Daily Inspiration Quote by Ingrid Newkirk

“Inclusive” is usually a word that flatters the speaker. Newkirk weaponizes it. She frames the refusal to extend moral concern beyond humans not as a neutral preference, but as a prejudice with a name: “human supremacy.” That’s the strategic move. By placing species hierarchy in the same moral category as racism and sexism, she forces the reader to confront an uncomfortable possibility: that what feels like common sense (“humans come first”) may be ideology dressed as nature.

The line is built on reversal. The common accusation aimed at animal-rights activists is that they care “more” about animals than people. Newkirk pivots to fear as the real motive on the other side: we aren’t resisting inclusion because it’s irrational, but because it threatens a privileged status. “Only” sharpens the indictment, narrowing the cause to a single, ugly driver. It’s not ignorance, not tradition, not practicality. It’s supremacy.

The subtext is about identity as much as ethics. If you accept the analogy, you’re asked to reclassify ordinary behaviors - eating animals, experimenting on them, treating them as property - as practices sustained by an inherited bias. That’s why the language borrows from civil-rights vocabularies: those movements taught a culture how to recognize “normal” as a moral defense mechanism.

Context matters: Newkirk, as a high-profile animal liberation activist, is speaking into a society that likes animals emotionally and exploits them economically. The quote aims to collapse that contradiction, making the discomfort the point.