At times Moore strikes contemporary ethicists as rather ridiculous, arguing, for instance, against meat-eating even by wild animals. It is likely tha… - J. Howard Moore

I cannot express myself when I get to thinking about these things—these terrible crimes that man is inflicting year after year on millions of his poor, helpless brothers. I become indignant and desperate. I am ashamed of the race of beings to which I belong. It is so cruel and bigoted, so hypocritical, so soul-less and insane. I'd rather be an insect—a bee or a butterfly—and float in dim dreams among the wild flowers of summer than be a man and feel the wrongs and sufferings of this wretched world.

The criminal should be considered and pitied, not despised. He simply complies with the nature with which he came into the world, modified by the environment in which he has lived, the same as does every other being who breathes. You or I, with identical heredity and environment, would do identical deeds. Measured by his ability to do otherwise, the villain is not less divine than the humanitarian. Every creature acts out the impulses which arise in his own consciousness, and the will cannot create, but simply registers, those impulses. Punishment is one of the means possessed by society for its self-culture, and its administration should not be made an opportunity for pugilistic cocks to color their spurs.

The inanimate universe is related to the animate as means to end. We conscious individuals manipulate it in manners best adapted to the satisfaction of our desires. We barricade its rivers, plow its seas, ingulf its vegetations, enslave its atmospheres, torture its soils, and perform upon it any other surgery or enormity that will help us in the satisfaction of these driving desires of ours. The inanimate is. if reason is not treason, the gigantic accessory of the consciousnesses that infest it. The animate environment, on the contrary, is related to each living being, not as means, but as end.