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J. Howard Moore

277 quotes

“A carnivorous animal is not an ideal animal, and never can be. The life of a carnivorous animal is a perpetual onslaught. Every meal is a murder. Eating is not the harmless activity it is to one who sits down to fruit and grains. The carnivore must kill somebody, or have somebody else do it for him, in order to eat. It cannot be otherwise. And an animal whose life is one unbroken succession of such necessities, whose stomach is the grave of hundreds and thousands, and even of tens of thousands, of his fellow-beings, may be meritorious in other respects — may preach the Golden Rule, decry war, give money to the missionary, and rail at the rich — but so long as he continues to fill himself every few hours with the blood and vitals of others, he is not only not an ideal animal, but has in reality no just claims on life. Flesh is a painful form of nutrition for any organism, but it is especially so for man, because it is unnecessary, and because man makes so many pretensions and occupies a position in the world of such exceptional responsibility.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The question is not. Shall man be master of the earth? but. What sort of a master shall he be? Shall he be cruel and selfish, bigoted and imperialistic, thinking only of himself and sacrificing the interests of others to his own heartless purposes? or shall he be the responsible administrator of the universe, presiding over the affairs of the earth honourably and equitably, with a mind single to the good of all? Shall he be a savage despot or a schoolmaster? a feared and hated monster, or a wise, patient, and affectionate father? Since he has become the manager of the planet, shall he manage it as he would wish it to be managed if he were a subordinate and some other race had succeeded to the superintendency, or shall he cut loose from all moral obligations, ignore the promptings of his better self, and run things absolutely in the interest of himself? Which shall it be—the great law of love or the savage law of might?”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is impossible for me to express my loathing and horror of the practice men have of killing things for pastime so-called 'hunting,' or 'sport. No one but a barbarian can engage in such pursuits, or can look upon them or know of them without pain and indignation. It makes me want to fight and cry whenever I think of them. And when I see men engaged in such execrable activities (the crippling, killing, and terrifying of whole communities of innocent and happy beings, shooting them down in cold blood, and with hellish enthusiasm), my feeling is that I must stop them at all hazards. And there have been times, when I have come upon men engaged in these fiendish doings, when I would have shot them down if I had been armed, the enormity of their crimes has come over me with such vividness and power.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is not advised to sit down and fold his hands and roll his eyes piously toward the traditional source of good, and allow himself to be eaten up by tigers and ticks. And no one who reads honestly what has gone before can come to any such conclusion. Anything can be misrepresented if the one who attempts it is ingenious and determined enough. It is recognised that this is not an ideal world, and that it is impossible for any being to act among the evil as he would be able to act among the good. It is simply insisted that man shall ignore the urgings of his lower nature and do the best he can in the circumstances. Men do not and cannot act ideally toward their fellow-men, but they think they act nobly when they do the best they can. And, oh, if man would only try to be just to his fellow-races, what a different world he could make of it! If one is disposed to be wayward, it is astonishing what an array of excuses even the simpleton can scrape up in defence of himself. But if one is resolved on that higher life, ever held up to us by the better elements of our nature, it is also surprising how successful one can be, even among adverse conditions.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nature is the universe, including ourselves. And are we not all the time tinkering at the universe, especially the garden patch that is next to us—the earth? Every time we dig a ditch or plant a field, dam a river or build a town, form a government or gut a mountain, slay a forest or form a new resolution, or do anything else almost, do we not change and reform Nature, make it over again and make it more acceptable than it was before? Have we not been working hard for thousands of years, and do our poor hearts not almost faint sometimes when we think how far, far away the millennium still is after all our efforts, and how long our little graves will have been forgotten when that blessed time gets here?”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Take the donkey. The donkey brays. But wouldn't it have been more satisfactory to all those who have ears to hear and sensoriums to look after if the donkey had been provided with a laryngeal apparatus that would enable it to express the overflow of its yearnings in song? Would it have been better or would it have been worse if the liver-fluke had been left out of the world—that parasitic flat-worm residing in the bile-sac of the sheep, and causing sometimes as many as 3,000,000 sheep to perish miserably in a year in Great Britain alone? Couldn't we get along without tapeworms, and rattlesnakes, and fleas, and the appetite for alcohol? How about weeds, and diseases, and slush, and microbes, and famines, and fogs, and floods, and hurricanes, and earthquakes, and mosquitoes, and dust, and fools, and near-fools, and death?”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of all the silly notions foisted upon us by a know-nothing past, the notion that Nature is immaculate and ideal, perfect and all-wise, certainly takes the cake for downright absurdity. Men attempt to whitewash every old barbarity almost by appealing to what they call 'Nature,' as if whatever Nature is or does is all right, whether it is or not. Whenever these individuals get into a tight place in a discussion, or feel that they would like to allow their not very athletic reasoning faculties a rest, away they go to Nature (or the Bible); then everything is settled so far as they are concerned. They can always find something in the infinite diversity of Nature to suit every case especially if they have a knack for ignoring: essentials and are handy in the use of allegory.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The defect in this argument is that it assumes that the basis of ethics is life, whereas ethics is concerned, not with life, but with consciousness. The question ever asked by ethics is not, Does the thing live? but. Does it feel? It is impossible to do right and wrong to that which is incapable of sentient experience. Ethics arises with consciousness and is coextensive with it. We have no ethical relation to the clod, the molecule, or the scale sloughed off from our skin on the back of our hand, because the clod, the molecule, and the scale have no feeling, no soul, no anything rendering them capable of being affected by us. And the same thing is true of the cabbage, and the onion, and of plants generally. The fact that a thing is an organism, that it has organisation, has in itself no more ethical significance than the fact that it has symmetry, or redness, or weight.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world we inhabit is not an ideal world, except to the ninny. It is not such a world as we would pick out if we were choosing, unless the assortment from which we were to make the selection were a pretty hard batch. It is so full of inconveniences in the first place—so much so that it seems sometimes that it must have been whittled out in some idle hour, without any idea that it would ever be used for anything, and then, when organic beings came into existence, it was given to them as a place to grow up and fight it out in, because there wasn't any other place for them to go. Then, again, it is inhabited by a lot of species that have acquired their natures through an apprenticeship of crime and militancy extending bade millions of years into the past.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No man has a right to a million dollars. If so where did he get the right? Not from Nature nor reason, but from man-made legislatures—from the same immaculate source from which he got the right a little while ago to cut the blood out of the backs of poor helpless Africans with hippopotamus whips. No man has a right to monopolise the world to the extent of a million dollars. It is more than one man's share—much more. We are brothers. The world belongs to all of us, not to any one class. A million dollars in one hand means over-appropriation—plunder, too often scaped with fiendish unconcern from the bleeding palms of the poor. Every millionaire or multi-millionaire that wallows in golden mud-puddles compels hundreds of other men to go through life deprived of their birthright. I would be ashamed to be rich, and I would be ashamed to know that I had my share of the world and the shares of hundreds or thousands of my fellow-men besides. If there is one thing that ought to be plain, even to simpletons, it is the fact that the privilege of being born carries with it the right to an inalienable equity in the world in which we at birth find ourselves. It is not true, however prevalently it may be practised, that men acquire the right to own and hold and use the earth, and to exclude others from its use, by being born with the power or opportunity to get possession of it.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We know more about human heredity to-day than we did loo years ago. Human nature is not an unstained page. We come into the world with more than blank minds and helpless bodies. We come bringing with us machines, natures, which must be radically changed if we ever become more than mere fractions of men and women. Nearly all the woes of the world arise either from ignorance of the ways we should go or from hereditary waywardnesses which we bring into the world with us. It is as truly the function of the school to correct these inherent defects in our acting machinery and to put sign-boards in the mind telling which ways to go and which ways to avoid as it is to tutor the understanding or guide the growing body.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ethical culture should do for human character what physical culture should do for the body. It should produce a race of kind, honest, courageous, public-spirited, and justice-loving men and women. It is all so perfectly plain. Men are moral invalids. They come into the world bearing the curse of their animal origin. They are unfit for a life of love and co-operation. The defects of human character are as well known and as well understood as the defects of the human body. They are the cause of more unhappiness to mankind than any other one thing. They can be corrected by the application of the same remedies that have proved so efficacious in the case of mental and physical defects. The school should be the mental, physical, and moral infirmary of society.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The inextricable way pleasure and pain are mixed up with each other in this world is a mournful fact to beings who are all the time striving for pleasure alone. In the ideal world there is no pain, no misery. There is nothing but happiness. But in our world pain seems to have been the original feeling, the first one to appear in the evolution of sentiency. Pleasure is a sort of after-thought, a secondary attribute of consciousness which developed later as an aid to pain in keeping living beings straight. Pain is a whip, a penalty. Pleasure is a reward or bribe. Pain is a curse. We are all the time trying to minimize and escape it. In an ideal world the inhabitants never have any impulses that drive them to improper acts. All their impulses are good. Every act is proper and right. Ideal beings need only to live and act in order to be happy. We are not ideal beings. Our world happens to be one affording almost unlimited opportunities for improvement.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The well being of others is on an average as important as our own, and should as a general thing be appraised at the same value. If a certain amount of happiness is scheduled to fall to the lot of the earth, it makes absolutely no difference whether it falls on me, or on you, or on somebody a thousand miles away. It would serve the ends of absolute ethics quite as well if it fell on an insect or a horse as if it fell on a man. The only important thing from the standpoint of universal good is that the pleasure be experienced. It is not important what particular individual or species is the beneficiary. It might even go to another world, and be just as satisfactory to a universal well-wisher, who looked at Cosmos from the serene altitudes of pure reason, without any prejudices whatever one way or another in the matter. This is the ideal. It is a long, long way from our natures. But only in so far as we approximate this ideal do we rise above those imperfections of our being which have been ground out by the methods that have operated in the development of life on earth.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Act toward others as you would act toward a part of your own self is, it seems to me, the plainest and truest and the most comprehensive and useful rule of conduct ever formulated on this earth. It is the expression of balanced egoism and altruism. It is the soul of sympathy and oneness. It may be called the Law of the Larger Self. It is the extension of the regard which we have for ourselves to those below, above, and around us. It is simply the law of the individual organism widened to apply to the Sentient Organism. It is the message which is destined in time to come to redeem this world from the primal curse of selfishness. It is the dream which has been dreamed by the great teachers of the past independently of each other, merely by observing the actions of men and thinking what rule if followed would cure the wrongs and sufferings of this world.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ignorance of similarity is still more manifest in man's relations to the non-human inhabitants of the earth. These beings are worse than foreigners. They are mere "animals." And down to comparatively recent times they were supposed by everybody to have come upon the earth in an entirely different way, and for an entirely different purpose, from man. They were supposed to be mere machines, without any endowments of feeling or intelligence, which were placed here on earth by the universal architect to serve as conveniences for his masterpiece and favourite. Many of these non-human beings are so remote from human beings in language, appearance, interests, and ways of life, as to be nothing but "wild animals." These "wild things" have, of course, no rights whatever in the eyes of men.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a sense—in the truest sense, indeed—everything that exists is natural. And in this sense civilization is as natural as savagery—only there is not so much of it in the world, as yet. It is just as natural to be kind, and just, and altruistic as it is to be cruel, tyrannical, and selfish. But kindness, justice, and altruism are not so common as their negatives, as yet. The task that is before us is to make them so—to make them more so, indeed—to make cruelty, selfishness, and tyranny historical, and to make sympathy, reason, love, peace, altruism, and co-operation the reigning facts of our world.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The next hundred years will witness the greatest improvement in moral practice and understanding this world has ever seen. Nothing to compare with it has ever taken place in the evolution of ethics. The twentieth century is going to be a humanitarian century. The twenty-first century will dawn on a very different condition of things from that which we see around us to-day. Men are going to be Brothers, as certainly as the stars rise in the east. The marching and counter-marching going on in the industrial world to-day will end in a new order of society based on Mutualism, in which there will be not only division of labour but division of the products of labour as well. And along with the recognition of human brotherhood will come, is bound to come, the corollary recognition of the brotherhood of all those that feel.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes, in our littleness, we boast of the progress we have made, and of the knowledge, culture, and art which we as a race to-day display. But, O, it is the vanity of Adolescence. What will the knowledge, culture, and art of to-day amount to fifty or a hundred thousand years from now?—or a million years from now? Nothing! This sphere, with its clinging tenantry, will still be here then and will still be making its annual journeys round the sun, as now. But, O, what mighty and ineffable changes! The things of to-day will be so rude and childish and so far away that they will not even be considered.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Away with the fiction that human life has a value and sanctity all its own! It is a product of human conceit pure and simple. It has absolutely no foundation in fact. Even humanitarians, many of them, are not more than a third emancipated from the anthropocentric notion, for they continue to make meals out of the very beings they preach kindness towards. Kreophagy is the most direct and terrible of all the forms of inhumanity. It is sustained solely by the weight of numbers, as were cannibalism and human slavery. It hasn't a single logical leg to stand on. Indeed, it is so intrinsically horrible that if meat-eaters were the exception instead of the rule, they would, it seems to me, be almost hunted from the earth, like lions and tigers and other despoilers of the Universe Beautiful.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The same general moral code applies to every being that feels. In a general way, whatever is right to human beings is right also to non-human beings; and whatever is wrong to human beings is wrong to non-human beings. There are disparities everywhere—disparities in ethical standing, just as there are disparities in usefulness and feeling-power. But there are no greater disparities between men and other animals than there are between different individuals or varieties of the human species. I do not say nor do I believe that a guinea-pig has the same rights to life and to the satisfaction of its desires as an Englishman has. Neither has an Eskimo. But I do say that an ethical system that treats guinea pigs and non-humans generally with the ethical indifference that they receive to-day is a product of human provincialism pure and simple and is destined to become as obsolete as human slavery with the blooming of the ages.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mother love is not a human invention. It has been inherited. It is older than the Rocky Mountains. Mother love in man came from the same source as the backbone in man from pre-human forms. Mother love among men is the same thing exactly as mother love among birds and quadrupeds. The mother monkey loves her child with almost the same tenderness as the human mother. When a monkey child dies, the mother carries the little corpse around with her for clays, refuses to eat, and sits often in silence and grief. Mother birds will risk their very lives for their young. So will mother bears, and lions, and whales, and the females of many other species.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As time passes and society assumes more and move the care of the young, it is probable that the love of parents for their own children will grow weaker. Parents will develop a feeling of regard for children as a whole, and will not have that feeling of partiality which they today have so much, for their own children. Society is in many ways better fitted to look after its young than are individual parents. Society today carries on the education of the child, providing school houses, teachers, and in some cases even books and meals. All of these things were formerly done by parents themselves, that is, in a "private" rather than in a "public" way. And future times will no doubt see still further advances along these same lines.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[O]ur bodies do not generate energy in sufficient abundance for us to regard labor as a blessing. We don't work, as a rule, because we would rather work than not. We work because we would rather work than starve. Labor is a sort of necessary evil. We endure it because it is not so bad as some other things we would have to undergo if we didn't work. To labor as men do in producing civilization in producing the food, houses, machinery, and luxuries of modern peoples is not natural in the present stage of development of the human machine. It is a strained and artificial expenditure. This is shown by our fondness for holidays, by our constant search for labor-saving machines, and by the fact that we are all the time looking forward to a Golden Age in our lives when we can lead a life of leisure. We generally classify toil with trouble and tears with the evil things of life, not with the good things. The Happy Places that men dream of for themselves after death are invariably places where there is not much work to do.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humanitarianism is the name commonly given to that higher humanity which embraces the whole animal kingdom, or as much of it as gives evidence of feeling. Humanitarianism is the final goal of human sympathy. Starting with the tribe (or the family, or even the individual), the instinct of sympathy has spread from tribe to confederacy, from confederacy to nation, from nation to race, and from race to species. It is constantly growing and deepening among the sub-divisions of the human species and is as constantly extending to the non-human populations of the earth. It is destined finally to reach the remotest shores of the Great Ocean of Feeling. Wherever there are bodies that bleed and souls that mourn, there human sympathy should go, angel-like, with its sweetness and healing down even to those lowly and overlooked but suffering-and-enjoying civilizations beneath our feet, in the grasses and grounds and the crystal deeps.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our competitive system of industry is a vestigial institution. It is a survival from the militant ages of the past. It is a form of warfare. It is unsuited to a world of co-operation and division of labor. Higher men are beings of sympathy. They have the natures to put themselves in the places of others. Their ideal is the Golden Rule. But our system of industry compels us to fight each other. It is a heart-hardener. It is a system of cannibalism. Instead of instilling the feeling of brotherhood, it compels us to eat each other. It will pass away. It is already far advanced in its transition to a system based on sympathy and systematic co-operation.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everywhere we turn we find evidence that the "civilization," so-called, of higher peoples is a made-over something, and that the antecedent thing from which it has been derived is the "civilization" of the savage. In this derived "civilization" we find everywhere features of the old, antecedent, and disappearing order of things customs, laws, beliefs, languages, ideals, and institutions which are now no longer functional, but which survive in a more or less dwindling condition in obedience to the same laws as those which perpetuate the vermiform appendix and the hairy covering of our bodies and the hunting and fighting instincts of our natures. It is of vast advantage to us to be able to recognize these vestigial features, in order that we may more skilfully disentangle ourselves from them and at the same time definitely turn our backs on them in our efforts to advance toward a Better World.”
J. Howard Moore (1862–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source