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.
Fear must be entirely banished. The purified soul will fear nothing.
We have before us the fiendishness of business competition and the world war, passion and wrongdoing, antagonism between classes and moral depravity within them, economic tyranny above and the slave spirit below.
We are the makers of our own lives. There is no such thing as fate. Our lives are the result of our previous actions, our karma, and it naturally flows that, having been ourselves the makers of our karma, we must also be able to unmake it.
Books about spies and traitors - and the congressional hearings that follow the exposure of traitors - generally assume that false-negative errors are much worse than false-positive errors.
The world that I should wish to see would be one freed from the virulence of group hostilities and capable of realizing that happiness for all is to be derived rather from co-operation than from strife. I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than imprisoning the minds of the young in rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them through life against the shafts of impartial evidence.
EACH DAY OF HUMAN life contains joy and anger, pain and pleasure, darkness and light, growth and decay. Each moment is etched with nature’s grand design-do not try to deny or oppose the cosmic order of things.
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