It is only human supremacy, which is as unacceptable as racism and sexism, that makes us afraid of being more inclusive.
Interpretation
The quote warns against the belief in human superiority over other species, equating it with unacceptable social prejudices.
Ingrid Newkirk's quote critiques the notion of human supremacy, asserting that it fosters fear and resistance toward inclusivity, not only among humans but towards all living beings. By comparing this mindset to racism and sexism, she emphasizes that a truly inclusive society must reject all forms of superiority and embrace diversity in its many forms, advocating for a more compassionate and heterogeneous coexistence with other species.
In practice
In a speech at an animal rights conference, this quote can emphasize the need for empathy.
[I believe] that animals have a worth in and of themselves, and that they are not inferior to human beings but rather just different from us, and that they really don't exist for us nor do they belong to us...it should not be a question of how they should be treated within the context of their usefulness, or perceived usefulness, to us, but rather whether we have a right to use them at all.
I think if you're against cruelty and you look at what happens to animals in slaughterhouses and on factory farms, you have to be completely against eating meat.
Only the half-mad are wholly alive.
Nay, do not think I flatter. For what advancement may I hope from thee, That no revenue hast but thy good spirits To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flattered?
We don't even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires. We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths - but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.
In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
He [Zampano] probably would of insisted on corrections and edits, he was his own harshest critic, but I've come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angels of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.
A city with one newspaper... is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.
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