quotations about vegetarianism
I advance no exaggerated or fanciful claim for Vegetarianism. It is not, as some have asserted, a "panacea" for human ills; it is something much more rational -- an essential part of the modern humanitarian movement, which can make no true progress without it. Vegetarianism is the diet of the future, as flesh-food is the diet of the past.
HENRY S. SALT
"The Humanities of Diet", Ethical Vegetarianism
Were all members of the animal kingdom, Leave your brothers and sisters in the sea.
PRINCE
"Animal Kingdom", The Truth
Vegetarianism -- You are what you eat, and who wants to be a lettuce?
PETER BURNS
attributed, The Book of Poisonous Quotes
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 D. BARNARD
attributed, Humanimal
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
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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.
LEO TOLSTOY
On Civil Disobedience
Only by discarding a diet based on rotting corpses could men become sane.
JACK LINDSAY
Fanfrolico and After
Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
Last Chance to See
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
A Cornell undergraduate and his academic adviser have come up with a new way to think about vegetarians. And it's not just about what's on their plates. The new theory proposes that vegetarianism is an identity, not just a series of decisions about what to eat. Choosing a plant-based diet -- and a wide variety of ways that people think, feel and behave in relation to that choice -- provides vegetarians with a sense of self, the researchers said, just as race, religion, gender or sexual orientation can provide an identity for others.
SUSAN KELLEY
"What makes a vegetarian? It's not what's on the plate", Cornell Chronicle, April 20, 2017
The meat industry is one of the most destructive ecological industries on the planet. The raising and slaughtering of pigs, cows, sheep, turkeys and chickens not only utilizes vast areas of land and vast quantities of water, but it is a greater contributor to greenhouse gas emissions than the automobile industry.
PAUL WATSON
A Very Inconvenient Truth
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
Vegetables contain more nutriment than an equal amount of dead flesh. This will sound a surprising and incredible statement to many people, because they have been brought up to believe that they cannot exist unless they defile themselves with flesh, and this delusion is so widely spread that it is difficult to awaken the average man from it.
C. W. LEADBEATER
Vegetarianism and Occultism
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
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
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 his system 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
Walden
Men think it right to eat animals, because they are led to believe that God sanctions it. This is untrue. No matter in what books it may be written that it is not sinful to slay animals and to eat them, it is more clearly written in the heart of man than in any books that animals are to be pitied and should not be slain any more than human beings. We all know this if we do not choke the voice of our conscience.
LEO TOLSTOY
The Pathway of Life: Teaching Love and Wisdom
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
attributed, Meaty Vegan Blog
Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
BIBLE
Genesis 1:29
Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Eating Animals