Vegetarian Quotations

Food for Thought for the Open-Minded

Krishna (ultimate, highest and original manifestation of the Godhead) [Bhagavad-gita 10:5]

"Avoiding harm to all creatures... this is true knowledge. All else is ignorance." — Krishna (ultimate, highest and original manifestation of the Godhead) [Bhagavad-gita 13:8]

"Nonviolence... and mercy to all life forms are the goals of godly persons who are endowed with My nature." — Krishna (ultimate, highest and original manifestation of the Godhead) [Bhagavad-gita 16:1]

"Do not harm any living creature, but be compassionate and gentle; show good will to all." — Krishna (ultimate, highest and original manifestation of the Godhead)

"Avoiding harm... and working towards the happiness of all living creatures is the duty of everyone." — Krishna (ultimate, highest and original manifestation of the Godhead) [Bhagavata Purana 11:17:21]

"He alone who truly sees Me in every creature... seeing Me everywhere, does not harm himself or others." — Krishna (ultimate, highest and original manifestation of the Godhead)

"When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of God we call him a sportsman." — Joseph Wood Krutch (American writer, critic, and naturalist)

L

"We all love animals. Why do we call some 'pets' and others 'dinner?'" — k.d. lang‡ (Canadian pop and country singer-songwriter)

"If you knew how meat was made, you'd probably lose your lunch." — k.d. lang‡ (Canadian pop and country singer-songwriter)

"As soon as I realized that I didn't need meat to survive or to be in good health, I began to see how forlorn it all is. If only we had a different mentality about the drama of the cowboy and the range and all the rest of it. It's a very romantic notion, an entrenched part of American culture, but I've seen, for example, pigs waiting to be slaughtered, and their hysteria and panic was something I shall never forget." — Cloris Leachman† (American actress of stage, film and television)

"I venture to maintain that there are multitudes to whom the necessity of discharging the duties of a butcher would be so inexpressibly painful and revolting, that if they could obtain a flesh diet on no other condition, they would relinquish it forever." — W. E. H. Lecky (Irish historian and publicist)

"When I was twelve, I went hunting with my father and we shot a bird. He was laying there and something struck me. Why do we call this fun to kill this creature [who] was as happy as I was when I woke up this morning." — Marv Levy (American and Canadian Football coach and front office executive)

"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 capitalists for the same reasons." — C. S. Lewis (Irish-born British novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist)

"I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it." — Abraham Lincoln (16th President of the United States)

M

"Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are like us.' Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are not like us.' Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction." — Charles R. Magel

"All beings are fond of themselves, they like pleasure, they hate pain, they shun destruction, they like life and want to live long. To all, life is dear; hence their life should be protected." — Mahavira (the last Tirthankara)

"He who permits [the slaughter of an animal], he who cuts it up, he who kills it, he who buys or sells [meat], he who cooks it, he who serves it up, and he who eats it, [must be considered as] the slayers of the animal." — Manu (progenitor of mankind)

"Meat can never be obtained without injury to living creatures, and injury to sentient beings is detrimental to [the attainment] of heavenly bliss; let him therefore shun [the use of] meat." — Manu (progenitor of mankind)

"If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian." — Paul McCartney (English singer-songwriter, poet, composer, multi-instrumentalist, entrepreneur, record and film producer, painter, and animal rights and peace activist)

"Is any killing humane? Let us recognize the fact that there is no humane killing. Killing is inhuman. It is the last word in humanity." — K. Sankara Menon

"Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar." — Bradley Millar

N

"One should treat animals such as deer, camels, asses, monkeys, mice, snakes, birds and flies exactly like one's own son. How little difference there actually is between children and these innocent animals." — Narada Muni (Divine sage) [Bhagavata Purana 7:14:9]

"It is much more exciting and difficult to 'shoot' with a camera than with a gun and I wish that more and more adventurous young men would give up the gun in favour of the camera." — Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (Indian statesman who was the first, and has been the longest-serving prime minister of India)

"Recognize meat for what it really is: the antibiotic- and pesticide-laden corpse of a tortured animal." — Ingrid Newkirk (British-born animal rights activist, author, and president and co-founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)

"I do not like eating meat because I have seen lambs and pigs killed. I saw and felt their pain. They felt the approaching death. I could not bear it. I cried like a child. I ran up a hill and could not breathe. I felt that I was choking. I felt the death of the lamb." — Vaslav Nijinsky (Russian ballet dancer and choreographer of Polish descent)

"Hunting involves many terrible Karmic aspects. In murdering a father or mother animal, very likely some young creatures are made orphans, left unprotected in the wilderness. And, often, clumsy hunters only succeed in wounding the creatures; thus escaping immediate destruction, the maimed animals may roam in agony for days upon days, until Death finally supervenes. More misery in trapping: caught in the wicked traps, many creatures actually gnaw off their own paws, to gain the precious freedom." — Swami Noshervanji

O

"We have found ways never before imagined to torture and maim animals and make their lives a misery, almost a living hell for many thousands locked in cages in the multinational food industry, in government establishments devoted to finding the newest and best weapons for humans to kill each other, and in laboratories where often the most important thing being researched is the latest in lipstick or face cream." — David Oderberg (Professor of Philosophy at Oxford)

P

"Ahimsa paramo dharma (non-violence is the highest duty)" — Padma Purana

"Of all the gifts only one is supreme.
It is the freedom from fear
For all of the creatures of this universe.
There is no other gift greater than this."
— Padma Purana

"It is my opinion that hunting for sport is hardly a sport in any just sense. The contestants are not evenly matched. If the hunted were equipped with the same powerful and often expensive weapons as the two-legged hunter, and could be taught to use them, then hunting might be more sportsmanlike. But the animals are not likely to be consulted in matter or given such a break." — Saul K. Padover

"As to my vegetarism, I do the best I can. I have never refrained from doing something I believed was right because I could not do it perfectly. I do not believe it is right for me to ask someone else to do my 'dirty work' for me. I would not kill a creature, and I would not ask someone else to kill it for me, so I will not eat the flesh of the creature." — Peace Pilgrim (American pacifist, vegetarian, and peace activist)

"Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?" — Plutarch (Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist)

"If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you want to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources, unaided by cleaver or cudgel or any kind of ax." — Plutarch (Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist)

"I will not eat anything that walks, runs, skips, hops or crawls. God knows that I've crawled on occasion, and I'm glad that no one ate me." — Alex Poulos

"Torturing animals to prolong human life has separated science from the most important thing that life has produced - the human conscience." — John Cowper Powys (British writer, lecturer, and philosopher)

"As long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long men massacre animals, they will kill each other." — Pythagoras (Ionian Greek philosopher and founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism)

Q

R

"Animals do not 'give' their life to us, as the sugar-coated lie would have it. No, we take their lives. They struggle and fight to the last breath, just as we would do if we were in their place." — John Robbins (American author, and a pioneer popularizing the linkages between agriculture, health and the environment)

"Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they're in the game." — Paul Rodriguez (Mexican-born American stand-up comedian and actor)

S

"Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to humankind." — Albert Schweitzer* (German-French theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician)

"Not until we extend the circle of our compassion to include all living things, shall we ourselves know peace." — Albert Schweitzer* (German-French theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician)

"The thinking [person] must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo." — Albert Schweitzer* (German-French theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician)

"We have no right to inflict suffering and death on another living creature unless there is some unavoidable necessity for it, and that we ought all of us feel what a horrible thing it is to cause suffering and death out of mere thoughtlessness. And this conviction has influenced me only more and more strongly with time. I have grown more and more certain that at the bottom of our heart we all think this, and that we fail to acknowledge it and to carry our belief into practice chiefly as sentimentalists, though partly also because we allow our best feelings to get blunted. But I vowed that I would never let my feelings get blunted, and that I would never be afraid of the reproach of sentimentalism." — Albert Schweitzer* (German-French theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician)

"To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will-to-life. At the same time the man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life as his own. He accepts as being good: to preserve life, to raise to its highest value life which is capable of development; and as being evil: to destroy life, to injure life, to repress life which is capable of development. This is the absolute, fundamental principle of the moral, and it is a necessity of thought." — Albert Schweitzer* (German-French theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician)

"And when I think of the suffering of the creatures in our factory farms, laboratories, puppy mills, or of any animal neglected or mistreated by man, for me there is no more powerful question than to ask: 'What would the Good Shepherd think of this?'" — Matthew Scully (American author, journalist, and speechwriter)

"Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind's capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship... We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don't; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us." — Matthew Scully (American author, journalist, and speechwriter)

"Complaints about the smell of our factory farms, and only the smell, are the final insult... We notice these places, many of us, only when the odors reach our homes and new subdivisions, affecting our own quality of life. We create these animals for our profit and pleasure, playing with their genes, violating their dignity as living creatures, forcing them to lie and live in their own urine and excrement, turning pens into penitentiaries and frustrating their every desire except what is needed to keep them breathing and breeding. And then we complain about the smell." — Matthew Scully (American author, journalist, and speechwriter)

"Having granted some protections to some animals, we are constantly confronted with the logic of our own laws, troubled by perfectly rational connections between the random or 'wanton' acts of cruelty the law forbids and the systematic, institutional cruelties it still permits. If this animal is to be protected, why not his identical one, too?" — Matthew Scully (American author, journalist, and speechwriter)

"I know a 'crime against nature' when I see one. It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes, and no one has cringed at the sight of a soybean factory." — Matthew Scully (American author, journalist, and speechwriter)

"It's also worth recalling that people can agree on the same objectives for different reasons: A secular philosopher like Peter Singer can oppose factory farming because it's unethical by his theories of justice. An environmentalist can oppose factory farming because it's reckless stewardship. A conservative can oppose factory farming because it is destructive to small farmers and to the decent ethic of husbandry those farmers live by. A religious person can oppose factory farming because it is degrading to both man and animal — an offense to God." — Matthew Scully (American author, journalist, and speechwriter)

"The factory farm is an economic necessity, cuts costs for the consumer, unavoidable in the global economy, a fact of life, a way of life, a livelihood, blah blah blah, all this to justify an obvious moral evil so sickening and horrendous it would leave us ashen, producing goods now replaceable, and employing people who could be making those alternative products instead. All this so we can have our accustomed veal or lamb or fried chicken or pork chop or hot dog at the ballpark." — Matthew Scully (American author, journalist, and speechwriter)

"The standard vegetarian argument that the average person eats meat, and yet could not bear to see how it was produced, actually speaks well for the average person. Imagine a world in which most people enjoyed hearing and seeing the details." — Matthew Scully (American author, journalist, and speechwriter)

"When a man's love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity. When he lets a demanding palate make his moral choices, that is gluttony. When he ascribes the divine will to his own whims, that is pride. And when he gets angry at being reminded of animal suffering that his own daily choices might help avoid, that is moral cowardice." — Matthew Scully (American author, journalist, and speechwriter)

"'Calves are adorable,' as columnist David Plotz expressed it in Slate magazine, 'but veal is delicious. God gave man dominion over the beasts of the Earth (and) if any animal has economic utility, we should farm it.' Actually, if we are going to get pious about it, God gave us lots of things, and one of them is conscience. Veal, no matter what seasonings cover it, or what sanctimony defends it, does not carry the 'taste of elegance.' Veal carries, as Alice Walker observes, 'the taste of a bitter life.'" — Matthew Scully (American author, journalist, and speechwriter)

"If true, the Pythagorean principles as to abstain from flesh, foster innocence; if ill-founded they at least teach us frugality, and what loss have you in losing your cruelty? It merely deprives you of the food of lions and vultures…let us ask what is best - not what is customary. Let us love temperance - let us be just - let us refrain from bloodshed." — Seneca (Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist)

"... People may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to other animals as well as humans, it is all a sham." — Anna Sewell (British writer, best known as the author of the classic novel Black Beauty)

"Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends." — George Bernard Shaw* (Irish playwright)

"Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay." — George Bernard Shaw* (Irish playwright)

"While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?" — George Bernard Shaw* (Irish playwright)

"My situation is a solemn one. Life is offered to me on condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism. My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarfs in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures." — George Bernard Shaw* (Irish playwright)

"I do not want to make my stomach a graveyard of dead animals." — George Bernard Shaw* (Irish playwright)

"I look my age. It is the other people who look older than they are. What can you expect from people who eat corpses?" — George Bernard Shaw* (Irish playwright)

"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* (Irish playwright)

"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." — Percy Bysshe Shelley (major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language)

"I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens." — Isaac Bashevis Singer* (Polish-born Jewish American Nobel Prize-winning author and one of the leading figures in the Yiddish literary movement)

"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* (Polish-born Jewish American Nobel Prize-winning author and one of the leading figures in the Yiddish literary movement)

"Various philosophers and religious leaders tried to convince their disciples and followers that animals are nothing more than machines without a soul, without feelings. However, anyone who has ever lived with an animal — be it a dog, a bird, or even a mouse — knows that this theory is a brazen lie, invented to justify cruelty." — Isaac Bashevis Singer* (Polish-born Jewish American Nobel Prize-winning author and one of the leading figures in the Yiddish literary movement)

"We are all God's creatures — that we pray to God for mercy and justice while we continue to eat the flesh of animals that are slaughtered on our account is not consistent." — Isaac Bashevis Singer* (Polish-born Jewish American Nobel Prize-winning author and one of the leading figures in the Yiddish literary movement)

"It is easy to take a stand about a remote issue, but the specieist, like the racist, reveals his true nature when the issue comes nearer home. To protest about bullfighting in Spain or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat chickens that have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves that have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their hosues to blacks." — Peter Singer (Australian philosopher)

"Becoming a vegetarian is not merely a symbolic gesture. Nor is it an attempt to isolate oneself from the ugly realities of the world, to keep oneself pure and so without responsibility for the cruelty and carnage all around. Becoming a vegetarian is a highly practical and effective step one can take toward ending both the killing of nonhuman animals and the infliction of suffering on them." — Peter Singer (Australian philosopher)

"My mother thought it would make us feel better to know animals had no souls and thus their deaths were not to be taken seriously. But it didn't help and when I think of some of the animals I've known, I wonder. The only really 'soulful' eyes in the world belong to the dog or cat who sits on your lap or at your feet commiserating when you cry." — Liz Smith (American columnist)

"It is difficult to picture the great Creator conceiving of a program of one creature (which He has made) using another living creature for purposes of experimentation. There must be other, less cruel ways of obtaining knowledge." — Adlai Stevenson (American politician)

"Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own." — Robert Louis Stevenson (Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer)

"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 (Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer)

T

"We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing that we do. Cruelty... is a fundamental sin, and admits of no arguments or nice distinctions. If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, it protests against cruelty, is always clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us - in fact, anyone who does not join in is dubbed a crank." — Rabindranath Tagore* (Bengali polymath)

"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, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other...." — Henry David Thoreau (American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist)

"I have just been through the process of killing a cistudo for the sake of science; but I cannot excuse myself for this murder, and see that such actions are inconsistent with the poetic perception, however they may serve science, and will affect the quality of my observations. I pray that I may walk more innocently and serenely through nature. No reasoning whatever reconciles me to this act. It affects my day injuriously. I have lost some self-respect. I have a murderer's experience to a degree." — Henry David Thoreau American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist)

"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 himself 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 (American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist

"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 (widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists)

"'Thou shalt not kill' does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings; and this Commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai." — Leo Tolstoy (widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists)

"What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit for their cruelty." — Leo Tolstoy (widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists)

"Flesh-eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to moral feeling — killing." — Leo Tolstoy (widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists)

U

"I think, therefore I am... a vegetarian." — Author Unknown

"Heart attacks... God's revenge for eating his little animal friends." — Author Unknown

V

"You think you can stamp on that caterpillar? All right, you've done it. It wasn't difficult. And now, make the caterpillar again" — Lanza del Vasto (philosopher, poet, artist, and nonviolent activist)

"Modern civilization has gone astray: it thinks from the head, not the heart. Animals have become a victim of our 'researches' in schools and colleges. We sacrifice animals by testing drugs on them and inoculating them with disease. We inflict tortures on them in order to demonstrate to our students lessons in the laboratory... Think of the cruelties inflicted on the monkeys we export to foreign countries for petty profits!" — T. L. Vasvai

"All life, I regard, is sacred. And it seems to me, in ethics we are concerned not alone with mankind, but also with animals. The ethical ideal, as I understand it, is: Help all life; have sympathy with all life; avoid injurying anything living." — T. L. Vasvai

"Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: we are burial places! I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men." — Leonardo da Vinci (Italian polymath, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer)

W

"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men." — Alice Malsenior Walker (American author)

"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." — Alice Malsenior Walker (American author)

"I think there will come a time, and this is down the road a great many years, when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that have preceded it: the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say, 'meat-eaters!' in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism." — Dennis Weaver (American actor)

"I've found without question that the best way to lead others to a more plant-based diet is by example — to lead with your fork, not your mouth." — Bernie Wilke

X

Y

"Eating meat isn't needed at all for health; so to do otherwise, just for the taste, is immoral, cruel, and inexcusable." — Yajnavalkya dasa

"My compassion does not end where my taste buds begin." — Yajnavalkya dasa

"I should think that compassion for all living entities should be an essential precept in one's religion; yet the vast majority of religions barely mention this concept. What does this say for those religions? That there are people who show more compassion than their god? It is for this reason that I reject any religion as mere humanistic speculation which doesn't demand, at the very least, vegetarianism." — Yajnavalkya dasa

"Critics and detractors of those of use who are compassionate for other living entities invariably resort to calling us 'sentimentalists' or name-calling, such as 'Bambi lovers'. Why is that? Are they concerned that there too much compassion in the world already? I don't think so; there can never be too much compassion. Or is there some nutrient in meat that is required for good health? Of course not; no one can claim this. In fact, the opposite has been shown to be true, time and time again. So what is their motivation? Is it their addiction to sense enjoyment? Or are they worried that showing compassion theatens their machismo reputation? Everything boils down to priorities. What do you consider more important in your life? Disregard for the suffering of others? Your taste buds? Or what?" — Yajnavalkya dasa

"Everything in life boils down to priorities. Some things are more important to you than others. Other things are less important. So where are your priorities? Is the temporary satisfaction of your taste buds more important than the suffering of one who loves life as much as you do?" — Yajnavalkya dasa

Z

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*Nobel Laureate
†Emmy Award Winner
‡Grammy Award Winner


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