Sentient Quotes - page 4
The word "vegan,” newer and more challenging than "vegetarian” because it includes every sentient being in its circle of concern and addresses all forms of unnecessary cruelty from an essentially ethical perspective, with a motivation of compassion rather than health or purity, points to an ancient idea that has been articulated for many centuries, especially in the world's spiritual traditions.
Will Tuttle
a long time ago only kings had rights. then rights were extended to property-owning white men. then all men. then wymyn [sic]. then children. then the mentally retarded. now we're agonizing over the extension of basic rights to homosexuals and animals. we need to finally accept that all sentient creatures are deserving of basic rights.
Moby
Marriages are made by men and women; not by society; not by the state; not by the church; not by supernatural beings. By this time we should know that nothing is moral that does not tend to the well-being of sentient beings; that nothing is virtuous the result of which is not good. We know now, if we know anything, that all the reasons for doing right, and all the reasons against doing wrong, are here in this world.
Robert G. Ingersoll
the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desirable...is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments...This, being, according to the utilitarian opinion, the end of human action, is necessarily also the standard of morality; which may accordingly be defined, the rules and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of which an existence such as has been described might be, to the greatest extent possible, secured to all mankind; and not to them only, but, so far as the nature of things admits, to the whole sentient creation.
John Stuart Mill
The whole history of lamentation, and mourning, and woe, from the beginning of the world-the funeral ceremonies in which the living symbolize the intensity of their grief-the monuments they rear to tell the world for centuries to come of the calamity they have suffered from the stroke of death-are enduring attestations that it is not so much in the removal of one sentient and living being off the earth, as in the change-the calamitous change to the survivors-that death is truly the King of Terrors.
Robert Chambers (publisher born 1802)
Fantasy is my favorite genre for reading and writing. We have more options than anyone else, and the best props and special effects. That means if you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.
Patrick Rothfuss
But it is quite easy to express the solution in words, thus: the plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy, in which this is a fundamental dogma, has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply the object...
'You may suddenly come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the basic conviction of Vedanta: ... knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sentient beings.'
Erwin Schrödinger
