(This may seem a bit preachy as it is clearly a one sided collection of quotes. Nonetheless, it was intended only as some food for thought for those who question why one might become a vegetarian. If you're truly interested, I suggest reading Diet for a New America which goes well beyond the "mere" questions of ethics primarily spoken to in these quotes).
"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."
- Gandhi -
"Nothing will benefit human health
and increase chances for survival of life on earth as the
evolution to a vegetarian diet."
- Albert Einstein -
"If man wants freedom why
keep birds and animals in cages? Truly man is the king of beasts,
for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others.
We are burial places! I have since an early age abjured the use
of meat."
- Leonardo-da-Vinci -
"Flesh eating is simply
immoral, as it involves the performance of an act, which is
contrary to moral feeling: killing. By killing, man suppresses in
himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity, that of
sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself and by
violating his own feelings becomes cruel."
- Leo Tolstoy -
"Flesh eating is unprovoked
murder."
- Benjamin Franklin -
"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."
- Henry David Thoreau -
"Animals are my friends...and
I don't eat my friends."
- George Bernard Shaw -
"Plant life instead of animal
food is the keystone of regeneration. Jesus used bread instead of
flesh and wine in place of blood at the Lord's Supper."
- German Composer Richard Wagner (1813) -
"If you have men who will
exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and
pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow
men."
- St. Francis of Assisi -
"For as long as men massacre
animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds
of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."
- Pythagoras -
"...Ethics has not only to do
with mankind but with the animal creation as well. This is
witnessed in the purpose of St. Francis of Assisi. Thus we shall
arrive that ethics is reverence for all life. This is the ethic
of love widened universally. It is the ethic of Jesus now
recognized as a necessity of thought...Only a universal ethic,
which embraces every living creature can put us in touch with the
universe and the will which is there manifest..."
- Albert Schweitzer -
"There is just no reason why
animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there
are so many substitutes. Man can live without meat."
- The Dalai Lama -
It is just like man's vanity and
impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his
dull perceptions.
- Mark Twain -
Never doubt that a small group of
thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it
is the only thing that ever does.
- Margaret Mead -
"We consume the carcasses of
creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own,
and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear."
- Robert Louis Stevenson -
"People often say that humans
have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for
continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not
try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has
also been done since the earliest of times."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer -
"To a man whose mind is free
there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of
animals than in the suffering of man. For with the latter it is
at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who
causes it is a criminal. But thousands (now billions) of animals
are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If
any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And
that is the unpardonable crime."
- Romain Rolland--Nobel 1915 -
"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 -
"You have just dined, and
however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the
graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson -
"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."
- Henry David Thoreau -
"Until he extends his circle
of compassion to all living things, man will not himself find
peace."
- Dr. Albert Schweitzer--Nobel 1952 -
"To become vegetarian is to
step into the stream which leads to nirvana."
- Buddha -
"40 years ago on the set of
Gunsmoke I read the book The Holy Science. Since then I have not
eaten meat."
- Dennis Weaver -
"Since visiting the abbatoirs
of S. France I have stopped eating meat."
- Vincent Van Gogh (in a letter to his brother Theodore) -
"The most energetic workers I
have encountered in my world travels are the vegetarian miners of
Chile."
- Charles Darwin -
"I feel very deeply about
vegetarianism and the animal kingdom. It was my dog Boycott who
led me to question to right of humans to eat other sentient
beings."
- Cesar Chavez (pacifist head of the United Farm Workers) -
"Now I can look at you in
peace; I don't eat you anymore." (to the fishes in his
aquarium)
- Franz Kafka -
"Nonviolence is not just
abstention from war, fighting, or animal flesh. It is abstention
from negative thoughts and negative speech."
- Nathaniel Altman -
"Love animals: God has given
them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble
their joy, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their
happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride
yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you,
with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it,
and leave the traces of your foulness after you-alas, it is true
of almost every one of us!"
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
"The worst sin towards our
fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to
them, that's the essence of inhumanity."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer -
"We pray on Sundays that we
may have light/To guide our footsteps on the path we tread;/We
are sick of war, we don't want to fight,/And yet we gorge
ourselves upon the dead."
- George Bernard Shaw -
"It is man's sympathy with
all creatures that first makes him truly a man."
- Dr. Albert Schweitzer--Nobel 1952 -
"Vegetarian food leaves a
deep impression on our nature. If the whole world adopts
vegetarianism, it can change the destiny of humankind."
- Albert Einstein -
"Our task must be to free
ourselves... widening our circle of compassion to embrace all
living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."
- Albert Einstein -
"The greatness of a nation
and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are
treated."
- Gandhi -
If slaughterhouses had glass walls,
everyone would be a vegetarian.
- Paul McCartney -
If we cut up beasts simply because
they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in
the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up
imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalist for the same reasons.
- C. S. Lewis -
"Among the noblest in the
land - Though man may count himself the least - That man I honor
and revere, Who without favor, without fear, In the great city
dares to stand, The friend of every friendless beast."
-Henry W. Longfellow -
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 -
In 1997 alone 36.3 million cattle,
1.58 million veal calves, 92.0 million pigs, 3.91 million sheep
and lamb, 22.0 million ducks, 290.2 million turkeys, and 7,903.5
million chickens were slaughtered in the US. 25 million animals
were killed each day OR 293 per second.
- National Agricultural Statistics Service -
To produce a single pound of meat
takes an average of 2,500 gallons of water-as much as a typical
family uses for all its combined household purposes in a month.
- John Robbins: Diet for A New America -
Meat and other animal products (dairy and eggs) accumulate "fat soluble toxins" (which are the toxins we are most concerned with. Water-soluble toxin are excreted easily.) If you wish to detoxify, you must avoid commercial meat and animal products! (In his "Diet for a New America" John Robbins quotes a study that found the breast milk of mothers eating a Standard American Diet (SAD) contained one hundred times more pesticides than that found in the milk of vegetarians, and indeed this milk is not really fit to ingest.) Fat-soluble toxins accumulate up the food chain.
Dr. Hagiwara quotes a Japanese dietary ecologist who, like Robbins, warns the only way to avoid a worldwide food crisis will be to improve the efficiency of food production by revamping our meat-based system of agriculture. As a comparison, he notes that one cow requires grass from ten acres of land, and for X amount of time, this one cow will feed 30 people. "The arithmetic of this waste is stunning... During the same time that that cow is sustaining those 30 lives, the protein which could be harvested directly from barley leaves grown on that ten acres of land would sustain 300 lives."