Enhance Your Quote Experience
Enjoy ad-free browsing, unlimited collections, and advanced search features with Premium.
" "Indeed, all his works are replete with the sublimest thoughts and inspirations, and the least that we, as Comrades, can do as proof of our mission to spread "enlightenment is first, to acquaint ourselves with Professor Moore's books, and secondly, to pass the knowledge on to others. Thus his efforts shall not have been in vain.
John Howard Moore (December 4, 1862 – June 17, 1916) was an American zoologist, philosopher, educator and social reformer. He advocated for the ethical consideration and treatment of animals and authored several articles, books, essays and pamphlets on topics including education, ethics, evolutionary biology, humanitarianism, utilitarianism and vegetarianism. He is best known for his work The Universal Kinship (1906), which advocated for a secular sentiocentric philosophy he called the doctrine of "Universal Kinship", based on the shared evolutionary kinship between all sentient beings.
Enjoy ad-free browsing, unlimited collections, and advanced search features with Premium.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Human beings are not children of the sun. They are children of the jungle. We have in our natures many things that we would be a great deal better off without instincts and ways of acting which we would never have included in ourselves in the world if we had had the privilege of choosing just what was to go into our natures. These instincts and ways of acting are vestigial. They were useful to our ancestors, but owing to changes in surroundings they are not useful to us.
In their phenomena of life the inhabitants of the earth display endless variety. They swim in the waters, soar in the skies, squeeze among the rocks, clamber among the trees, scamper over the plains, and glide among the grounds and grasses. Some are born for a summer, some for a century, and some flutter their little lives out in a day. They are black, white, blue, golden, all the colours of the spectrum. Some are wise and some are simple; some are large and some are microscopic; some live in castles and some in bluebells; some roam over continents and seas, and some doze their little day-dream away on a single dancing leaf. But they are all the children of a commion mother and the co-tenants of a common world. Why they are here in this world rather than some place else; why the world in which they find themselves is so full of the undesirable; and whether it would not have been better if the ball on which they ride and riot had been in the beginning sterilised, are problems too deep and baffling for the most of them. But since they are here, and since they are too proud or too superstitious to die, and are surrounded by such cold and wolfish immensities, what would seem more proper than for them to be kind to each other, and helpful, and dwell together as loving and forbearing members of One Great Family?
Civilisation is not an appeal to nature. It is a revolt against nature—against nature as it has been represented in man in the past. It is supernatural. Civilization is an attempt to subordinate and control those primitive impulses which have reigned in human nature in the less gracious and less rational times gone by—impulses which we have ourselves to-day to a considerable extent inherited.