Animal Quotes: 17 Verified Sources, 6 Famous Fakes

• Jeremy Bentham — “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, printed 1780, published 1789, Chapter XVII, section 1. It is the last line of a long footnote, not of the main text. The sentence before it, “But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail?”, is almost always dropped, and popular reprints add shouted capitals that the running text does not have.

• Walt Whitman — “I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd, / I stand and look at them long and long.” The opening of section 32 of “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass. Six lines follow and are almost always amputated, and they are the point: Whitman does not admire animals for being gentle but for owning nothing and kneeling to no one. “Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.”

• Henry Beston — “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.” The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, 1928, Chapter 2, page 25. It is the end of an argument, not the start of one. The passage opens “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals” — quoting only the ending loses Beston's premise that our error is one of measurement rather than of kindness.

• Zhuangzi and Huizi, on the joy of fishes. Zhuangzi, chapter 17, “The Floods of Autumn”, section 13, around the 3rd century BCE. It is usually shared as a moment of reverie; it is a challenge. Zhuangzi says the fish playing at their ease are enjoying themselves, and Huizi replies: “You are not a fish; how do you know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?”

• Proverbs 12:10 — “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.” King James Version, 1611. This is the oldest animal-welfare line in wide English circulation. The 1611 first printing spells the last word “cruell”, and modern translations render “beast” as “animal”, which is why the verse turns up in two visibly different forms.

• Michel de Montaigne — “When I play with my cat who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?” “Apology for Raimond Sebond”, Essays Book II, Chapter XII, 1580, in Charles Cotton's translation. Donald Frame's 1957 translation gives “who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me”. Both render the same French and neither is the definitive wording. The sentence that follows is nearly always cut: “If I have my hour to begin or to refuse, she also has hers.”

• Arthur Schopenhauer — animal rights denied is “one of revolting coarseness, a barbarism of the West.” On the Basis of Morality, 1840, Part III, Chapter VIII, subsection 7, in Arthur Brodrick Bullock's 1903 translation. In the original the sentence continues by blaming the attitude on a specific religious inheritance, a clause quote sites uniformly delete.

• Charles Darwin — “My object in this chapter is to shew that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.” The Descent of Man, second edition of 1874, Chapter III. This is a statement of intent, not a finding: the circulating version deletes “My object in this chapter is to shew that” and reissues a thesis Darwin was about to argue as a verdict he had already reached. In the 1871 first edition the same sentence sits in Chapter II and reads “is solely to shew that”; Darwin dropped “solely” for the second edition.

• Martin Buber — “The eyes of an animal have the capacity of a great language.” I and Thou, 1923, Third Part, in Walter Kaufmann's 1970 translation. The sentence runs on, and the ending is what carries it: “most eloquent when they rest entirely in their glance, they express the mystery in its natural captivity, that is, in the anxiety of becoming.” The line opens a paragraph on the wordless language of animal eyes; the house cat Buber is famous for looking at begins the paragraph immediately after.

• George Eliot — “Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.” Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857, second story, “Mr Gilfil's Love Story”, Chapter 7. It is a narrator's aside rather than dialogue, prompted by Caterina Sarti being greeted at the hall door by Rupert, an old bloodhound.

• Anna Sewell — “if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.” Black Beauty, 1877, Chapter 38, “Dolly and a Real Gentleman”. It is almost always quoted with no speaker, as though it were Sewell's own creed or the horse's. It belongs to a passenger named Wright, who has just stopped a carter beating his horses and copied the name and address off the cart so he can report him.

• George Graham Vest — “The one absolute, unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world.” A closing argument, delivered to a jury at Warrensburg, Missouri, on 23 September 1870 in Burden v. Hornsby, and printed in the Congressional Record of 16 October 1914, volume 51, Appendix, pages 1235–36. The plaque wording adds one word and turns the pair “absolute, unselfish” into the adverb “absolutely unselfish”. Shortened versions also lose the opening address to the jury, and with it the courtroom.

• Mark Twain — “Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.” The epigraph to Chapter XXVII of Following the Equator, 1897, credited in the book to Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar and printed with exactly those capitals. Worth knowing precisely because most animal quotes attributed to Twain online are not his.

• Mark Twain, on the cat and the stove lid. The epigraph to Chapter XI of the same book, and a maxim about experience rather than a joke about cats: “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.”

• Aldo Leopold — “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” “Thinking Like a Mountain”, in A Sand County Almanac, published by Oxford University Press in 1949, a year after Leopold's death. It is used as nature lyricism by people who do not mention that Leopold had just helped shoot the wolf whose eyes he was watching. In context it is a confession.

• Milan Kundera — “Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.” The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Part Seven, translated by Michael Henry Heim, Faber and Faber, 1984, page 289. The load-bearing sentence before it is usually dropped: “True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.”

• Albert Einstein, on vegetarianism — the real one. A letter to Hermann Huth of 27 December 1930, filed as Einstein Archive 60-058: “Besides agreeing with the aims of vegetarianism for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.” The line about a vegetarian diet benefiting survival on Earth, which is what actually circulates under his name, is not his.

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” — Mahatma Gandhi. The most-shared animal quotation in English has no author behind it. Researcher Philip Johnson searched all 98 volumes of the 1999 electronic edition of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi and found nothing. Every citation leads to another modern author quoting a modern author; nobody produces a Gandhi text, date or page, and English Wikiquote files it under “Unsourced”. A supposed 1931 speech is sometimes invoked and never produced. Gandhi did write about animals in places that can be sourced, such as Young India of 6 October 1921 — but not this.

“Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.” — Anatole France. No work of Anatole France has ever been produced containing this sentence, in English or in French. No book, chapter, page or date accompanies it on any site that prints it, and the French rendering appears only in modern social media, never in a France edition. Wikiquote has kept it in the unsourced bin since 2009, and in January 2023 its editors declined to restore it because the only contributor was an anonymous address with nothing to attribute. France died in 1924; a quotation with a Nobel laureate's name attached and no paper trail before the internet is the classic profile of a modern invention wearing a borrowed byline.

“The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.” — Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo did not write it. It is a line from a novel: Dmitry Merezhkovsky's The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, serialised in Russian in 1900 and published as a book in 1901. It appears in Book VI, a fictional diary kept by an invented character, and even inside the fiction it is third-hand, because the diarist is reporting what another character told him. The English wording now printed on vegan merchandise comes from the novel's translation, not from any Leonardo manuscript. The companion line about abjuring meat from an early age has the same fictional origin.

Chief Seattle's ecological speech — “What is man without the beasts?”, “All things are connected.” Written in 1971 by Ted Perry, a screenwriter, for Home, a 1972 environmental film made for the Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission. Perry expanded on an 1887 newspaper reconstruction and added material of his own, including buffalo shot from passing trains — an impossibility, since there were no bison within hundreds of miles of Puget Sound and no transcontinental railroad. The producer withheld Perry's writing credit to make the text feel authentic. Chief Seattle did speak in 1854; nothing resembling the famous animal passages survives in any record of it. Perry later wrote that putting words into the mouth of a real person he did not know was “pure hubris if not racist”.

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.” — Groucho Marx. The joke is about thirty years older than the attribution, and it started with a horse. Quote Investigator's earliest citation is a July 1943 column by Francis Bisson in the Chicago Daily News; a May 1947 version was credited to the jockey Ted Atkinson. The dog appears in February 1954 in Boys' Life, credited to a reader in Cleveland. Groucho Marx is not attached to it until April 1973, in a Philadelphia gossip column — nineteen years after the dog version was in print, and two years before his death.

“Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.” — Albert Einstein. Not Einstein's. It sat in the 1996 edition of The Quotable Einstein under “Attributed to Einstein” and was cut from the 2010 edition as unsubstantiated. Einstein ate meat for nearly all his life and adopted a vegetarian diet only about a year before his death in 1955. What he did write on the subject is the 1930 letter to Hermann Huth quoted above.

Most people arrive at a page like this needing one line for one purpose. These are the verified ones, grouped by the job they actually do — and in a few cases the honest answer is that the famous line for that job is one of the fakes above.

For animal cruelty and animal rights. Bentham's footnote is the founding text, and “Can they suffer?” is the whole argument in three words. Schopenhauer is blunter, calling the denial of animal rights a coarseness and a barbarism. Anna Sewell puts the duty on the bystander rather than the abuser: anyone who can stop cruelty and does nothing shares the guilt. Kundera makes it the test of a society, and Proverbs 12:10 is the oldest version of the same thought in English. The line most often used for this purpose — judging a nation by how it treats its animals — is the Gandhi one, and it has no author.

For animal lovers, and for a dog. George Graham Vest's courtroom eulogy is still the best of them, and it is worth quoting from the Congressional Record rather than from a plaque. George Eliot's remark that animals ask no questions and pass no criticisms is lighter and fits a card. The line people usually reach for here is Anatole France's about a part of the soul remaining unawakened, which France never wrote.

For kinship with animals rather than affection for them. Beston's “other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time” is the strongest sentence on this page, and Whitman's section 32 is its poem. Montaigne's cat is the oldest and the funniest: he cannot tell who is entertaining whom. Zhuangzi goes furthest, doubting that we can know what a fish enjoys at all.

For wildlife, conservation and loss. Leopold's fierce green fire, remembering that he had just shot the wolf. Darwin's chapter thesis, quoted with its opening clause intact, is the scientific version of the same claim. Buber belongs here too: a language that needs no sounds and no gestures.

For humour. Twain, twice, and correctly credited to Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar both times. The Groucho Marx line about a dog being too dark to read in is funnier than either, and it is not his.

Almost nobody meets these lines in the books they came from, and each format that carries them damages the text in a way you can predict once you have seen it a few times.

Plaques shorten. Vest's eulogy was a closing argument to a Missouri jury in 1870. On brass and on greeting cards it is trimmed until the address to the jury disappears and the courtroom with it, and the printed “one absolute, unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world” acquires an extra word and becomes “absolutely unselfish”. Reprints also add emphasis no edition contains: Bentham's footnote is widely set with shouted capitals that the running text does not have.

Aggregators fuse and truncate. The Buber sentence everyone shares is a weld of two different translations, and it stops one clause before the phrase that gives it meaning. Schopenhauer circulates in an English wording that matches no translation anyone can name, carried mainly by a vegetarian-history page that credits it to a translator whose text says something else, and always stopped just before the clause about religious inheritance. Twain's epigraph about extracting only the wisdom that is in an experience is reduced to a joke about cats. Darwin's statement of what he intended to argue is stripped of its opening clause and reissued as a verdict.

Context is discarded when it complicates the sentiment. Leopold's fierce green fire is quoted as nature writing by people who leave out the shooting. Sewell's line about sharing in the guilt is quoted with no speaker, so a minor character's parting words to a cab driver read as the author's creed. Kundera's moral test is quoted without the sentence that defines it. Whitman's animals are made gentle when his point was that they own nothing.

And a good sentiment will find a famous mouth. This is the failure that matters most, because no amount of careful quoting fixes it. A novelist's line becomes Leonardo's. A screenwriter's becomes a Suquamish leader's, and reaches children through a picture book that sold over 250,000 copies. A joke about a horse becomes Groucho's thirty years later. A sentence nobody can find anywhere becomes Gandhi's, and stays his in every list of animal quotes on the internet, including the ones that rank above this page.