A good translation, he says, requires "a truly devout, faithful, diligent, Christian, learned, experienced, and practiced heart."”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Luther's competence as a Bible translator

Women , Men , God , Children

“I intensely dislike the job of butchering a farm animal. The pig we butchered today squealed unmercifully when it was shot. It thought we were going to feed it but instead it received a bullet to its brain. Eating animals is so uncivilized, I am beginning to understand why GB Shaw, Tolstoy and Albert Einstein are vegetarians…”

Virgil John Tangborn (1920–1944)

March 4, 1942

Understanding , Animals

“You think to baffle me, you with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher's. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already. And through them you and others shall yet be mine, my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Dracula, having found Jonathan Harker, Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood in his house
Dracula (1897)

Love , Girl , Revenge , Thinking

“As people are not eaten, butchering them is of no use.”

Arndt Pekurinen (1905–1941) Finnish pacifist

Personal motto. Quoted in "Amoral America" by Robert Fearn - Page 715

People

“You see by what has happened that we are superior to you in intelligence, in size of army, and in number of supporters. Surely you were easily trapped, captured without a struggle. It is in my power to do with you what I wish when I wish. Helpless and prostrate, you lie before us now, victims of our might. But if one looks for a punishment equal to the crimes you have committed, it is impossible to find a suitable one. You murdered your revered and benevolent old emperor, the man whom it was your sworn duty to protect. The empire of the Roman people, eternally respected, which our forefathers obtained by their valiant courage or inherited because of their noble birth, this empire you shamefully and disgracefully sold for silver as if it were your personal property. But you were unable to defend the man whom you yourselves had chosen as emperor. No, you betrayed him like the cowards you are. For these monstrous acts and crimes you deserve a thousand deaths, if one wished to do to you what you have earned. You see clearly what it is right you should suffer. But I will be merciful. I will not butcher you. My hands shall not do what your hands did. But I say that it is in no way fit or proper for you to continue to serve as the emperor's bodyguard, you who have violated your oath and stained your hands with the blood of your emperor and fellow Roman, betraying the trust placed in you and the security offered by your protection. Still, compassion leads me to spare your lives and your persons. But I order the soldiers who have you surrounded to cashier you, to strip off any military uniform or equipment you are wearing, and drive you off naked. 9. And I order you to get yourselves as far from the city of Rome as is humanly possible, and I promise you and I swear it on solemn oath and I proclaim it publicly that if any one of you is found within a hundred miles of Rome, he shall pay for it with his head.”

Septimius Severus (145–211) Emperor of Ancient Rome

Herodian, Book II.

Death , People , Lie , Way

“I would rather see Rome ruled by a man who once had to ask his accountant tricky questions before his steward could pay the butcher’s bill than by some mad limb like Nero, who was brought up believing himself the son and the grandson of gods, and who thought wearing the purple gave him free rein to indulge his personal vanities, execute real talent, bankrupt the Treasury, burn half of Rome – and bore the living daylights out of paying customers in theatres!”

Lindsey Davis book Shadows in Bronze

Shadows in Bronze

God , Question , Personality , Madness

“VII. Let me call your attention to the recent tragedy in New Orleans, whereof the facts are obtained entirely through Pro-Slavery channels. A considerable body of resolute, able-bodied men, held in Slavery by two Rebel sugar-planters in defiance of the Confiscation Act which you have approved, left plantations thirty miles distant and made their way to the great mart of the South-West, which they knew to be the indisputed possession of the Union forces. They made their way safely and quietly through thirty miles of Rebel territory, expecting to find freedom under the protection of our flag. Whether they had or had not heard of the passage of the Confiscation Act, they reasoned logically that we could not kill them for deserting the service of their lifelong oppressors, who had through treason become our implacable enemies. They came to us for liberty and protection, for which they were willing render their best service: they met with hostility, captivity, and murder. The barking of the base curs of Slavery in this quarter deceives no one--not even themselves. They say, indeed, that the negroes had no right to appear in New Orleans armed (with their implements of daily labor in the cane-field); but no one doubts that they would gladly have laid these down if assured that they should be free. They were set upon and maimed, captured and killed, because they sought the benefit of that act of Congress which they may not specifically have heard of, but which was none the less the law of the land which they had a clear right to the benefit of--which it was somebody's duty to publish far and wide, in order that so many as possible should be impelled to desist from serving Rebels and the Rebellion and come over to the side of the Union, They sought their liberty in strict accordance with the law of the land--they were butchered or re-enslaved for so doing by the help of Union soldiers enlisted to fight against slaveholding Treason. It was somebody's fault that they were so murdered--if others shall hereafter stuffer in like manner, in default of explicit and public directions to your generals that they are to recognize and obey the Confiscation Act, the world will lay the blame on you. Whether you will choose to hear it through future History and 'at the bar of God, I will not judge. I can only hope.”

Horace Greeley (1811–1872) American politician and publisher

1860s, The Prayer of the Twenty Millions (1862)

Men , God , Hostility , World

“In the course of General Westmoreland's testimony, he made the statement that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. I stopped him and said, 'General, would you rather command an army of slaves?' He drew himself up and said, 'I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.' I replied, 'I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries.' But I went on to say, 'If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

That was the last that we heard from the general about mercenaries.
Two Lucky People: Memoirs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1998) p. 380.

“Punk: Well, I've had six days to watch that scene over and over and over, and as painful as it was to watch, as painful it was to experience, I saw something more painful. Something caught my eye that was ten times more painful than my arm being mangled inside of a ladder while Alberto wrenched on it with his cross-armbreaker; it was more painful than Alberto butchering the English language; it was more painful than watching Miz [demonstrates] make his own bad-guy face, and his pathetic attempts to sound like a tough guy—"really? really?"—it was more painful than sitting through two hours of Michael Cole commentary as he struggles to sound relevant. No, I continued to watch Monday Night Raw, and what I saw was old clown shoes himself, the Executive Vice President of Talent Relations and Interim Raw General Manager, John Laurinaitis accept an award on my behalf. This wasn't just any award, it was the Slammy Award for Superstar of the Year, being accepted by a guy who's never been a superstar of thirty seconds. I mean, who's he ever beat? And I'm not a hard guy to find, I've yet to receive said Slammy. So what…[turns around and notices] oh. Speak of the devil. No, no, no, don't apologize. Where's my Slammy at?
Laurinaitis: Punk, I mailed your Slammy to you, but with the holiday season, it may take a while to get to you. But if I were you, I'd be more worried about your championship match tonight than your Slammy.
Punk: Well, if I were you, I'd wish myself best of luck in my future endeavors. But I don't expect you to do that; in fact, you wouldn't do that, just like I'm not gonna lose the Title tonight. So when TLC is over with, you're still gonna have to put up with CM Punk as your WWE Champion.
Laurinaitis: You know what, Punk? I'm gonna be the bigger man right now, okay? I mean, after all, I am taller than you. Good luck tonight, and merry Christmas.
Punk: Johnny, luck's for losers.”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

TLC 2011
WWE Raw

Pain , Shoe , Guy , Time

“All the way home Hellfrick was exultant, but the steering wheel was sticky with blood, and once or twice I thought I heard the calf kicking in the back seat…On bunker Hill we turned down our alley and pulled up at the parking space adjacent the hotel wall. Hellfrick got out. "Now I'm going to give you a lesson in butchering."”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Way , Home

“I'll tell you what harms the vast majority of Muslims that love freedom and hate terror: Muslim theocracy does. Muslim intolerance does. Wahabism does. Salafism does. Islamism does. Jihadism does. Sharia law does. The mere conservatism of traditional Islam does. We're not talking about only jihadists hating homosexuals and thinking they should die, we're talking about conservative Muslims. The percentage of British Muslims polled who said that homosexuality was morally acceptable was zero. Do you realize what it takes to say something so controversial in a poll that not even 1% of those polled would agree with it? There's almost no question that extreme that you will ever see in a poll that gets a zero, but ask British Muslims whether homosexuality is morally acceptable, and that's what you get. And the result is more or less the same in dozens of other countries. It's zero in Cameroon, zero in Ethiopia. 1% in Nigeria, 1% in Tanzania, 1% in Mali, 2% in Kenya, 2% in Chad. 1% in Lebanon, 1% in Egypt, 1% in the Palestinian territories, 1% in Iraq, 2% in Jordan, 2% in Tunisia, 1% in Pakistan. But 10% in Bangladesh. Bangladesh: that bright spot in the Muslim world where they are regularly hunting down and butchering secular writers with machetes. The people who suffer under this belief system are Muslims themselves. The next generation of human beings born into a Muslim community who could otherwise have been liberal, tolerant, well-educated, cosmopolitan productive people are to one or another degree being taught to aspire to live in the Middle Ages, or to ruin this world on route to some fictional paradise after death. That's the thing we have to get our heads around. And yes, some of what I just said applies with varying modifications to other religions and other cults. But there is nothing like Islam at this moment for generating this kind of intolerance and chaos. And if only a right wing demagogue will speak honestly about it, then we will elect right wing demagogues in the West more and more in response to it. And that will be the price of political correctness: that's when this check will finally get cashed. That will be the consequence of this persistent failure we see among liberals to speak and think and act with real moral clarity and courage on this issue. The root of this problem is that liberals consistently fail to defend liberal values as universal human values. Their political correctness, their multiculturalism, their moral relativism has led them to rush to the defense of theocrats and to abandon the victims of theocracy and to vilify anyone who calls out this hypocrisy for what it is as a bigot. And to be clear, and this is what liberals can't seem to get, is that speaking honestly about the ideas that inspire Islamism and jihadism, beliefs about martyrdom, and apostasy and blasphemy and paradise and honour and women, is not an expression of hatred for Muslims. It is in fact the only way to support the embattled people in the Muslim community: The reformers and the liberals and the seculars and the free thinkers and the gays and the Shiia in Sunni-majority context and Sufis and Ahmadiyyas, and as Maajid Nawaz said, the minorities within the minority, who are living under the shadow, and sword rather often, under theocracy. […] If you think that speaking honestly about the need for reform within Islam will alienate your allies in the Muslim community, then you don't know who your allies are.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, "Waking Up with Sam Harris Podcast #38 — The End of Faith Sessions 2" (15 June 2016) https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-end-of-faith-sessions-2
2010s

Love , Death , Women , Hate

“A cat is the ideal literary companion. A wife, I am sure, cannot compare except to her disadvantage. A dog is out of the question. It may do at a butcher's – it would be out of place in a bookseller's. A cat for a bookseller is a different creature temperamentally from the same animal at a fishmonger's or a baker's. In these shops the cat is a useful animal – I suppose it is employed to eat fish entrails or to keep down rats and mice – but in my shop its function is that of a familiar. It is at once decorative – contemplative – philosophical, and it begets in me great calm and contentment.”

William Darling (politician) (1885–1962) Scottish politician

Source: The Bankrupt Bookseller (1947), p. 48

Dogs , Cats , Question , Fish

“Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.”

Learned Hand (1872–1961) American legal scholar, Court of Appeals judge

"A Fanfare for Prometheus" (29 January 1955); also in The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses (1952), p. 131.
Extra-judicial writings

Hate , Time

“Firuz Shah Tughlaq organised an industry out of catching slaves. Shams-i-Siraj Afif writes in his Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi: “The Sultan commanded his great fief-holders and officers to capture slaves whenever they were at war (that is, suppressing Hindu rebellions), and to pick out and send the best for the service of the court. The chiefs and officers naturally exerted themselves in procuring more and more slaves and a great number of them were thus collected. When they were found to be in excess, the Sultan sent them to important cities… It has been estimated that in the city and in the various fiefs, there were 1,80,000 slaves… The Sultan created a separate department with a number of officers for administering the affairs of these slaves.”. Firuz Shah beat all previous records in his treatment of the Hindus… He records another instance in which Hindus who had built new temples were butchered before the gate of his palace, and their books, images, and vessels of Worship were publicly burnt. According to him “this was a warning to all men that no zimmi could follow such wicked practices in a Musulman country”. Afif reports yet another case in which a Brahmin of Delhi was accused of “publicly performing idol-worship in his house and perverting Mohammedan women leading them to become infidels”. The Brahmin “was tied hand and foot and cast into a burning pile of faggots.””

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

The historian who witnessed this scene himself expresses his satisfaction by saying, “Behold the Sultan’s strict adherence to law and rectitude, how he would not deviate in the least from its decrees.”
Quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. ISBN 9788185990231

Women , Men , War , Books

“We send one species to the butcher and give our love and kindness to another apparently for no reason other than because it's the way things are. When our attitudes and behaviors toward animals are so inconsistent, and this inconsistency is so unexamined, we can safely say we have been fed absurdities. It is absurd that we eat pigs and love dogs and don't even know why. Many of us spend long minutes in the aisle of the drugstore mulling over what toothpaste to buy. Yet most of us don't spend any time at all thinking about what species of animal we eat and why. Our choices as consumers drive an industry that kills ten billion animals per year in the United States alone. If we choose to support this industry and the best reason we can come up with is because it's the way things are, clearly something is amiss. What could cause an entire society of people to check their thinking caps at the door—and to not even realize they're doing so? Though this question is quite complex, the answer is quite simple:.”

Melanie Joy book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

Source: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2010), pp. 27-28

Love , People , Dogs , Way

“The use of plants is all our life long of that universal importance and concern that we can neither live nor subsist with any decency and convenience, or be said, indeed, to live at all without them. Whatsoever food is necessary to sustain us, whatsoever conteibutes to delight and refresh us, is supplied and brought forth out of that plentiful and abundant store. And ah! how much more innocent, sweet, and healthful is a table covered with those than with all the reeking flesh of butchered and slaughtered animals. Certainly man by nature was never made to be a carnivorous animal, nor is he armed at all for prey and rapine, with jagged and pointed teeth and crooked claws sharpened to rend and tear, but with gentle hands to gather fruit and vegetables, and with teeth to chew and eat them.”

John Ray (1627–1705) British botanist

Quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating by Howard Williams (London: F. Pitman, 1883), p. 107 https://archive.org/stream/ethicsofdietcate00will/ethicsofdietcate00will#page/107/mode/2up.

Life , Health , Food , Nature

“There can be no question but that Christianity was originally a Jewish promotion, and it is noteworthy that the Christians who try to make their cult respectable in the Third Century claim that they repudiate the Jews. One of the earliest to do this was Tertullian, a Carthaginian shyster, whose Apologeticum, a defense of Christianity, was written at the very beginning of the Third Century. He asserts that Christianity is not a conspiracy of revolutionaries and degenerates, as was commonly believed, and claims that it is an association of loving brothers who have preserved the faith that the Jews forsook – which has been the common story ever since. Our holy men salvage Tertullian by claiming that he was "orthodox" in his early writings, but then, alas! became a Montanist heretic, poor fellow. Tertullian is the author of the famous dictum that he believes the impossible because it is absurd (credo quia absurdum), so he is naturally dear to the heart of the pious. How much Jerome and other saints have tampered with the facts to make Tertullian seem "orthodox" in his early works has been most fully shown by Timothy Barnes in his Tertullian (Oxford, 1971), but even he spends a hundred pages pawing over chronological difficulties that can be reconciled by what seems to me the simple and obvious solution: Tertullian, who was evidently a pettifogging lawyer before he got into the Gospel-business, had sense enough to eliminate from his brief for the Christians facts that would have displeased the pagans whom he was trying to convince that Christians represented no threat to civilized society; he accordingly concealed in his apologetic works the peculiar doctrines of the Christian sect to which he had been originally "converted," but he naturally expounded those doctrines in writings intended, not for the eyes of wicked pagans, but for other brands of Christians, whom he wished to convert to his own sect, which was that of Montanus, a very Holy Prophet (divinely inspired, of course) who was a Phrygian, not a Jew, and who had learned from chats with God that since the Jews had muffed their big opportunity at the time of the Crucifixion, Jesus, when he returned next year or the year after that, was going to set up his New Jerusalem in Phrygia after he had raised hell with the pagans and tormented and butchered them in all of the delightful ways so lovingly described in the Apocalypse, the Hymn of Hate that still soothes the souls of "fundamentalist" Christians today. If, in his Apologeticum and similar works, Tertullian had told the stupid pagans that they were going to be tortured and exterminated in a year or two, they might have doubted that Christians were the innocent little lambs that Tertullian claimed they were.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Love , Men , God , Hate

“Both the Jacobins and Bolsheviks butchered their upper ruling classes and executed their royal families. They broke with Christianity and waged war on it, intending to wipe it off the face of the earth. They succeeded in involving the people of the nations in wars fought with energy and enthusiasm - the revolutionary wars of the past, the war against Germany today. Their theories and revolutionary ideas had enormous influence beyond the borders of their own countries. The methods of National Socialism are different, but basically they too pursue a single idea: the extermination and annihilation of people who think differently from them.”

Wilm Hosenfeld (1895–1952) Righteous Among the Nations

Szpilman, The Pianist, page 193. Diary entry, 18 January 1942.

War , People , Family , Idea

“He's smilin' like a butcher's dog!”

Mike Lange (1948) Canadian sportscaster

"Eddie Spaghetti! The Story Behind Mike Lange-isms"

Dogs

“After the Council of Nicea, … the State supported the associated churches by all the means in its power. It recognized the decisions of their councils and enforced them with civil pains and penalties; it also recognized the sentences of deposition and excommunication passed on members of the clergy or laity belonging to any one of the associated churches and followed them with civil disabilities. It did its best to destroy all Christianity outside of the associated churches, and largely succeeded. The rigour of the state persecution directed against Christian nonconformists in the fourth and fifth centuries has not received the attention due to it. The state confiscated their churches and ecclesiastical property (sometimes their private property also); it prohibited under penalty of proscription and death their meeting for public worship; it took from the nonconformist Christians the right to inherit or bequeath property by will; it banished their clergy; finally, it made raids upon them by its soldiery and sometimes butchered whole communities, as was the case with the Montanists in Phrygia and with the Donatists in Africa. And this glaringly un-Christian mode of creating and vindicating the visible unity of the Catholic Church of Christ was vigorously encouraged by the leaders of the associated churches who had the recognition and support of the State.”

Thomas Martin Lindsay (1843–1914) Scottish historian, professor and principal of the Free Church College, Glasgow

The Church and the Ministry in the Early Centuries (1903), p. 360 http://books.google.com/books?id=IvUsAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA360

Death , Pain , Penalty , Communication

“Either I am going mad, or this country has lost its marbles, especially when it comes to our legal system. Listen to this. A child murderer had been awarded compensation because the food in jail did not cater for his Islamic beliefs — it was not halal. Halal food bans pork, and all other animals must be slaughtered in a certain way. I didn't know you had to kill cabbages. The baby killer is a Muslim. For four months, in the Maryborough Correctional Centre, he was fed a vegetarian diet. He complained to QCAT (the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal), and he got $3000. When I tell you what this callous bastard did, I think you'll agree he's lucky to even get bread and water. In some countries, he wouldn't still be alive to even get a meal. Raymond Akhtar Ali ran an halal butcher's shop. He was married, but started having an affair with a 22-year-old employee, Amanda Blackwell. The Supreme Court was told she become his "sex slave"; he got her pregnant. When the baby was born in secret, this devout Muslim killed the child, and the butcher, butchered the baby. The dismemebered body was buried throughout his house. In 2000, Ali was sentenced to life imprisonment. And this killer, due for parole next year, had the audacity to complain about the jail food. So he was fed vegetables. So what? This is a sick joke.”

Derryn Hinch (1944) New Zealand–Australian media personality

Today Tonight, 15 August 2013.

Life , Secret , Food , Sex

“The dropping of the [atomic] bomb on a populated center was another totally superfluous crime. Even if callous arguments for the annihilation of Hiroshima could be made, there was no necessity for the slaughter in Nagasaki, cradle of Japanese Christianity. Within a split second the bomb wiped out one-eighth of Japan’s Catholic Christians. Here the argument resurfaces—Truman wanted to impress the Soviets, just as Churchill had with Dresden. But how could any butcher impress the arch-butcher from the Caucasus? Not even the late Adolf Hitler had succeeded.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Source: Leftism Revisited (1990), p. 282

“Thank God that sow's gone to the butcher.”

Odilo Globocnik (1904–1945) SS officer

About the death of Reinhard Heydrich. Quoted in "The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS" - Page 166 - by Heinz Hohne - History - 2000.

God

“…a man who sold meat but knew nothing of the poetry of the slaughterhouse…. Ted Arden was no ice-cream butcher.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

“Has the artist ever considered the history of the "chop" which is brought so elegantly to his studio? … He has first employed a slaughterman … to convert a beautiful living creature into a hideous carcase, to be displayed with other carcases in that ugliest product of civilisation, a butcher's shop, and then he has employed a cook to conceal, as far as may be, the work of the slaughterman. This is what the Spectator calls being "humanised" by schools of cookery; I should call it being de-humanised.”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

The Humanities of Diet

School , Beauty , History , Cooking

“It is often said, as an excuse for the slaughter of animals, that it is better for them to live and to be butchered than not to live at all. … In fact, if we once admit that it is an advantage to an animal to be brought into the world, there is hardly any treatment that cannot be justified by the supposed terms of such a contract. Also, the argument must apply to mankind. It has, in fact, been the plea of the slave-breeder; and it is logically just as good an excuse for slave-holding as for flesh-eating. It would justify parents in almost any treatment of their children, who owe them, for the great boon of life, a debt of gratitude which no subsequent services can repay. We could hardly deny the same merit to cannibals, if they were to breed their human victims for the table, as the early Peruvians are said to have done.”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

The Humanities of Diet

Life , Children , World , Parent

“I don't duel, boy. I kill as a soldier kills, which is as a butcher kills, as quickly, efficiently, and with as least risk to myself as I can arrange. If I decide you die, you will die when I choose, where I choose, by what means I choose, and you will never see the blow coming. (…) I don't duel. But if you seek to die like a bludgeoned steer, cross me again.”

Lois McMaster Bujold The Curse of Chalion

The Curse of Chalion (2000)

Boy

“"I don't think I would be too comfortable with many of his compliments… He's a butcher!" "More than that, my friend… he is a warmaster. And that makes him a master butcher."”

David Gemmell book The King Beyond the Gate

Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 21

Thinking

“The social value of freeing women from a harem-enclosed existence to a life of activity can be questioned only by those advocates of a "man's world" who wish to perpetuate its butchers and savage jungle law.”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

As quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.7 in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda" by Michelle R. Finn,
Attributed

Life , Women , World , Law

“While pretending to liberate mankind from the alleged oppression of capitalism Marxist Man has defied the warm, white light of Twentieth Century civilization to introduce slavery on a scale unprecedented in the history of the race. While claiming to foster the "rights of the common man" the Marxist has butchered his fellow citizens from Kulaks to aristocrats in numbers that baffle rational comprehension. And while describing himself as the epitome of the best in nature - the creature of science, the supreme intelligence of the universe -Homo-Marxian has exploited his cunning to compound crimes which scarcely would be duplicated by the most predatory tribes of pre-historic times.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

History , Intelligence , Nature , Light

“My mother took me to town with her, and made me pass, as if by accident, through the yard of a slaughter-house. I saw some men, their arms naked and besmeared with blood, knocking a bull in the head; others cutting the throats of calves and sheep, and separating their still heaving limbs. Streams of smoking gore ran along the pavement. An intense feeling of pity, mingled with horror, seized upon me. I asked to be led away quickly. The thought of these scenes, the necessary preliminaries of one of those dishes of meat which I had so often seen on the table, made me take a disgust to animal food and inspired me with a horror for butchers.”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French writer, poet, and politician

Book IV, Note VIII, p. 61
Les confidences (1849)

Men , Food , Feeling , Animals

“The bearer of this letter is an old friend of mine not quite the right side of the blanket as they say in fact he is the son of a first rate butcher but his mother was a decent family called Hyssopps of the Glen so you see he is not so bad and is desireus of being the correct article.”

Daisy Ashford book The Young Visiters

Source: The Young Visiters (1919), Chapter 5

Family

“His father was a Butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's Trade, but when he kill'd a Calfe he would doe it in high style, and make a Speech.”

John Aubrey book Brief Lives

"William Shakespeare"
Brief Lives

Exercises , Boy

“Sheep run to the slaughterhouse, silent and hopeless, but at least sheep never vote for the butcher who kills them or the people who devour them. More beastly than any beast, more sheepish than any sheep, the voter names his own executioner and chooses his own devourer, and for this precious “right” a revolution was fought.”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Voters' strike

People

“I was just falling in love right, left and centre with these gorgeous young artists who came in the gallery. They’d see this fat old stripper, this nutter who runs a butcher’s shop that she thinks is an art gallery, and who thinks she’s some artist but hasn’t even been to art school… They probably thought, "Christ, who is this woman who’s texting me 20 times a day?"”

Stella Vine (1969) English artist

Catherine Deveney, "Stripped bare", http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=288312004 The Scotsman, (2004-03-14)
On her life running the Rosy Wilde gallery after her mother's death in 2003.

Love , School , Art , Thinking

“Aiyar wants the public to believe that the Kashmiri Pandits are so unintelligent that they left their comfortable homes and beautiful Valley at the instance of a pied piper called Jagmohan, and not by the militants' strategy of 'killing one and frightening one thousand'. He ignores the hard fact that eminent Kashmiri Pandits had been butchered before I took over.”

Jagmohan

Setting the recored straight, Sunday, 7.11.1993, quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 57

Beauty , Home

“As the law does think fit
No butchers shall on juries sit.”

Charles Churchill (satirist) (1731–1764) British poet

The Ghost (1763)

Law , Thinking

“The killing of the horses [a bullfight in Madrid, he visited in June 1910] by the bull is very horrible, much more so as they have no chance to escape and are ridden up to the bull to be butchered.... the entry of the bull into the ring however is very beautiful; his surprise and the first charges he makes are very pretty.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

Quote of Hopper's letter to his sister, June 9, 1910; as cited in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 23
1905 - 1910

Beauty , Chance , Horse