Vegetarianism quotes
188 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"Alas, what wickedness to swallow flesh into our own flesh, to fatten our greedy bodies by cramming in other bodies, to have one living creature fed by the death of another!"
"Vegetarian food leaves a deep impression on our nature. If the whole world adopts vegetarianism, it can change the destiny of humankind."
"Flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to moral feeling: 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." "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields."
"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
"I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It's like...you're just eating misery. You're eating a bitter life."
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"Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research."
"Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism."
"I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further."
"It almost seems to me that man was not born to be a carnivore."
"It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust."
"Every time we sit down to eat, we make a choice. Please choose vegetarianism. Do it for animals. Do it for the environment and do it for your health."
"Awareness is bad for the meat business. Conscience is bad for the meat business. Sensitivity to life is bad for the meat business. DENIAL, however, the meat business finds indispensable."
"The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit."
"I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet."
"I think there's something odd about eating another living anything."
"If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty."
"Food affects the mind. For the practice of any kind of yoga, vegetarianism is absolutely necessary since it makes the mind more pure and harmonious."
"He who has renounced all violence towards all living beings, weak or strong, who neither kills nor causes others to kill - him I do call a holy man."
"He who, seeking his own happiness, punishes or kills beings who also long for happiness, will not find happiness after his death."
"My body will not be a tomb for other creatures."
"To become vegetarian is to step into the stream which leads to nirvana."
"Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled."
"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..."
"We are the living graves of murdered beasts."
"Man is the only animal that can be bored."
