Vegetarianism

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Vegetarianism

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[edit] Humor

• "O impudence of power and might,/ Thus to condemn a hawk or kite,/When thou, perhaps, carniv'rous sinner,/Hadst pullets yesterday for dinner!'." - John Gay, The Fables, Volume 1 (1727), Pythagoras and the Countryman
• "Here's a test you can try at home: put a two-year-old in a playpen with an apple and a rabbit. If it plays with the apple and eats the rabbit, you've got a carnivore." - Dan Piraro
• "Sooner or later, we'll all be on the menu." - Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone ("To Serve Man")
• "When I see bacon, I see a pig, I see a little friend, and that’s why I can’t eat it. Simple as that. But I’ll eat Linda’s veggie bacon. All her food was so good. Steve Martin came around for a barbecue once. I was grilling and he said, “Oh, no, I can’t have any of that.” I asked why not and he said, “Sorry, I’m vegetarian.” I said, “You didn’t know we are?! Everything on the grill is veggie!” He said, “Ahhh” and ate three veggie burgers and then asked where he could buy them. " - Paul McCartney, Animal Times interview, Fall, 1998
• "So then Mom decided my father ought to do a vegan diet, too. Well, my father grew up on a cattle ranch, but the nice thing is, my dad’s been sitting at the same dinner table for fifty-one years, and he can’t find his way around the kitchen! He’s been reying my Mom for fifty-one years to put the plate in front of him. So Mom went to the local health food store and bought hot dogs that are called “Not Dogs” and veggie burgers – which used to taste like cardboard, but now they’re really good. She can get Canadian bacon made of a wheat derivative. It’s all vegetarian. Instead of cow’s milk, it’s soy milk, rice milk, fake eggs – all that stuff! Dad just keeps cleaning his plate. Now I’ve got two vegetarian parents, and only one of them know it!" - Neal Barnard, M. D, Wramc Us Too, Inc Newsletter, 2003
• " For all we know that English people are/ Fed upon beef - I won't say much of beer/ Because 'tis liquor only, /and being far/ From this my subject, has no business here; / We know too, they are very fond of war,/ A pleasure - like all pleasures - rather dear;/ So were the Cretans - from which I infer/ That beef and battle both were owing her." - Lord Byron, Don Juan
• "I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalm'd off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion consider'd, with my [vegetarian] master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc'd some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I din'd upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do." - Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
• "Perhaps a man hitched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky Way will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and apologize (belatedly) to the cow." - Milan Kundera, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• "I was born a vegetarian. I wanted to do the shoot because I feel there is no need to cause another living thing pain or harm. There are so many other things we can eat. I have never eaten meat in my life, and I'm 5 foot 10 and not exactly wasting away. A wise man once said, 'Animals are my friends, and I'm not in the habit of eating my friends' – that is exactly how I feel"." – Joss Stone, in a PETA vegetarian ad
• "Nobody can come up with a good argument for eating animals — nobody can. People as some kind of a joke say, well, 'It's tasty', but it's only tasty once you garnish it and you put salt and pepper, and you cook it, and you have to do 300 things to it to disguise its true taste. If you put garnishes on a chair or fabric, it would probably taste quite nice." - Morrissey
• " [When asked what he would eat if he was in a desert with no food in sight except a cow ] I'd find out what the cow was eating and join it." - Benjamin Zephaniah
• " If beef is your idea of `real food for real people,' you'd better live real close to a real good hospital." – Neal Barnard, M. D
• "Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends." - George Bernard Shaw
• "I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants." - A. Whitney Brown

[edit] Health

• "In fact, my best year of track competition was the first year I ate a vegan diet. Moreover, by continuing to eat a vegan diet, my weight is under control, I like the way I look. (...)I regained my energy. I was drinking 24 to 32 ounces of juice a day. I ate no dairy products. And I had my best year as an athlete ever! (...) I know that many people think that eating a vegetarian diet - and especially a vegan diet – will require sacrifice and denial. Jannequin Bennett demonstrates in this book that eating vegan does not have to be tasteless and boring. " – Carl Lewis, Excerpt from Carl Lewis’ introduction to Very Vegetarian, by Jannequin Bennett
• "It is incredible how much prejudice has been allowed to operate in favor of meat, while so many facts are opposed to the pretended necessity of its use." – Phillip Hecquet
• "This species of food [fruits and farinacea] is that which is most suited to man..." – Carl Linnaeus, Amaenitates academica, x., 8
• "The natural food of man, to judge from his structure, appears to consit principally of the fruits, roots, and other succulent parts of vegetables." – Georges Cuvier, Le Régne Animal
• "It is, i think, not going to far to say that every fact connected with the human organization goes to prove that man was originally formed a frugivorous animal. This opinion is principally derived from the formation of his teeth and of his digestive organs, as well as from the character of his skin, and the general structure of his limbs." – Thomas Bell, Anatomy, physiology, and Diseases of the teeth
• "Man lives very well upon flesh, you say, but, if he thinks this food to be natural to him, why does he not use it as it is, as furnished to him by Nature? But, in fact, be shrinks in horror from seizing and rending living or even raw flesh with his teeth, and lights a fire to change its natural and proper condition . . . What is clearer than that man is not furnished for hunting, much less for eating, other animals? In one word, we seem to be admirably admonished by Cicero that man was destined for other things than for seizing and cutting the throats of other animals. If you answer, "that may be said to be an industry ordered by Nature, by which such weapons are invented," then, behold, it is by the very same artificial instrument that men make weapons for mutual slaughter. Do they this at the instigation of Nature? Can a use so noxious be called natural? Faculty is given by Nature, but it is our own fault that we make a perverse use of it." – Pierre Gassendi, Letter to Van Helmont
• "How many times, for instance, have we not heard people speak with all the assurance of conviction about canine teeth and “simple stomach” of man as certain evidence of his natural adaptation for a flesh diet! At least we have demonstrated one fact – that if such arguments are valid, they apply with even greater force to the anthropoid apes, whose “canine teeth" are much longer and more powerful then those of man. [...] and yet, with the solitary exception of man, there is not one of these last that does not, in a natural condition, absolutely refuse to feed on flesh! M. pouchet observes that all the details of the digestive apparatus in man, as well as his dentition, constitute so many proofs of his frugivorous origin; an opinion shared by Owen, who remarks that the anthropoids and all quadrumana drive all their alimentation from fruits, grains, and other succulent and nutritive vegetable substances; and that the strict analogy which exists between the structure of the animals and that of man clearly demonstrates his frugivorous nature. This is, also, the view taken by Gassendi, Cuvier, Linné, Professor Lawrence, Charles Bell, Flourens, and a great number of other eminent writers." – Anna Kingsford, M.D. , The Perfect way of Diet
• "The peoples living upon vegetable foods, are, of all men, the handsomest, the most vigorous, the least exposed to diseases and to passions, and they whose lives last longest" – Bernardin de Saint-Pierre , Etudes
• "Comparative anatomy, therefore, proves that man is naturally a frugivorous animal, formed to subsist upon fruits, seeds, and farinaceous vegetables." – Sylvester Graham, The Science of Human Life
• "Strange spectacle! To see a mother giving her daughter, whom but yesterday she was suckling at her breast, this gross aliment of bloody meats, and the dangerous excitant wine!" - Jules Michelet, La Femme, vi. Onzième Edition, Paris, 1879
• "Don´t live to eat, eat to live" – Antoni Gaudi, (Gaudi was a vegetarian), Juan Bergós Massó, Gaudí, el hombre y la obra, Barcelona : Universidad Politécnica, 1974
• "The table was well spread with all manner of fruit, beans, greenstuff and good pies...but of flesh and fish there was never a sign." – Shmuel Yosef Agnon, The Bridal Canopy
• "Go veg—for animals, for your health, for life. " – Masta Killa from Wu-Tang Clan, from the pro-vegetarian add he did for PETA
• "It is the position of the American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada that appropriately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. " - American Dietetic Association, (from their website www.eatright.org)
• "The meat industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars lying to the public about their product. But no amount of false propaganda can sanitize meat. The facts are absolutely clear: Eating meat is bad for human health, catastrophic for the environment, and a living nightmare for animals" – Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders, in the PETA website
• "I think and speak clearer since I cut the dairy out. I can breathe better and perform at a better rate, and my voice is clearer. I can explore different things with my voice that I couldn't do because of my meat and dairy ingestion. I am proud and blessed to be a vegetarian. Everything became clear. - Common, interview for PETA
• "It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind." - Albert Einstein, letter to Vegetarian Watch-Tower, December 27, 1930
• "True and constant vigor of the body is the effect of health, which is much better preserved with watery, herbaceous, frugal, and tender food, than with vinous, abundant, hard, and gross flesh. […] the vulgar opinion, then which, on health reasons condemns vegetable food and so much praises animal food, being so ill-founded, I have always thought it well to oppose myself to it, moved both by experience and by that refined knowledge of natural things which some study and conversation with great men have given me." - Antonio Cocchi, The Pythagorean Diet
• " All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap. " – William Blake, on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
• "As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love." - Pythagoras
• "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit. That we can subsist on plant food and perform our work even to advantage is not a theory, but a well-demonstrated fact. Many races living almost exclusively on vegetables are of superior physique and strength. There is no doubt that some plant food, such as oatmeal, is more economical than meat, and superior to it in regard to both mechanical and mental performance. Such food, moreover, taxes our digestive organs decidedly less, and, in making us more contented and sociable, produces an amount of good difficult to estimate. In view of these facts every effort should be made to stop the wanton and cruel slaughter of animals, which must be destructive to our morals. " - Nikola Tesla (Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900)
• "It is not my purpose here to discuss the question of vegetarianism, or to meet the objections that may be urged against it; though it must be admitted that of these objections not one can withstand a loyal and scrupulous inquiry. I, for my part, can affirm that those whom I have known to submit themselves to this regimen have found its result to be improved or restored health, marked addition of strength, and the acquisition by the mind of a clearness, brightness, well-being, such as might follow the release from some secular, loathsome, detestable dungeon." - Maurice Maeterlinck, on The Buried Temple (le Temple Enseveli), III - The kingdoom of Matter, 5
• "Until the age of twelve, then, I only lived on bread, milk-food, vegetables, and fruit. My health was not less robust on this account, nor my growth less rapid, and it was to this diet, perhaps, that I was indebted for that purity of feature, that exquisite sensibility of feeling, and that quiet gentleness of humor and character which I had preserved up to that period." - Alphonse de Lamartine, On Les confidences
• "In the next ten years, one of the things you're bound to hear is that animal protein … is one of the most toxic nutrients of all that can be considered." – Dr. T. Colin Campbell
• " Like my friend the Doctor, I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an ailment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principle diet" - Thomas Jefferson, letter written on March 21, 1819 to Dr. Vine Utley
• "When people ask me why I don’t eat meat or any other animal products, I say, 'Because they are unhealthy and they are the product of a violent and inhumane industry." - Casey Affleck, in a PETA video
• "Every time we sit down to eat, we make a choice. Please choose vegetarianism. Do it for … animals. Do it for the environment, and do it for your health." - Alec Baldwin, in the PETA website, he worked with PETA.
• "Linda McCartney sausages were my favorite. They’re much better than eating real sausages and you don’t have to contemplate half way through exactly what s inside them. ... You can have them, a bit of fried bread, tinned tomatoes. Delicious. " – Simon Cowell
• "I never really liked meat. I was a child that had to be forced to eat my meat. Whatever you ate before [going vegetarian] that you loved—like turkey slices—they've got a substitute now that's not hard to find." – Masta Killa, from Wu-Tang Clan
• ”The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.” – Neal Barnard, M. D
• "I am a vegan now, and it was a conscious decision. I studied a lot about African culture and health and the best way to take care of the body. … I really wanted to be healthy. I found out a lot about the body and what drugs they put in meat. My taste buds started changing, and I didn't crave meat and dairy products anymore" – Brandy

• "I don't eat meat, fish, or eggs. I was never a big meat-eater, but I've got more energy now. I eat a lot of tofu, and I drink soy shakes with fruit every morning. I always have soybeans, black beans, or chickpeas for lunch or dinner" – Shania Twain
• "It was a lot easier for me to lose the weight rather than putting it back on when I had to start shooting Spider-Man 2 because I'm a vegetarian, and it feels uncomfortable if you feel you're eating too much." – Toby McGuire
• " Man came before the axe and fire so he couldn't be carnivorous.The length of mans digestive tube is 5-8 meters and the distance between the mouth and the coccyx is 50 to 80 centimetres, which gives us a result of 10 as in other frugivorous animals and not 3 as in the carnivorous or 20 as in the herbivorous animals.The only animal with probable omnivorous morphology that exists, is the bear, which has some pointed teeth and others that are flat." - Thomas Henry Huxley
• "Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." - Albert Einstein
• "Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? has it nerves in order to be impassible? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature." - Voltaire
• "You can't tear flesh by hand, you can't tear hide by hand. Our anterior teeth are not suited for tearing flesh or hide. We don't have large canine teeth, and we wouldn't have been able to deal with food sources that require those large canines" – Dr. Richard Leakey
• "I'm on a vegan diet, I do yoga every day, I work out, I'm totally spiritual ..." -Avril Lavigne
• "There is no doubt, that man is not built to be a carnivorous animal. What a sweet, pleasing and innocent sight is the spectacle of a table served that way and what a difference to a make up of fuming animal meat, slaughtered and dead! Man in no way has the constitution of a carnivorous being. Hunt and voracity are unnatural to him. Man has neither the sharp pointed teeth or claws to slaughter his prey. On the contrary his hands are made to pick fruits, berries and vegetables and teeth appropriate to chew them." – John Ray
• "Although most of us conduct our lives as omnivores, in that we eat flesh as well as vegetables and fruits, human beings have characteristics of herbivores, not carnivores . The appendages of carnivores are claws; those of herbivores are hands or hooves. The teeth of carnivores are sharp; those of herbivores are mainly flat (for grinding). The intestinal tract of carnivores is short (3 times body length); that of herbivores, long (12 times body length). Body cooling of carnivores is done by panting; herbivores, by sweating. Carnivores drink fluids by lapping; herbivores, by sipping. Carnivores produce their own vitamin C, whereas herbivores obtain it from their diet. Thus, humans have characteristics of herbivores, not carnivores." - William C. Roberts, M.D.,, Twenty questions on atherosclerosis

[edit] Ethical

• "A pitiful fellow! Such a ridiculous kind of pity his, as those silly souls have, who would not kill an innocent chicken for the world; but when killed to their hands, are always the most greedy devourers of it." - Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, volume 4
• "Simply let those, like him of Samos, live! / Let herbs to them a bloodless banquet give. / In beechen goblets let their beverage shine, / Cool from the crystal spring their sober wine! / Their youth should pass in innocence secure / From stain licentious, and in manners pure." - John Milton, Elegy 6" 55-66, to Charles Diodati
• "Animal life, sombre mystery. All nature protests against the barbarity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his inferior brethren." - Jules Michelet
• "Nothing can be more shocking and horrid than one of our kitchens sprinkled with blood, and abounding with the cries of expiring victims or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up here and there." -Alexandre Pope, The Guardian, May 21, 1713
• "We manage to swallow flesh, only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing we do." - Rabinadranath Tagore, Glimpses of Bengal Letters, 1894
• "To any thinking person, it must be obvious that there is something badly wrong in relations between human beings and the animals that human beings rely on for food; and that in the past 100 or 150 years whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as traditional animal husbandry has been turned into an industry using industrial methods of production. (...)It would be a mistake to idealise traditional animal husbandry as the standard by which the animal-products industry falls short: traditional animal husbandry is brutal enough, just on a smaller scale. A better standard by which to judge both practices would be the simple standard of humanity: is this truly the best that human beings are capable of? " - J.M. Coetzee, Animals can't speak for themselves - it's up to us to do it, February 22, 2007
• "There is in man a disposition to compassion as generally diffused as his other instincts. Newton had cultivated this sentiment of humanity, and he extended it to the lower animals. With Locke he was strongly convinced that God has given to them a proportion of ideas, and the same feelings, which he has to us . . . In truth, without humanity, a virtue which comprehends all virtues, the name of philosopher is little deserved." - Voltaire, Elémens de la Philosophie de Newton
• "Opposers of compassion urge: 'If we should live on vegetable food, what shall we do with our cattle? What would become of them? They would grow so numerous they would be prejudicial to us - they would eat us up if we did not kill and eat them!' But there is abundance of animals in the world whom men do not kill and eat; and yet we hear not of their injuring mankind, and sufficient room is found for their abode. Horses are not usually killed to be eaten, and yet we have not heard of any country overstocked with them. [...] Because some [animals] have no compassion, feeling, or reason, are we to possess no compassion, feeling, or reason?" - George Nicholson (1760 - 1825), Remarks on defenses of flesh-eating
• "Yeah, yeah, it means the same idea, that I don’t eat meat. You should only eat what you need. You can change your whole physiological makeup, you know, and you become almost dirty, dirty, you know, from what you eat. You know, the more red meat and blood we eat, the more bloodthirsty we get, the more violent we get. The more vegetarian food that we eat, the more peace is taken into us. " - Ziggy Marley, PETA2.com interview
• "So-called farms today treat animals like so many boxes in a warehouse, chopping off beaks and tails and genitals with no painkillers at all, inflicting third-degree burns repeatedly by branding cows, … and just a horrible catalog of abuses that, if done to dogs or cats, would be illegal on grounds of animal cruelty." – James Cromwell, in the PETA website
• "Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel, and brutal taking of life. - Dick Gregory, PETA website
• "A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral." - Henry David Thoreau, On Civil Disobedience
• "I was watching an HBO special on eating habits and different cultures, and they showed in China how people eat cats, and I'm really fond of cats, and I happened to be sitting on the couch with my cat, and once I saw that, it just put everything in perspective. If I wouldn't eat my cat what's the difference between eating a cat or a cow? If certain animals are considered lesser than, so are certain people and that's not really fair. And the root of that is to consider life on equal terms across the board." - Ben Kenney, from a PETA video with The Roots
• "Man alone consumes and engulfs more flesh than all other animals put together. He is, then, the greatest destroyer, and he is so more by abuse than by necessity. Instead of enjoying with moderation the resources offered him, in place of dispensing them with equity, in place of repairing in proportion as he destroys, of renewing in proportion as he annihilates, the rich man makes all his boast and glory in consuming, all his splendour in destroying, in one day, at his table, more matenal than would be necessary for the support of several families. He abuses equally other animals and his own species, the rest of whom live in famine, languish in misery, and work only to satisfy the immoderate appetite and the still more insatiable vanity of this human being who, destroying others by want, destroys himself by excess. - George Buffon,L'Histoire Naturelle
• "I’ve been a vegan since I was about 3 years old and involved in animal rights for years. I’ve seen a number of animal rights films throghout the years, nona has affected me as profoundly as Earthlings. " – Joaquin Phoenix , interview from the official Earthlings website
• "Men fed upon meat, and drinking strong drinks, have all an impoisoned and acrid blood which drives them mad in a hundred different ways. Their main insanity express in the fury of shed the blood of his brothers and to devastate fertile lands to rule over cemeteries." - Voltaire, On The Princess of Babylon, Chapter III
• "The indifference of children towards meat is one proof that the taste for meat is unnatural; their preference is for vegetable foods, such as milk, pastry, fruit, etc. Beware of changing this natural taste and making children flesh-eaters, if not for their health's sake, for the sake of their character. For however one tries to explain the practice, it is certain that great meat-eaters are usually more cruel and ferocious than other men. This has been recognized at all times and in all places. The English are noted for their cruelty while the Gaures are the gentlest of men. All savages are cruel, and it is not their customs that tend in this direction; their cruelty is the result of their food. They go to war as to the chase, and treat men as they would treat bears. Indeed in England butchers are not allowed to give evidence in a court of law,no more can surgeons. Great criminals prepare themselves for murder by drinking blood. Homer makes his flesh-eating Cyclops a terrible man, while his Lotus-eaters are so delightful that those who went to trade with them forgot even their own country to dwell among them." – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from Emile or On Education
• "I, for my part, wonder of what sort of feeling, mind or reason that man was possessed who was first to pollute his mouth with gore, and allow his lips to touch the flesh of a murdered being; who spread his table with the mangled forms of dead bodies, and claimed as daily food and dainty dishes what but now were beings endowed with movement, with perception and with voice. For the sake of some little mouthful of flesh we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that portion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy." - Plutarch, Moralia.
• "(Of the mouth of man which is a tomb) there shall come forth loud noises out of the tombs of those who have died by an evil and violent death." - Leonardo da Vinci, (Prophecies).
• "Oh, come! That boot is on the other leg. Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that." - George Bernard Shaw, (The Vegetarian, 15 January 1898)
• " We cannot pretend that we do not know this. We are not ostriches, and cannot believe that if we refuse to look at what we do not wish to see, it will not exist. This is especially the case when what we do not wish to see is what we wish to eat. If it were really indispensable, or, if not indispensable, at least in some way useful! But it is quite unnecessary, and only serves to develop animal feelings, to excite desire, and to promote fornication and drunkenness. And this is continually being confirmed by the fact that young, kind, undepraved people—especially women and girls—without knowing how it logically follows, feel that virtue is incompatible with beefsteaks, and, as soon as they wish to be good, give up eating flesh." - Leo Tolstoy, Essays and Letters, The First Step
• " Simonson, in his rubber jacket and rubber overshoes fastened with a string over his worsted stockings (he was a vegetarian and would not wear the skin of slaughtered animals), was also in the courtyard waiting for the gang to start." - Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection, Book III, chap I
• " The destruction of animals for food, in its details and tendencies, involves so much of cruelty as to cause every reflecting individual—not destitute of the ordinary sensibilities of our nature—to shudder. - William A. Alcott, On Vegetable Diet
• " God gave our first parents the food He designed that the race should eat. It was contrary to His plan to have the life of any creature taken. There was to be no death in Eden. The fruit of the trees in the garden was the food man's wants required." - Ellen G. White
• "How can one, who eats the flesh of others to swell his flesh, show compassion?" - Tiruvalluvar, Tirukkural: 251
• "I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized." - Henry David Thoreau (On Walden)
• "As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: In their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. 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." - Isaac Bashevis Singer (On Enemies, A Love Story)
• "It is demonstrated that brutes are rational animals, reason in most of them being indeed imperfect, of which, nevertheless, they are not entirely deprived. Since, however, justice pertains to rational beings, as our opponents say, how is it possible not to admit, that we should also act justly towards brutes?" - Porphyry, On Abstinence from Animal Food
• " Grant animals a ray of reason, imagine what a frightful nightmare the world is to them: a dream of cold-blooded men, blind and deaf, cutting their throats, slitting them open, gutting them, cutting them into pieces, cooking them alive, sometimes laughing at them and their contortions as they writhe in agony. Is there anything more atrocious among the cannibals of Africa? To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of men. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous.—And that is the unpardonable crime. " - Romain Rolland, On Jean-Christophe
• "Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace." - Albert Schweitzer (The Philosophy of Civilisation)
• " My mother was convinced, and on this head I have retained her firm belief, that to kill animals for the purpose of feeding on their flesh is one of the most deplorable and shameful infirmities of the human state; that it is one of those curses cast upon man either by his fall, or by the obduracy of his own perversity." - Alphonse de Lamartine, On Les confidences
• " Recently, while I was in the street, my eye was caught by a poulterer's shop; I stared unthinkingly at his piled-up wares, neatly and appetizingly laid out, when I became aware of a man at the side busily plucking a hen, while another man was just putting his hand in a cage, where he seized a live hen and tore its head off. The hideous scream of the animal, and the pitiful, weaker sounds of complaint that it made while being overpowered transfixed my soul with horror. Ever since then I have been unable to rid myself of this impression, although I had experienced it often before." - Richard Wagner, On Selected Letters of Richard Wagner
• " And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?." - H.G. Wells, On The War of the Worlds, Chapter I
• " In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughter-houses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic question of meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still remember, as a boy, the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughter-house." - H.G. Wells, On A Modern Utopia Chapter the Ninth, The Samurai, Section 5
• "Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, nothing so surely unmortars a society; nothing, we might plausibly argue, will so harden and degrade the minds of those that practice it. And yet we ourselves make much the same appearance in the eyes of the Buddhist and the vegetarian. We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions, and organs with ourselves; we feed on babes, though not our own; and the slaughter-house resounds daily with screams of pain and fear. We distinguish, indeed; but the unwillingness of many nations to eat the dog, an animal with whom we live on terms of the next intimacy, shows how precariously the distinction is grounded." - Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas, Chapter XI
• "I refuse to eat animals because I cannot nourish myself by the sufferings and by the death of other creatures. I refuse to do so, because I suffered so painfully myself that I can feel the pains of others by recalling my own sufferings.I feel happy, nobody persecutes me; why should I persecute other beings or cause them to be persecuted? I feel happy, I am no prisoner, I am free; why should I cause other creatures to be made prisoners and thrown into jail? I feel happy, nobody harms me; why should I harm other creatures or have them harmed? I feel happy, nobody wounds me; nobody kills me; why should I wound or kill other creatures or cause them to be wounded or killed for my pleasure and convenience?(...) I think that men will be killed and tortured as long as animals are killed and tortured. So long there will be wars too. Because killing must be trained and perfected on smaller objects, morally and technically." - Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, Animals, My Brethren (written in the Concentration Camp Dachau, in the midst of all kinds of cruelties)
• "As for me, I could never so much as endure, without remorse and griefe, to see a poore, sillie, and innocent beast pursued and killed, which is harmelesse and voide of defence, and of whom we receive no offence at all. - Montaigne, Of Cruelty
• " It is not a digression to mention the horrors of war in connection with the massacre of cattle and carnivorous banquets. The diet of individuals corresponds closely to their manners. Blood demands blood. On this point anyone who searches among his recollections of the people whom he has known will find there can be no possible doubt as to the contrast which exists between vegetarians and coarse eaters of flesh, greedy drinkers of blood, in amenity of manner, gentleness of disposition and regularity of life." - Elisée Reclus, On Vegetarianism
• "It is often said, as an excuse for the slaughter of animals, that it is better for them to live and to be butchered than not to live at all. Now, obviously, if such reasoning justifies the practice of flesh-eating, it must equally justify all breeding of animals for profit or pastime, when their life is a fairly happy one. (...) In fact, if we once admit that it is an advantage to an animal to be brought into the world, there is hardly any treatment that cannot be justified by the supposed terms of such a contract. Also, the argument must apply to mankind. It has, in fact, been the plea of the slave-breeder; and it is logically just as good an excuse for slave-holding as for flesh-eating. It would justify parents in almost any treatment of their children, who owe them, for the great boon of life, a debt of gratitude which no subsequent services can repay. We could hardly deny the same merit to cannibals, if they were to breed their human victims for the table, as the early Peruvians are said to have done." - Henry Stephens Salt, On The Humanities of Diet
• " With respect to animal diet, let it be considered, that taking away the lives of animals, in order to convert them into food, does great violence to the principles of benevolence and compassion. This appears from the frequent hard-heartedness and cruelty found amongst those persons, whose occupations engage them in destroying animal life, as well as from the uneasiness which others feel in beholding the butchery of animals." - David Hartley, On Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations
• " I became a vegetarian because I was persuaded that life is as valid for other creatures as it is for humans. I do not need dead animal bodies to keep me alive, strong and healthy. Therefore, I will not kill for food." – Scott Nearing, On The Making of a Radical
• "And yet (would you believe it?) I have seen the very men who have thus boasted of their tenderness, at the same time devouring the flesh of six different animals tossed up in a fricassee. Strange contrariety of conduct! They pity, and they eat the objects of their compassion!" - Oliver Goldsmith, On The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith
• " I have often thought, if it was not for this tyranny which custom usurps over us, that men of any tolerable good-nature could never be reconcil'd to the killing of so many animals for their daily food. - Bernard Mandeville, On The Fable of the Bees
• "I like animals, all animals. I wouldn’t hurt a cat or a dog—or a chicken or a cow. And I wouldn’t ask someone else to hurt them for me. That’s why I’m a vegetarian." - Peter Dinklage, in a PETA vegetarian-testimonial
• "Chickens, pigs, and other animals … are interesting individuals with personalities and intelligence. … What people need to understand is that if they're eating animals, they are promoting cruelty to animals." – Pamela Anderson, in the PETA website
• "No member of the animal kingdom nurses past maturity, No member of the animal kingdom ever did a thing to me, Its why I don't eat red meat or white fish, Don't give me no blue cheese, Were all members of the animal kingdom, Leave your brothers and sisters in the sea." – Prince, Animal Kingdom lyrics, from The Truth album
• " Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
• "To see the convulsions, agonies and tortures of a poor fellow-creature, whom they cannot restore nor recompense, dying to gratify luxury and tickle callous and rank organs, must require a rocky heart, and a great degree of cruelty and ferocity. I cannot find any great difference between feeding on human flesh and feeding on [other] animal flesh, except custom and practice." - George Cheyne , Essay on Regimen
• "Why is compassion not part of our established curriculum, an inherent part of our education? Compassion, awe, wonder, curiosity, exaltation, humility - these are the very foundation of any real civilization, no longer the prerogatives, the preserves of any one church,. but belonging to everyone, every child in every home, in every school." - Yehudi Menuhin, Just for the animals
• "I’m opposed to fur and any kind of use of animal products. I don’t eat them, and I don’t wear them. I’m not for the killing of any creature, whether it be seals, cows, dogs or any animal. So anytime it comes to any kind of animal cruelty, I’m totally against it." – Bryan Adams, PETA interview, 2007
• "Every time we sit down to eat, we make a choice. Please choose vegetarianism. Do it for … animals. Do it for the environment, and do it for your health." - Alec Baldwin, in the PETA website, he worked with PETA.
• "If you could feel or see the suffering, you wouldn't think twice. Give back life. Don't eat meat." – Kim Basinger
• "I am a very strict vegetarian. ...I just really, really love animals, and I act on my values." – Natalie Portman
• "Chickens raised for food today are … covered in excrement, they're diseased, and they're drugged up with all sorts of toxins that you are ingesting if you eat chickens. One recent study found that chicken flesh in this country has four times as much arsenic—yes, arsenic, the poison (which is used in the drugs the chickens are given) as any other meat … I have been a vegan for many years." – Russell Simmons
• "I think there's something odd about eating another living anything." – Shania Twain
• "I stopped eating meat about six years ago, when I was working on the movie Selena. During the shoot, I had to hold a chicken for five hours—if you hold it and feel its little heart beating for hours, you just can't think about eating it." – Constance Marie
• "It may take a while, but there will probably come a time when we look back and say, ‘Good Lord, do you believe that in the 20th century and early part of the 21st, people were still eating animals?'." – Mary Tyler Moore
• "It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
• "The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men." - Leonardo da Vinci (Quote invented by Dimitri Merejovski in a novel)
• "You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "Thousands of people who say they 'love' animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that could make their lives worth living and who endured the awful suffering and the terror of the abattoirs." - Jane Goodall
• "I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily." - Marguerite Yourcenar
• "I do feel that spiritual progress does demand, at some stage, that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants." - Mahatma Gandhi.
• "To become vegetarian is to step into the stream which leads to nirvana." - Buddha.
• "Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals." - Theodor Adorno
• "Meat is for beasts to feed on." - Ovid
• "Now I can look at you in peace; I don`t eat you anymore." - Franz Kafka (quoted by Max Brod in Franz Kafka: A Biography)
• "Cruelty is cruelty, whether it’s cruelty to children, to the elderly, to dogs and cats, or to chickens." - Russell Simmons
• " It seems obvious to me that a Christ-child who is depicted in the scriptures as being born in the stable, surrounded by animals, is not meant to be the figurehead of a Great Slaughter and a feast of gluttony and self indulgence. " – Lady Dowding
• "Yes, I am a vegetarian. I find the thought of stuffing fragments of corpses down my throat quite repulsive, and I am amazed that so many people do it every day. " - J. M. Coetzee
• "The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men." - Alice Walker.
• "If you can justify killing to eat meat, you can justify the conditions of the ghetto. I cannot justify either one." - Dick Gregory.
• "Once people spend time with farm animals in a loving way ... a pig or cow or a little chicken or a turkey, they might find they relate with them the same way they relate with dogs and cats. People don't really think of them that way because they're on the plate. Why should they be food when other animals are pets? I would never eat my doggies." - Alicia Silverstone
• "Man could live on vegetables alone. However the whole of nature is not enough to satisfy his intemperance and the inconsistent variety of his appetite. Man by himself consumes and devours more meat than all the other animals together and not out of necessity but as a form of abuse. " – Count Buffon
• "Eating animals as food is not far away from athropophagy and cannibalism.” – Alexander von Humbold
• "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian." - Paul McCartney
• "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." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
• "If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men." - St. Francis of Assisi
• "If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because ...its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling-killing." - Leo Tolstoy
• "No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does." - Henry David Thoreau
• "The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable." - Thomas More
• "Those who believe that the slaughtering of animal for food and goods are flawed in their thinking. That is, the belief that the natural order, the order that animals eat animals, is immoral in anyway is a justification of the lifestyle and opinions of another." - Jared Miller, research on human nature.

[edit] Environmental

• "Those 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 elsewhere, reduce pollution, save water and energy, and cease contributing to the clearing of forests. When nonvegetarians 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." - Peter Singer, Animal Liberation
• "There's so many animals, there's not enough land anymore and everything's swamped with pesticides and fertilizers... It's destroying just about everything - topsoil, wildlife, water, birds. If everyone went veggie we'd need only about half the amount of land and we could have real forests and wild places again…. Animals use up huge amounts of water and there are billions of them. You can feed ten times the number of people on the food they give to animals… If you can feed ten times the number of people by not passing food through animals first and then killing them. That's got to make people think… It’s sucking in the world's supplies of grain and soya which are needed for people. It's costing lives. That's why we've got to get our message out there." – Paul McCartney, PETA interview
• "Yet many Americans who have reluctantly given up their gas-guzzling cars would never think of questioning the resource costs of their grain-fed-meat diet. So let me try to give you some sense of the enormity of the resources flowing into livestock production in the United States. The consequences of a grain-fed-meat diet may be as severe as those of a nation of Cadillac drivers." – Frances Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet
• "For every 16 pounds of grain and soy fed to beef cattle in the United States we only get 1 pound back in meat on our plates. The other 15 pounds are inaccessible to us, either used by the animal to produce energy or to make some part of its own body that we do not eat (like hair or bones) or excreted." – Frances Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet
• "Were the belief one day to become general that man could dispense with animal food, there would ensue not only a great economic revolution--for a bullock, to produce one pound of meat, consumes more than a hundred of provender--but a moral improvement as well, not less important and certainly more sincere and more lasting than might follow a second appearance on the earth of the Envoy of the Father, come to remedy the errors and omissions of his former pilgrimage.." – Maurice Maeterlick, The Buried Temple, III The kingdom of Matter, 5
• "I do not mean here absolute want of food, but want of healthful nutriment. How to provide good and plentiful food is, therefore, a most important question of the day. On the general principles the raising of cattle as a means of providing food is objectionable, because, in the sense interpreted above, it must undoubtedly tend to the addition of mass of a "smaller velocity." – Nikola Tesla, The Problem of Increasing Human Energy, Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1900
• "Political economists tell us that the produce of an acre of land in wheat, corn, potatoes, and other vegetables, and in fruits, will sustain animal life sixteen times as long as when the produce of the same acre is converted into flesh, by feeding and fattening animals upon it." – William A. Alcott, Vegetable Diet, New York: Fowlers & Wells, 1848, pp. 263-265
• "Life is full of choices, and many years ago, I chose to become a vegetarian, and it was one of the best choices I’ve ever made. " – Forest Whitaker, in a video for PETA
• ” The same amount of land used to graze and feed cattle could feed ten people, if however we cultivated it with lentils, kidney beans or peas it could feed a hundred people....The Orinoco basin can produce sufficient bananas to feed the whole of mankind comfortably. " – Alexander von Humbold

[edit] Anti-vegetarian quotes

• "I'm a postmodern vegetarian - I eat meat ironically." ~ Bill Bailey (Part Troll)
• Vegetarian: old Indian word for "lousy hunter." - Bumper sticker
• "Behold the Venus flytrap, the complete answer to the philosophy of vegetarianism" - Tom Edwards
• "Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self righteousness." - Robert Hutchinson
• "Have you just started that meal or are you just finishing it?" - Winston Churchill to vegetarian cabinet minister Sir Stafford Cripps as they ate a meal together.
• "If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?" - John Cleese
• "For every animal you don't eat, I'm going to eat three." - Maddox
• "You think you're saving the world by eating a tofu-burger and sticking to a diet of grains and berries? Well here's something that not many vegetarians know (or care to acknowledge): every year millions of animals are killed by wheat and soy bean combines during harvesting season... WHEAT IS MURDER." - Maddox