“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

“Killing was a relatively simple matter--a blow to the head, a knife to the throat--complicated only by how much one cared about the pain or terrors animals felt in dying.... The animal also died a second death. Severed from the form in which it had lived, severed from the act that had killed it, it vanished from human memory as one of nature's creatures.”

“Few doctrines throughout History have been able to eradicate hatred, most of them have simply tried to deflect it from one object to another: to the infidel, the foreigner, the apostate, the master, the slave, the father. Naturally, hatred is only called hatred when we see it in others; the hatred which is in ourselves bears a thousand different names.”

“Once the frontiers of horror have been crossed, one will pass from form to form beyond the human and from metamorphosis to metamorphosis to accomplish, in the anguish of an impossible return, the most terrible journey to the depths of darkness.”

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social enviroment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions."(Essay to Leo Baeck, 1953)”

“The difficulty with this conversation is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees. ”