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J. Howard Moore

277 quotes

“All over the non-human world, with few exceptions, each being seeks the satisfaction of his own desires, if not with positive disregard for the happiness and misery of the rest of the universe, at least with sincere unconcern. There is no courtesy, sympathy, or amenity there—a cold, heartless, implacable world of strangers.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The stars of heaven never looked down on a more pitiful sight than that of a horse, after having drudged faithfully all his days in the service of his lord, cast out in his helpless old age to wander and perish.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh, universe! Pitiful spectacle! Aggregation of tragedy, somnambulism, inhumanity, terrorism, and death! It makes one long to seal up his sensibilities and leap out into the gulfs and be swallowed up. The handiwork of an all-wise biophilist? Rhapsody of an idiot! Gods? No! The monstrous kindergarten of an idle-pated knave! A Satanic prank! The surreptitious handiwork of an ass! A universe is, indeed, to be pitied whose dominating inhabitants are so unconscious and so ethically embryonic that they make life a commodity, mercy a disease, and systematic massacre a pastime and a profession.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women are everywhere systematically deprived of privileges which men have fought and bled and died to obtain for themselves. In many lands a woman legally ceases to exist the day she is wed—if she ever existed before. Man has always been, and is to-day, the race, and woman his shadow.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The weak submit because they are helpless and because they are ignorant, because they are incarcerated and disarmed, and because they have been taught and intimidated into believing that the conventional and the legal, whatever they are, have been ordained and established by the immeasurable manufacturer of things.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A more pyramidal farce could not be framed at the present stage of the human imagination than that of human industry—the immense privilege and monopoly and the immense flatulence of wealth side by side with the most helpless and sickening deprivation—all brought about and perpetuated by hypocrites who lapse into hysterics over the injunction, "What you do not like when done to yourself do not do to others.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The earliest examples of human association were those practically of autocentricism. Each individual considered himself the only or chief end for which the universe existed. Each's own individual welfare was the end for which he struggled, and all the rest of the universe, sentient and insentient, was contemplated as means to this.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ethics, in our part of the world, may be considered to have advanced, at least in its pretensions, to the anthropocentric stage of evolution. Aggregation has advanced from individual to tribe, and from tribe to race, and from race to sex, and from sex to species, until to-day the ethical conception of many minds includes, with greater or less vividness and sincerity, all sexes, colors, and conditions of men. The fact that an animal is a human, that is, that he belongs to the hominine species of beings, entitles him, regardless of his imperfections, to some sort of consideration.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Zoocentricism, that stage of solidarity in which the entire sentient universe is contemplated, universal consideration and love, is as yet too difficult for human consciousness. Human philosophy, which has been so slow in discovering the solidarity of the human species, is to-day, except in its Oriental manifestations, as reluctant to recognize other species in its ethical contemplations as were dominant human groups in less advanced stages of aggregation reluctant to recognize the solidarity of the hominine species.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ideal universe is a universe so ordered or natured as to allow its inhabitants to understand and dominate it sufficient to satisfy their desires, and inhabited by beings with desires so poised and assorted that there is not only not mutual inhibition of desires, but such a dovetailing and intertwining of the consciousnesses that there is mutual aid in the satisfaction of desire—a universe responsive to the whims of its inhabitants, and inhabited by beings socially harmonious and helpful.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The relation of the inhabitants of the universe to each other most favorable to the satisfaction of the desires of the universe is, therefore, that which will enable the animate universe, as a whole, to attain that relation which an individual living being, if he were alone In the universe, would desire to achieve for himself—a relation such as is sustained to each other and to the whole by the individual cells of a multicellular organism—a relation in which each acts in the interests of all, including himself, and all act in the interests of each.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Justice is more than equity: it is benevolence. It is not enough to live and let live. We should live and help live. There is as much grace and utility, as genuine moral glory, in the lifelong succor of the helpless by the strong as there is in the temporary chivalry shown by a human being in extricating a fellow from passing misfortune.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ideal cooperation is rational and intentional rather than accidental. The clumsy, unsystematic production of existing societies is replaced by perfectly symmetrical and unified procedures. The whole of society constitutes one mighty organism carrying on the functions necessary to its maintenance and welfare in the most intelligent and magnanimous manner. The social ideal is an organized fraternity of perfectly articulating supplements, assaulting the inanimate as an individual personality, not as a mob of incompatible ruffians.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The earth is our mother, our habitation, and our tomb. In the presence of these facts, it would seem the highest sanity for us to be kind and merciful to each other, and to cultivate without hypocrisy the charming chivalry of the Golden Rule. The task of understanding and managing the tendencies which surround and beat upon us and in the midst of which we writhe and supplicate is certainly sufficient in itself without our turning upon and cudgeling each other.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One thing is certain, however, and that is, that the most powerful instinct of human nature, the instinct to struggle and survive, the instinct to be superior, must be destroyed or greatly subordinated before the state here outlined can be realized; for the ideal state will be practically bereft of opportunity for its satisfaction.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And what is it to act upon others as you would that others would act upon you? It is to put yourself in the place of others. It is consideration of others as ardent as consideration of self. It is the balancing of abilities, supplementation, the social ideal.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since impulses are simply sensations which have become motor, and since sensations are only tendencies from without become conscious, the nature of any being may be said to be the manner in which it correlates the tendencies which it contacts, or the manner in which a being, as a distinct and detached portion of the universe, reacts upon the rest of the universe.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An ox is of a very different nature from a fox, and men (some of them) are very unlike serpents, because the classes of impulses in the consciousnesses of these animals are for the most part very different in one animal from another. Serpents, oxen, foxes, and men, however, are all similar in their eagerness to reproduce themselves, and in their emphatic reluctance to die.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The dread of death, an instinct so unfailing in all animals, exists, not because existence is intrinsically so sweet, nor because annihilation is so distressing, but because this bugaboo has been an indispensable safeguard against the suicide of the life process. The expectation of post-mortem consciousness, so prevalent and so insistent among human beings, is a hope arising from the concussion of a desire and a fancy—the desire to persist just referred to, and the fancy or hallucination of a double which originated among savages from shadows, images, dreams, and the like.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consciousness arises with, or out of, and accompanies, these clay compounds called creatures, but it does not cause, nor in any way interfere with, their phenomena. If it were possible to construct artificial clods, chemically as accomplished as philosophers, but without any accompanying consciousness, these soulless mechanisms, without will, feeling, or conscious intelligence, simply acting out their chemical and physical affinities, would not behave otherwise in any infinitesimal particular than the real, conscious meditators on things.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If this ball is ever other than a globule of alloy, if the universe ever experiences the long longed for millennium of prophecy and hope, all must come thru the reformed and glorified gateway of the womb. Individual, or post-natal, reformation is, and must always be, more or less imperfect. It is powerless in determining the nature with which beings come into the world, and it is ineffectual in modifying it after it is determined.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The absolute and only function of punishment is to reform the one receiving the punishment and to deter others of like impulses. No misery should be inflicted upon a criminal because he has done a wrong, but because he and others have dispositions to do other wrongs. The function of punishment is not to "satisfy" in some mysterious sense a past offense, but to provide against and curtail future offenses.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The purpose of all penal schemes should be, not reciprocity, but reformation pure and simple; not the relentless and absurd infliction of misery commensurate with the crimes committed, but the achievement of the largest possible reformation with the gentlest and most strategic deprivation.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The twofold function of individual culture is so to develop beings that they shall be able to perceive their proper relations to the rest of the uiniverse, to the inanimate about them, and to other beings in space and time, and realizing their relations to others, to be disposed to assume them.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From the time an individual human comes into the world a sprawling, squalling, unpeepered vagrant, to the hour he goes out in tragedy and pain, life is one continuation of the very conditions which brought him into the world a confirmed egoist.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is it any wonder, therefore, that the young, accustomed to such an environment, grow up to consider life itself a game, in which they are to strive to outwit those about them? Is it any wonder that you and I and men and women everywhere are helplessly selfish, when we were born so, when all that we know of altruism has come thru Sunday-school rumors and straggling precepts, and when we have all our lives been surrounded by selfish people and occupied in selfish pastimes and professions? Nothing could be more natural. Altruism is anomalous on the earth, and it is not astonishing.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Living beings who love themselves no more ardently than they love others are prodigies, and it will never be otherwise so long as beings are born as they are and live in like conditions.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All school-room competition should be abolished. The school should be a family, a fraternity, a colony of cooperating, helping, sympathizing brothers and sisters, not a camp of hot combatants bent on mutual discomfiture. Competition is not necessary, and if it were necessary, it would not be justifiable. If it is not possible to produce great intellects without crimes on character, then let us doze forever in the holy haze of mediocrity. A graceful nature is the most essential psychic possession of a living being.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who, that has pity, is disposed to censure a child for rebelling against the useless and absurd rumination, thru painful years, of mummified languages and fearful mathematical formulae, which have no more real bearing, and which to the average human being never will have any more real bearing, on the great, living, performing universe around him than the esoteric nonsense of the Five Kings?”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here is a Future. And the creeds and ideals, men bow down to to-day will in time to come pass away, and new creeds and ideals will claim their allegiance. Shrines change as the generations come and go, and out of the decomposition of the old comes the new. The time will come when the sentiments of these pages will not be hailed by two or three, and ridiculed or ignored by the rest; they will represent Public Opinion and Law.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is a talkative and religious ape. He is an ape, but with a much greater amount of enterprise and with a greater likelihood of being found in every variety of climate. Like the anthropoid, man has a bald face and an obsolete tail. But he is distinguished from his arboreal relative by his arrogant bearing, his skilled larynx, and especially by the satisfaction he experiences in the contemplation of the image which appears when he looks in a mirror.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The universe is an evolution. Change is as extensive as time and space. The present has come out of that which has been, and will enter into and determine that which is to be. Everything has a biography. Everything has evolved—everything—from the murmur on the lips of the speechless babe to the soul of the poet, and from the molecule to Jehovah.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hardships have come. They have come from the inanimate universe in the form of floods, fires, frosts, accidents, diseases, droughts, storms, and the like; from other species, who were competitors or enemies; and from unbrotherly members of the same species. Some have survived, but the great majority have perished. Only a fraction, and generally an appallingly small fraction, of each generation of a species have lived to maturity.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The supposed psychical gulf between human and non-human beings has no more existence, outside the flamboyant imagination of man, than has the once-supposed physical gulf. It is pure fiction. The supposition is a relic of the rapidly dwindling vanity of anthropocentricism, and is perpetuated from age to age by human selfishness and conceit. It has no foundation either in science or in common-sense. Man strives to lessen his guilt by the laudation of himself and the disparagement and degradation of his victims.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The frail, narrow, fantastic character of human sympathy is the most mournful fact in human nature. 'Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn,' and his inhumanity to not-men makes the planet a ball of pain and terror.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he difference in mental method between the man of learning and the ordinary man or woman is the same as the difference between mature men and children and between men generally and other animals. It is one of degree, not of kind. The philosopher, the clodhopper, and the ape, all use precisely the same methods of reasoning, differing only in exactness and in the materials of consciousness dealt with.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us be honest. Honour to whom honour is due. It will not emaciate our own glory to recognise the excellence and reality of others, or to come face to face with our own frailties. We are our brother's keeper. Our brethern are they that feel. Let us universalise. Our thoughts and sympathies have been too long wingless. The Universe is our Country, and our Kindred are the Populations that Mourn. It is well—it is eminently well, for it is godlike—to send our Magnanimity to the Dusts and the Deeps, our Sunrises to the Uttermost Isles, and our Charity to the Stars.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the wisest things ever said by one of the profoundest philosophers of all time was the warning to the seeker after truth to beware of the influence of the 'idols (or illusions) of the tribe' by which he meant that body of traditional prejudices which every sect, family, nation, and neighbourhood has clinging to it, and in the midst of which and at the mercy of which every human being grows up.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Egoism is preference for self, partiality toward that part of the universe bounded by one's own skin. It may consist simply of regard for self, but with regard for self is usually associated enmity toward others. Egoism manifests itself in such qualities of mind as selfishness, cruelty, intolerance, hate, hardheartedness, savagery, rudeness, injustice, narrowness, and the like. It is the primal impulse of the living heart. Enmity is older and more universal than love. Enmity constituted the very loins from which long ago came the original miscreants of this world.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I saw the fishes playing there; I saw all that was in the whole world round; In wood, and bower, and marsh, and mead, and field, All things which creep and fly, And put a foot to earth. All these I saw, and say to you,That nothing lives among them without hate.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fact that altruism has been evolved by the cooperation of individuals with each other and against others is a significant fact in the analysis and understanding of the ethical phenomena of the earth. To this fact is due the restricted and illogical character of all altruism.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The evolution of consciousness in its social and ethical aspects consists in the evolution of the ability to make real and vivid the phenomena that are more and more distant in both space and time.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the barbarism is not behind us nor around us. History looks dark and discouraging to us, as we turn its terrible pages, but we would see something just as discouraging if we would look into a mirror.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is, in fact, but one great crime in the universe, and most of the instances of terrestrial wrong-doing are instances of this crime. It is the crime of exploitation—the considering by some beings of themselves as ends, and of others as their means—the refusal to recognize the equal, or the approximately equal, rights of all to life and its legitimate rewards—the crime of acting toward others as one would that others would not act toward him. For millions of years, almost ever since life began, this crime has been committed, in every nook and quarter of the inhabited globe.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Deeds are right and wrong in themselves; and whether they are right or wrong, good or evil, proper or improper, whether they should be done or should not be done, depends upon their effects upon the welfare of the inhabitants of the universe.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The partially emancipated human being who extends his moral sentiments to all the members of his own species, but denies to all other species the justice and humanity he accords to his own, is making on a larger scale the same ethical mess of it as the savage. The only consistent attitude, since Darwin established the unity of life (and the attitude we shall assume, if we ever become really civilised), is the attitude of universal gentleness and humanity.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To take the life of an ox for his muscles, or to kill a sheep for his skin is murder, and those who do these things or cause them to be done are murderers just as actually as highwaymen are who blow off the heads of hapless wayfarers for their guineas. If these things seem untrue it is not because they are untrue, but because those to whom they seem so are unable to judge conduct from the quadrupedal point of view.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there were in this world beings as much more clever than Caucasians as Caucasians are more clever than cows and sheep, and these beings should regard themselves as the darlings of the gods and should attach a fictitious dignity and importance to their own lives, but should look upon Caucasians as simply so much 'beef' and 'mutton,' these bleached terrorists of the world would in the course of a few generations of experience probably become sufficiently illumined to realise that current human conceptions of cows and sheep are not only preposterous, but fiendish.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The psychology of the exploitation of nonhuman beings by human beings is not different in kind from the psychology of any other act of exploitation. The great first cause of man's inhumanity to not-men is the same precisely as the great first cause of man's inhumanity to man—Selfishness—blind, brutal, unconscionable egoism.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We think of our acts toward non-human peoples, when we think of them at all, entirely from the human point of view. We never take the time to put ourselves in the places of our victims. We never take the trouble to get over into their world, and realise what is happening over there as a result of our doings toward them. It is so much more comfortable not to do so—so much more comfortable to be blind and deaf and insane.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source