J. Howard Moore Quotes

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?

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.

Vacation days may be much more beautifully spent communing with the transcendent spirit of Nature than in the butchery and terrorisation of her simple-hearted children.

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.

If man acted unkindly toward non-human beings only when he had to do so in order to avoid harm to himself—if he were as economical in his injuries to others as he would be if he had to endure them himself—the violence which to-day marks his dominion of the planet would be reduced to a mere vestige of what it is.

Men are not zoophilists (being-lovers). Not many of them are philanthropists (man-lovers). They are barbarians. And the wrongs inflicted by them on non-human beings are for the most part inflicted simply because they feel like it. Human nature is so constructed that men get pleasure out of doing the most monstrous deeds. It is worse than this. Human nature is so constructed that it contains elements which demand exercise, demand motor expression, and in whose expression the most lamentable and appalling effects are produced.

The great trouble is that individuals and races in their treatment of each other are not guided by the same high standards of impartiality as an individual organism in dealing with his own organs and parts. Life is not one. It lacks unity of feeling and purpose. And as long as it lacks this oneness it will lack justice.

The function of punishment is to do good, to improve the universe, to add to the sum total of happiness. And punishment which does not do this is not justified. It is a crime in itself. The penal acts of society should be judged just as other acts of conduct are judged—by their utilities.

Many races, owing to the manner in which life has been evolved, are by nature criminal, just like a lot of individual men and women. Their existence is a continual menace to the peace and well-being of the world. The fullness of their lives is dependent upon the emptiness and destruction of others. The mosquito and the tiger, the rattle-snake and the 'sportsman,' are criminals of this kind. The same thing is true of predatory animals generally.

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?

No being will do his most luminous and exalted thinking with his stomach a morgue.

Flesh foods are coming to be recognised more and more by physicians, teachers, writers, and progressive and scientific people generally, as being not only unnecessary and immoral, but as actually inhibitory of the highest efficiency and well-being in man himself. The meat fetish is nothing but an idol, a delusion pure and simple, which has been foisted upon us, like so many other delusions, by tradition, and the time is not far distant when it will be recognised as such by all who really think.

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.

When one sees, the variety and abundance of beautiful and bloodless fruits that gorge the markets of civilisation and considers the amount of art available for cooking and compounding this abundance, and considers, too, what might be still further accomplished in the production and preparation of foods by scientific attention to the matter, it seems so strange, so sad, and so frightful, that man, elected by the accidents of evolution to be the model and schoolmaster of the world, and adapted so signally to a guiltless diet, should continue to perpetrate in the daylight of the twentieth century the barbarous, blood-sucking atrocities of the reptile.

The carnivorous life is denounced by the tenderer and more enlightened elements of mankind, and so those under indictment begin to rake and scrape to see what they can turn up in vindication of their beloved and imperilled rapacities. They find, happily, that Nature is 'red in tooth and claw,' that man has 'canine teeth,' and that human beings are without the five stomachs of the ruminantia. Of course, man is a carnivorous animal; couldn't be anything else if he wanted to be; would probably peter out if he attempted it; and it is not necessary to try to be anything else, anyway, if he could be, for he is in harmony with the all-wise and perfectly lovely regime of bloody Nature already. Mighty slim pegs on which to suspend a life of crime, considering that their substance is purely imaginary! But sufficient for those who have made up their minds beforehand to be satisfied with whatever there is.