quotations about vegetarianism
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
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
The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled.
MARY MIDGLEY
Animals and Why They Matter
I was born into a family of carnivores, and I married into a family of carnivores -- I know through experience that the concept of vegetarianism is difficult to comprehend in meat-and-potatoes country.
MYCHEL MATTHEWS
"Eating veggies in meat-and-potatoes country", Twin Falls Times-News, April 4, 2017
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
It is a cruel folly to offer up to ostentation so many lives of creatures, as make up the state of our treats; as it is a prodigal one to spend more in sauce than in meat.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
attributed, Main Street Vegan
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
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
Thanksgiving dinner's sad and thankless.
Christmas dinner's dark and blue.
When you stop and try to see it
From the turkey's point of view.
SHEL SILVERSTEIN
"Point of View", Vegetarian Times, November 1982
Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.
SIR ROBERT HUTCHISON
attributed, Wordsworth Book of Humorous Quotations
Refrain at all times from such foods as cannot be procured without violence and oppression.
THOMAS TRYON
attributed, Humanimal
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
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
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
I tell vegetarians, "Hey, vegetables are living things too. They're just easier to catch."
KEVIN BRENNAN
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
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
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
Vegetarianism -- You are what you eat, and who wants to be a lettuce?
PETER BURNS
attributed, The Book of Poisonous Quotes
The vegetarian is the only living creature who belongs to the vegetable kingdom.
EVEN ESAR
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