For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.
— George Orwell, 1984
You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will REMAIN…Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies.
— Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Like a trained and performing tortoise,/ I would make verse in your fashion, if she should/ command it,/ With her husband asking a remission of sentence,/ And even this infamy would not attract/ numerous readers
— Ezra Pound, Difference of Opinion with Lygdamus
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-five
Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room [as is done in factory farms—where 99% of our meat comes from], is not very healthy…Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don’t taste quite right—how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste?—but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with ‘broths’ and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals
So Rosalie and I have been painting these matryoshkas. I drew the outlines on them and she began painting. She painted the biggest one so far, and I started painting the tiniest one because I was done with drawing the outlines.
[Research] isn’t looking for a better cigarette filter or a softer face tissue or a longer-lasting house paint, God help us. Everybody talks about research and practically nobody in this country’s doing it. We’re one of the few companies that actually hires men to do pure research. When most other companies brag about research, they’re talking about industrial hack technicians who wear white coats, work out of cookbooks, and dream up an improved windshield wiper for next year’s Oldsmobile…Here, and shockingly few other places in this country, men are paid to increase knowledge, to work toward no end but that.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
Beyond this literal forgetting of animals by eating them, animal bodies were, for [Franz] Kafka, burdened with the forgetting of all those parts of ourselves we want to forget. If we wish to disavow a part of our nature, we call it our ‘animal nature.’ We then repress or conceal that nature, and yet, as Kafka knew better than most, we sometimes wake up and find ourselves, still, only animals.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals
