Gene Baur · 304 pages
Rating: (1.2K votes)
“The sixteen hundred dairies in California’s Central Valley alone produce more waste than a city of twenty-one million people-that’s more than the populations of London, New York, and Chicago combined.”
― Gene Baur, quote from Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food
“A noted writer in The Washington Post recently described the cause of compassion for farm animals as “the moral calling of our time.”
― Gene Baur, quote from Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food
“Becoming a vegan is not about self-denial; it’s more a matter of self-awareness. It is about trying new foods and broadening your palate, expressing the joy of being alive, and knowing that you’re making a daily effort to live less violently and more sustainably.”
― Gene Baur, quote from Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food
“The size and shape of the birds have also made it impossible for commercial turkeys to mount and breed naturally. This means that workers at breeding facilities have to masturbate male turkeys, called toms, to collect their semen. Then, in rapid succession, the females are turned upside down and their legs secured by a clamp. The semen is put in straws and inserted into the hen. She’s then released from the clamp, making way for the next in line. Not a pleasant process for the bird, nor a job one can take much pride in.”
― Gene Baur, quote from Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food
“Albert Einstein once said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
― Gene Baur, quote from Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food
“Even in the production of wool, cruelty is a feature. To reduce problems with flies that infest the folds in the skin of Merino sheep (the most highly prized wool breed), producers practice “mulesing.” Strips of flesh are literally cut off the backs of the animals’ legs and hind region to create smooth skin without anesthesia or pain relievers. Sheep also commonly have their tails cut off to control fly problems.”
― Gene Baur, quote from Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food
“I need to use everything—sound, image, performance—to get at the full meaning of the story”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Tar Baby
“In love and mating, ambience is central.”
― Norman Rush, quote from Mating
“What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.
There were even profounder questions. For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought. As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realiza-tion, of the realization of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense. The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer—has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful!”
― Saul Bellow, quote from Humboldt's Gift
“If you even think about asking Harry Potter for an autograph, your day ends right now.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from First Among Sequels
“But I did it because you can’t constantly be afraid of what might happen. If you do, you lose control of what is happening, and all the joy and pain it holds for you.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Birthright
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