It is with government as with medicine, its only business is the choice of evils. Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty.

...the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.

The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a day's time they will have turned it into a Hell.

The request of industry to government is as modest as that of Diogenes to Alexander: Get out of my light.

A civilized society must count animals as worthy of moral consideration and ethical treatment. The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

In the mind of all, fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity;—in that of poets of amusement—in that of the priest and the lawyer of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischievous ambition,—and too often both priest and lawyer have framed or made in part this instrument.

The question is not can animals speak but can they suffer.