Vegetarianism Quotes

“Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“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

“You can judge a man's true character by the way he treats his fellow animals.”
― Paul McCartney

“I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.”
― Albert Schweitzer

“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”
― Paul McCartney

“Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.”
― Franz Kafka

“By eating meat we share the responsibility of climate change, the destruction of our forests, and the poisoning of our air and water. The simple act of becoming a vegetarian will make a difference in the health of our planet.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology

“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 A. Edison

“Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.”
― Albert Einstein

“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

“Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, the whole world would be vegetarian.”
― Linda McCartney, Linda's Kitchen: Simple and Inspiring Recipes for Meals Without Meat

“I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer

“You're thinking I'm one of those wise-ass California vegetarians who is going to tell you that eating a few strips of bacon is bad for your health. I'm not. I say its a free country and you should be able to kill yourself at any rate you choose, as long as your cold dead body is not blocking my driveway.”
― Scott Adams

“Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.”
― Albert Schweitzer

“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I can't count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.)”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“I made the choice to be vegan because I will not eat (or wear, or use) anything that could have an emotional response to its death or captivity. I can well imagine what that must feel like for our non-human friends - the fear, the terror, the pain - and I will not cause such suffering to a fellow living being.”
― Rai Aren

“A human body in no way resembles those that were born for ravenousness; it hath no hawk’s bill, no sharp talon, no roughness of teeth, no such strength of stomach or heat of digestion, as can be sufficient to convert or alter such heavy and fleshy fare. But if you will contend that you were born to an inclination to such food as you have now a mind to eat, do you then yourself kill what you would eat. But do it yourself, without the help of a chopping-knife, mallet or axe, as wolves, bears, and lions do, who kill and eat at once. Rend an ox with thy teeth, worry a hog with thy mouth, tear a lamb or a hare in pieces, and fall on and eat it alive as they do. But if thou had rather stay until what thou eat is to become dead, and if thou art loath to force a soul out of its body, why then dost thou against nature eat an animate thing? There is nobody that is willing to eat even a lifeless and a dead thing even as it is; so they boil it, and roast it, and alter it by fire and medicines, as it were, changing and quenching the slaughtered gore with thousands of sweet sauces, that the palate being thereby deceived may admit of such uncouth fare.”
― Plutarch

“You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car.”
― Harvey Diamond

“The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chided for my singularity, but, with this lighter repast, I made the greater progress, for greater clearness of head and quicker comprehension. Flesh eating is unprovoked murder.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Ethically they had arrived at the conclusion that man's supremacy over lower animals meant not that the former should prey upon the latter, but that the higher should protect the lower, and that there should be mutual aid between the two as between man and man. They had also brought out the truth that man eats not for enjoyment but to live.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“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 Barnard