Vegetarian
Quotes
"If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian." ~ Paul McCartney
"Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep,
and nothing happens but decay." ~ George Bernard Shaw
"One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;" and so he
religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind
his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle." ~ Henry David Thoreau
"How can you eat anything with eyes?" ~ Will Kellogg
"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all
automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of "real food for real people" you'd better live real close to a real
good hospital." ~ Neal Barnard
"Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends." ~ George Bernard Shaw
"If you knew how meat was made, you'd probably lose your lunch." ~ k.d. lang
"Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we
feed on babies, though not our own." ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
"Being a meat eater is really expensive, even if you don't count the cost of chemo." ~ Snargleplexon.com
"My situation is a solemn one. Life is offered to me on condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism.
My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry,
and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarfs in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow
creatures." ~ George Bernard Shaw
"I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens." ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer, quoted in You Said a
Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs
"Heart attacks... God's revenge for eating his little animal friends." ~ Author Unknown
"Recognize meat for what it really is: the antibiotic- and pesticide-laden corpse of a tortured animal." ~ Ingrid Newkirk
"I will not eat anything that walks, runs, skips, hops or crawls. God knows that I've crawled on occasion, and I'm glad that no
one ate me." ~ Alex Poulos
"We all love animals. Why do we call some 'pets' and others "dinner?" ~ k.d. lang
"I won't eat anything that has intelligent life, but I'd gladly eat a network executive or a politician." ~ Marty Feldman
"A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows." ~ George Bernard Shaw
"A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses." ~ George Bernard Shaw
Truely man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: we are burial places!
I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals
as they now look on the murder of men. ~ Leonardo da Vinci
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..." ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
"I venture to maintain that there are multitudes to whom the necessity of discharging the duties of a butcher would be so
inexpressibly painful and revolting, that if they could obtain a flesh diet on no other condition, they would relinquish it
forever. ~ W.E.H. Lecky
"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
"While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?" ~ George Bernard Shaw
"I just could not stand the idea of eating meat - I really do think that it has made me calmer.... People's general awareness is
getting much better, even down to buying a pint of milk: the fact that the calves are actually killed so that the milk doesn't go to
them but to us cannot really be right, and if you have seen a cow in a state of extreme distress because it cannot understand why its
calf isn't by, it can make you think a lot." ~ Kate Bush
"Thou shalt not kill" does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings; and this Commandment was inscribed
in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai. ~ Leo Tolstoy
"As soon as I realized that I didn't need meat to survive or to be in good health, I began to see how forlorn it all is. If only we
had a different mentality about the drama of the cowboy and the range and all the rest of it. It's a very romantic notion, an entrenched
part of American culture, but I've seen, for example, pigs waiting to be slaughtered, and their hysteria and panic was something I shall
never forget." ~ Cloris Leachman
"We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing that we do. Cruelty... is a fundamental sin, and
admits of no arguments or nice distinctions. If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, it protests against cruelty, is always
clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us - in fact, anyone who does not join in is dubbed a
crank." ~ Rabindranath Tagore
"Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what
state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth
tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived.
How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench?
How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal
wounds?" ~ Plutarch
"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, Queen Mab Notes
"To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake
of the human body." ~ Mahatma Gandhi
A veteran USDA meat inspector from Texas describes what he has seen: "Cattle dragged and choked... knocking 'em four, five, ten times. Every
now and then when they're stunned they come back to life, and they're up there agonizing. They're supposed to be re-stunned but sometimes they
aren't and they'll go through the skinning process alive. I've worked in four large [slaughterhouses] and a bunch of small ones. They're all
the same. If people were to see this, they'd probably feel really bad about it. But in a packing house everybody gets so used to it that it
doesn't mean anything." ~ Slaughterhouse 1997
"I eat everything that nature voluntarily gives: fruits, vegetables, and the products of plants. But I ask you to spare me what animals are
forced to surrender: meat, milk, and cheese." ~ Author Unknown (Thanks, Eric)
Think of me tonite
For that which you savor
Did it give you something real,
or could you taste the pain of my death in its flavor?
~ Wayne K. Tolson, from "Food Forethought"
"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
"Vegans plant goodwill." ~ Terri Guillemets
"I do not like eating meat because I have seen lambs and pigs killed. I saw and felt their pain. They felt the approaching death. I could not
bear it. I cried like a child. I ran up a hill and could not breathe. I felt that I was choking. I felt the death of the lamb." ~ Vaslav Nijinsky
"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, mathematician
"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
"To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. 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, author, Nobel Prize 1915
"If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth -- beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be
to other animals -- would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals?" ~ George Bernard Shaw, playwright, Nobel Prize 1925
"What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
~ Jeremy Bentham, philosopher
"In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they
victimize blindly and without a thought." ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer, author, Nobel Prize 1978
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
~ Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel Prize 1921
"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being." ~ Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President
"As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields." ~ Unknown
"What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the
benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty." ~ Leo Tolstoy author
"I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished."
~ Henry David Thoreau, author
"Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research." ~ George Bernard Shaw
"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
"To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being." ~ Mahatma Gandhi, statesman and philosopher
"I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it
inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without
looking further." ~ Mark Twain, author
"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings,
we are still savages." ~ Thomas Edison, inventor