VEGETARIANISM QUOTES
quotations about vegetarianism
How can one, who eats the flesh of others to swell his flesh, show compassion?
TIRUVALLUVAR
Tirukkural
When you adopt a vegan diet we make a connection, you don't go back, it is not a diet, it is a lifestyle.
FREELEE FRUGIVORE
Go Fruit Yourself
With lentils, tomatoes and rice, olives and nuts and bread, Why does a man care to gnaw a slice of something bleeding and dead?
HENRY BAILEY STEVENS
Rhymes for Meat-Eaters
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Notebooks
Fundamental Christian values include preserving one's own health, feeding the hungry, preventing animal abuse, and protecting the environment. Vegetarianism effectively promotes these values.
STEPHEN R. KAUFMAN
Good News for All Creation
Though it might be preferable, it is difficult to ponder vegetarianism without ever taking into account and therefore taking to task carnivorism. If boldly outspoken vegetarians become obnoxious, and if carnivores become offended, the losses of social acceptance for the former and of shaky complacency for the latter are small costs to exchange for an animal's only life.
MARK MATHEW BRAUNSTEIN
Radical Vegetarianism
We must recognize that it is ecological suicide for us to endeavour to maintain a meat based agriculture and a primary carnivorous diet.
MICHAEL W. FOX
Inhumane Society
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
attributed, Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing
Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.
FRANZ KAFKA
attributed, Three Hundred and Sixty-five Good Reasons to be a Vegetarian
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
attributed, Food As Medicine
The Animals, you say, were "sent" For man's free use and nutriment. Pray, then, inform me, and be candid, Why came they aeons before man did, To spend long centuries on earth Awaiting their Devourer's birth? Those ill-timed chattels, sent from Heaven, Were, sure, the maddest gift e'er given -- "Sent" for man's use (can man believe it?) When there was no man to receive it!
HENRY STEPHENS SALT
The Sending of the Animals
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.
PAUL MCCARTNEY
attributed, The Vegetarian Manifesto
In the last fifteen years, I have seen vegetarianism go from fringe to fashion to fact of life because it's a healthy and worthy way to live. The hippie connotation, which kept many people away, is a thing of the past. Today the American vegetarian is not just the health nut, it's the stay-at-home mom, the computer engineer, the veterinarian, the nurse, the store clerk, the neighbor across the street, and the teenager next door. They are familiar, individuals, and students. They live in urban areas and in suburbia, and together they represent 16 million people. You can see how health-conscious our culture has become just by taking a trip to the local grocery store where the words "natural," "organic," and "meatless" jump out at you in every aisle.
KATHY FARRELL-KINGSLEY
The Big Book of Vegetarian
The destruction of animals for food, in its details and tendencies, involves so much cruelty as to cause every reflecting individual -- not destitute of the ordinary sensibilities of nature -- to shudder.
WILLIAM A. ALCOTT
Vegetable Diet
A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The Star, April 5, 1890
Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground--everything that has the breath of life in it--I give every green plant for food."
BIBLE
Genesis 1:29-30
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
Walden
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 MAETERLINCK
The Buried Temple
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
attributed, Sinfully Vegan
Give up animal foods for two months, or even for a week, and I promise you will look and feel better, and you'll want to do it forever!
ALICIA SILVERSTONE
Animal Times, spring 2008