quotations about vegetarianism
Vegetarians are preyed upon by those that are not.
RICHARD FORTEY
Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth
I refuse to eat animals because I cannot nourish myself by the sufferings and by the death of other creatures.
EDGAR KUPFER-KOBERWITZ
Animals, My Brethren
You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Fate", Essays and Lectures
Those who eat flesh are but eating grains and vegetables at second hand; for the animal receives from these things the nutrition that produces growth. The life that was in the grains and the vegetables passes into the eater. We receive it by eating the flesh of the animal. How much better to get it direct by eating the food that God provided for our use!
ELLEN WHITE
Health and Happiness
From a purely outsider's point of view, vegetarians are a confusing lot. I have vegetarian friends who eat fish. I have vegetarian friends who eschew beef bouillon but who eat chicken. I have vegetarian friends (not many) who become indignant when it becomes clear I do not appreciate the purity of their diet: they do not drink milk, eat cheese, eggs or bird's nests, and only wear the hides of freshly slaughtered polyesters.
CHERYL PECK
Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs
Anyone who lives in the fantasy world that vegetarianism is taking over needs to give their head a shake, meat lovers are ever increasing their consumption. U.S. Beef Production is projected to be 26.564 billion pounds in 2017, up 2.8 billion pounds from 2015.
JIM LONG
"Pork Commentary: US -- No Shortage of Meat Protein", The Pig Site, April 25, 2017
You're thinking I'm one of those wise-ass California vegetarians who is going to tell you that eating a few strips of bacon is bad for your health. I'm not. I say its a free country and you should be able to kill yourself at any rate you choose, as long as your cold dead body is not blocking my driveway.
SCOTT ADAMS
Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!
Actually, when we really think about it, we are all "grim reapers," inhabiting a planet where killing is the law. The big fish gobbles up the little fish, and where do all those hamburgers come from? Animals give their lives for us, and for each other, as the tiger eats the gazelle. Even vegetarians are killers though they might fool themselves into thinking they are not. Read The Secret Life of Plants, by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, and empathize with the philodendron, hooked up to a polygraph machine. The polygraph went "wild" when a plant-destroying student walked by. The plants also responded to music and adapted to human wishes. Does that ripe, juicy tomato feel it when you take a bite? (By eating it, you are also practicing tomato "sprout" control by preventing its seeds from becoming future tomato plants.) To live on planet Earth, all must kill.
A. CARLSON WHALEN
Mother Earth and the Gene Machines
Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.
ANTHONY BOURDAIN
Kitchen Confidential
Poor little innocent creatures, if you were reasoning beings and could speak, how you would curse us! For we are the cause of your death, and what have you done to deserve it?
SAINT RICHARD OF CHICHESTER
attributed, Lives of the Saints
We were all brainwashed to believe that the only source of protein was meat and cheese.
SUZANNE HAVALA
101 Reasons why I'm a Vegetarian
Some people think the plant-based, whole-foods diet is extreme. Half a million people a year will have their chests opened up and a vein taken from their leg and sewn onto their coronary artery. Some people would call that extreme.
CALDWELL ESSELSTYN
Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease
I'm not a vegetarian, but I eat animals who are.
GROUCHO MARX
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
All normal people love meat. If I went to a barbecue and there was no meat, I'd say, "Yo Goober! Where's the meat?" I'm trying to impress people here, Lisa. You don't win friends with salad.
HOMER SIMPSON
The Simpsons
Sooner or later, we'll all be on the menu.
ROD SERLING
"To Serve Man", The Twilight Zone
Were one to stop and think of what meat is, and what it was, it is doubtful if one could eat it. It is merely dead and decaying flesh -- flesh from the body of an animal.... Only by the fact that hey are covered up, and their true nature concealed by cooking, and basting, and pickling, and peppering and salting can we eat them at all. If we were natural carnivorous animals, we should delight in bloodshed and gore of all kind!... We should eat our flesh warm and quivering -- just as it comes from the cow!
HEREWARD CARRINGTON
The Natural Food for Man
First, how do you prove that mankind is invested with the right of killing them, and that brutes have been created for the purpose you assert them to be? Secondly, it is to be observed that the flesh of man himself possesses the same nourishing and palatable qualities? Are we then to become cannibals for that reason?
LEWIS GOMPERTZ
Moral Inquiries
The repugnance I have come to feel about eating such animals is an extension of what I would feel about eating my pet cat rather than the product of some calculation of quanta of suffering.
THOMAS WELLS
"The Incoherence of Peter Singer's Utilitarian Argument for Vegetarianism", ABC Online, October 25, 2016
Some people think vegetarianism is an extremist suppression of sensual passion. That is an obstacle.
ZHANG SI
"Using Vegetarianism to Put Animal Welfare on the Table", Sixth Tone, April 7, 2017
Nothing compares with a cafe that feels like home. But that kind of cafe can be tough to find when you're a vegetarian.
MYCHEL MATTHEWS
"Eating veggies in meat-and-potatoes country", Twin Falls Times-News, April 4, 2017