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The 52:52:52 project, launching on this site and on social media in 2025, will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

This site addresses what's changing, at the personal, organisational and societal levels. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 elements of life, from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and much more besides, which will help you better prepare for related change in your own life.

Halcyon In Kaleidoscope features irregular and fragmentary writings - on ideas and values, places and people - which evolve over time into mini essais, paying humble homage to the peerless founder of the genre. The kaleidoscope is Halcyon's prime metaphor, viewing the world through ever-moving lenses.

A Mundane Comedy is Dom Kelleher's new book, which will be published in 2025. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

Talking Change - Animals

Animals

 

As long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other - Pythagoras

Animal rights will end up with votes for oysters - Bertrand Russell

As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out - Alice Walker

I am conscious that meat eating is not in accordance with the finer feelings, and I abstain from it whenever I can - Dr. Albert Schweitzer -1952 Nobel Peace Prize recipient

I don't eat anything with a face - Linda McCartney

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals - Henry David Thoreau

If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty - Sir Paul McCartney

If man wants freedom why keep birds and animals in cages? Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places! I have since an early age abjured the use of meat - Leonardo Da Vinci

Impartial observers from other planets would consider ours an utterly bizarre enclave if it were populated by birds, defined as flying animals, that nevertheless rarely or never actually flew. They would also be perplexed if they encountered in our seas, lakes, rivers, and ponds, creatures defined as swimmers that never did any swimming. But they would be even more surprised to encounter a species defined as a thinking animal if, in fact, the creature very rarely indulged in actual thinking - Steve Allen

In relation to them (animals), all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka - Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Noble Laureate in literature

In the past white males like Singer and Tooley used to speak up greatly for the rights of women and minorities. Now fortunately women speak up for themselves and minorities speak up for themselves so the white liberal spokespersons are out of a job, but there’s one group that they can still patronise because they can’t speak for themselves and that’s the animals. The animals have this great advantage. …I’ll hear their rights when they express them themselves - Bernard Williams

Lots of people talk to animals, said Pooh. Not that many listen though. That's the problem - Benjamin Hoff - The Tao of Pooh

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to - Mark Twain

Many things made me become a vegetarian, among them, the higher food yield as a solution to world hunger - John Denver

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet - Albert Einstein

Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you anymore - Franz Kafka while looking at a fish

The humanist sense of a gulf between ourselves and other animals is an aberration. Feeble as it is today, the feeling of sharing a common destiny with other living things is embedded in the human psyche. Those who struggle to conserve what is left of the natural environment are moved by the love of living things, biophilia, the frail bond of feeling that ties humankind to the Earth - John Gray, Straw Dogs

The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, rather, can they suffer - Jeremy Bentham

There will never be any peace in the world as long as we eat animals - Isaac Bashevis Singer

To become vegetarian is to step into the stream which leads to nirvana - Buddha

When I was a child we kept lots of animals, including a cat, guinea pigs and hamsters, and it made no sense to me that there were lots of animals that you cared for, and often cared for very deeply, and other animals that are killed and consumed - Wendy Higgins, a former campaign director for the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection

To put all living things that aren’t human into one category is, first of all, a stupid gesture – theoretically ridiculous – and partakes in the very real violence that humans exercise towards animals - Jacques Derrida

 

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