Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves —Nhat Hanh

 

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Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.

We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. 

And therein we err, and greatly err. 
For the animal shall not be measured by man. 

In a world older and more complete than ours they move 
finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. 

They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. 

—Henry Beston
The Outermost House 

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Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth.

I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it;

while there is a criminal element, I am of it; 

while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.


—Eugene Debs
Statement to the Court, excerpt
Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act,
September 18, 1918

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