J. Howard Moore Quotes

The trouble with all ethical systems of this world has been their partiality. They have been arranged with undue regard for those who invented them. And this defect vitiates the prevailing systems to-day as it has vitiated the systems that have been produced in times gone by.

Men have had the same origin as other animals; they have the same general architecture of body and mind; and they have the same destiny. And they stand on the same general level of ethical claim and obligation.

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.

[A]nyone who has ever associated with dogs or monkeys long enough and intimately enough to really know them knows that they compare very favorably with human beings in the powers of feeling.

Men are like May-flies. The most of them see things only during the brief breath of a day. The ages of history and biology are unknown and unconsidered. No wonder the universe is misunderstood. The human mind is without longitude. Even a cannonball, photographed with an exposure of one-five-thousandth of a second, seems suspended in mid-air.

"Wild animals" merely strangers to us—beings who live apart from and independent of us. They suffer and enjoy the same as we do. They have their own ends and justifications of life.

Let us be alive. Let us be liquid. Let us be Young. The Old atrophy, because they cease to flow. Let us be loyal for ever to those heavenly banners that flutter everywhere in the airs of this age—the banners of those who strive for a Better World.

This is a wintry world. Low temperatures prevail in the hearts of men. Altruism is scarce. Gaunt but blessed hands stretch up to us everywhere for bread. They are the holy hands of Truth.

Out of the years of the past comes a message from one who towered among us a generation ago—a message voicing in all its fervency the prayer and hope of Humanity: "Young man, young woman, join yourself in your youth with some unpopular cause and grow up loyal in its service."

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.

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.

The Doctrine of Evolution is the greatest discovery ever made by the human mind. We are in the act of understanding it now, and hence are not able to appraise it at its true value. But v)^hen time has passed and we are able to look upon it historically and to realize its full significance, it will be recognized as being incomparably more epoch-making even than the prodigious contributions of Newton and Copernicus. It is more than a theory. It is a new point of view. It has necessitated an entirely new revaluation of everything in the universe.

The doctrine of anthropocentricism has now vanished from intelligent minds, and is in the act of vanishing from unintelligent minds. It is destined to continue to fade until there is not a particle of it left. It is rank imposture. It is too silly and childish even for simpletons. Man is not a being apart. He is not a favorite of the gods, nor the subject of celestial anxiety. Nothing revolves about him or exists for him. Like all the other inhabitants of this world, he is a mere by-product of the play of cosmic forces—forces which grind on without eyes, without anxiety, and without end.

The earth has been headquarters for bigots from time immemorial. I suspect that if we had information from the stars and were able to judge the spheres of space comparatively, we would find that the earth is head and shoulders above every other world within the sweep of the telescope in the enormous output of its assurance.

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.