quotations about vegetarianism
Many refined people will not kill a fly, but eat an ox.
ISAAC LEIB PERETZ
Taanis Gedanken
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
The Ten Trusts
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
I was a vegetarian until I started leaning toward the sunlight.
RITA RUDNER
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
I see a vegetarian mayor, not preaching to the masses, but living as a shining example that vegetarians are interested in building a just and thriving city capable of feeding all of its citizens in a sustainable and healthy manner.
DAVID ALEXANDER
"The tofu revolution: Toronto's vegetarians from 1945 to 2009 and beyond", The Edible City
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
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
The vegetarian is the only living creature who belongs to the vegetable kingdom.
EVEN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
attributed, Food and Drink: A Book of Quotations
Only by discarding a diet based on rotting corpses could men become sane.
JACK LINDSAY
Fanfrolico and After
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
Sooner or later, we'll all be on the menu.
ROD SERLING
"To Serve Man", The Twilight Zone
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
If we each had to butcher our own meat, there would be a great increase in the number of vegetarians.
ERNEST HOWARD CROSBY
Tolstoy and His Message
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-free lobby has been rebranding quietly for a while. Certainly, all but the most entrenched dinosaurs have forsworn the prejudice that all vegans and vegetarians are a feeble cohort of joyless neurotics, trussed up in hemp. Today, vegetarians especially are a mainstream minority: they've smartened up their menus and their look. Indeed, perhaps you would even consider going out with one.
PHOEBE LOCKHURST
"Vegetarian London: the best new dishes", Evening Standard, April 5, 2017
When a man of normal habits is ill, everyone hastens to assure him that he is going to recover. When a vegetarian is ill (which fortunately very seldom happens), everyone assures him that he is going to die, and that they told him so, and that it serves him right. They implore him to take at least a little gravy, so as to give himself a chance of lasting out the night.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Saturday Review, May 21, 1898
We manage to swallow flesh, only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing we do.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Glimpses of Bengal Letters
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
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