I've also always been fascinated by weddings... those surreal performances where the audience plays an integral part -- the joy, the sadness, the passion... all unfolding firstly in a house where God is served and ultimately in a house where beer is served... the knife inserted ritually into the virginal white cake to reveal the dark fruity interior... that ugly pagan concept of the father handing over his daughter to her new master... the mothers crying because they're losing a daughter, the page boys crying because they have to wear such stupid clothes... those embarrassing speeches and drunken uncles on the dance floor...
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In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks. So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America and sold. In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today. Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter and the destruction of wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics.
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I like the bad-boy types. Generally the guy I'm attracted to is the guy in the club with all the tattoos and nail polish. He's usually the lead singer in a punk band and plays guitar. But my serious boyfriends are relatively clean-cut, nice guys. So it's strange.
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[Although Ball is considered a pop singer, he's not a total stranger to Gilbert and Sullivan, having played Frederick in the West End mounting of Joe Papp's memorable production of The Pirates of Penzance . But Patience is a different kind of work--much of its humor is highly topical, poking fun at the short-lived Aesthetic movement that flourished among British dilettantes 125 years ago. Will that humor translate to a New York audience in the year 2005?] I think there's absolutely no difference to how we regarded things then and how we regard things now, ... There are still those performers and artists who strike on a new art form or mode that attracts their fans, while the majority of us may be saying, 'I'm sorry, but isn't that The Emperor's New Clothes?' There will always be charlatans who do things just to get acclaim and adulation. So I think it'll speak to an audience as clearly today as it did then.
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For most humans, especially for those in modern urban and suburban communities, the most direct form of contact with nonhuman animals is at meal time: we eat them.... The use and abuse of animals raised for food far exceeds, in sheer numbers of animals affected, any other kind of mistreatment.
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No lepidopterist's collection in the entire world...full if iridescent wings, is worth the life of a single butterfly.
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We covered 'Hey, Jude.' My father panicked, misunderstanding the lyrics and thinking our lead singer was belting out 'Hey, Jew' to a roomful of Holocaust survivors.
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Rock and roll doesn't necessarily mean a band. It doesn't mean a singer, and it doesn't mean a lyric, really. It's that question of trying to be immortal.
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Even in the worm that crawls in the earth there glows a divine spark. When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter God.
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For laughter frames the lips of death— Death frames the Singer and the Song.
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All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.
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In their behaviour toward creatures, all men were Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.
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If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.
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The same questions are bothering me today as they did fifty years ago. Why is one born? Why does one suffer? In my case, the suffering of animals also makes me very sad. I’m a vegetarian, you know. When I see how little attention people pay to animals, and how easily they make peace with man being allowed to do with animals whatever he wants because he keeps a knife or a gun, it gives me a feeling of misery and sometimes anger with the Almighty. I say ‘Do you need your glory to be connected with so much suffering of creatures without glory, just innocent creatures who would like to pass a few years in peace?’ I feel that animals are as bewildered as we are except that they have no words for it. I would say that all life is asking: ‘What am I doing here?’
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Life is God's novel. Let him write it.
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Around 5th and 6th grade I thought Dean Martin was the coolest guy in the world; he was a great singer, had his own television show and acted in movies.
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I have a simple life. I mean, you just give me a drum roll, they announce my name, and I come out and sing. In my job I have a contract that says I'm a singer. So I sing.
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As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.
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[T]hose who claim to care about the well-being of human beings and the preservation of our environment should become vegetarians for that reason alone. They would thereby increase the amount of grain available to feed people everywhere, reduce pollution, save water and energy, and cease contributing to the clearing of forests; moreover, since a vegetarian diet is cheaper than one based on meat dishes, they would have more money available to devote to famine relief, population control, or whatever social or political cause they thought most urgent. …[W]hen non-vegetarians say that 'human problems come first,' I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals.
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People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.
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All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact in suffering the animals are our equals.
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'We know now, as we have always known instinctively, that animals can suffer as much as human beings. Their emotions and their sensitivity are often stronger than those of a human being.'
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CAVETT: 'Are you saying that you think the life of a mosquito has the same worth as the life of a man?'
SINGER: 'I have seen no evidence to the contrary.'
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I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.
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The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual -- when it begins to ignore the passions, the motions -- it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
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Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
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There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.
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When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why then should man expect mercy from God? It is unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give.
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If I wanted to express my views on politics, I would have formed a fucking debating society, not a band!
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I don't know what it's like for a book writer or a doctor or a teacher as they work to get established in their jobs. But for a singer, you've got to continue to grow or else you're just like last night's cornbread -- stale and dry.
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