“The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.”

“Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored”

“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.”

“The longer I am a writer--so long now that my writing finger is periodically numb--the better I understand what writing is; what its function is; what it is supposed to do. I learn that the writer's pen is a microphone held up to the mouths of ancestors and even stones of long ago. That once given permission by the writer--a fool, and so why should one fear?--horses, dogs, rivers, and, yes, chickens can step forward and expound on their lives. The magic of this is not so much in the power of the microphone as in the ability of the nonhuman object or animal to BE and the human animal to PERCEIVE ITS BEING.”

“the world has changed: it did not change without your prayers without your faith without your determination to believe in liberation and kindness; without your dancing through the years that had no beat.”

“We do not believe in heaven or hell...; we do not believe in eternal damnation. We believe only in the unavoidable horror of hurting others and of likewise being hurt.”

“It just seems clear to me that as long as we are all here, it's pretty clear that the struggle is to share the planet, rather than divide it.”