Vegetarianism Quotes

I am very proud of the fact that 20 years [sic] on people tell me they became a vegetarian as a result of 'Meat is Murder'. I think that is quite literally rock music changing someone's life - it's certainly changing the life of animals. It is one of the things I am most proud of.

~ Johnny Marr

When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farm-workers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision--eating 'like everyone else'--is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

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

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, the whole world would be vegetarian.

~ Linda Mccartney

Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

As told by Kafka's close friend Max Brod:Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. 'Now at least I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore.' It was the time he turned strictly vegetarian.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Sister Carmelita says animals don't have soulsOf course animals have souls, where did she get that idea?She said the Pope says. The Pope's an old meanie. Animals have much nicer souls than we do. They never tell lies or blow anybody up. They eat each other. Well, they have to eat each other; they can't go to Dairy Queen and get a large vanilla cone with sprinkles, can they? They could eat grass.So could we, but we don't. We eat hamburgers.

~ Audrey Niffenegger

We might treat a rabbit as a pet or become emotionally attached to a goose, but we had come from cities and supermarkets, where flesh was hygienically distanced from any resemblance to living creatures. A shrink-wrapped pork chop has a sanitized, abstract appearance that has nothing whatever to do with the warm, mucky bulk of a pig. Out here in the country there was no avoiding the direct link between death and dinner.

~ Peter Mayle

Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race's mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness that we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?

~ J.m. Coetzee

Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.

~ Philip K. Dick

Even as a junkie I stayed true [to vegetarianism] - 'I shall have heroin, but I shan't have a hamburger.' What a sexy little paradox.

~ Russell Brand

Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible--it's to dismantle those systems.

~ Lierre Keith

These folk are hewers of trees and hunters of beasts; therefore we are their unfriends, and if they will not depart we shall afflict them in all ways that we can.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

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 savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

~ Henry David Thoreau

The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy.

~ John Updike

Well, then, Otter, of course I don’t like Bundt cake. It has eggs in it. Baby chicken eggs. You don’t see chickens standing outside of maternity wards waiting to get our babies to make their Bundt cake, do you?

~ T.j. Klune

Ethical vegetarians eat only plant-based food in order to show compassion toward animals and other humans and to benefit the planet.

~ Sharon Gannon

This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity—that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself—and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!

~ Leo Tolstoy

For all malignant cancers, both fish eaters and vegetarians and vegans combined had significantly lower mortality than regular meat eaters [HR: 0.76 (95% CI: 0.63, 0.91) and HR: 0.82 (95% CI: 0.72, 0.94), respectively]. Vegetarians and vegans combined also had significantly lower mortality than did regular meat eaters for pancreatic cancer [HR: 0.47 (95% CI: 0.26, 0.86); P-heterogeneity = 0.065] and cancers of the lymphatic/hematopoietic tissue [HR: 0.43 (95% CI: 0.27, 0.70)], and low meat eaters had significantly lower respiratory disease mortality than regular meat eaters [HR: 0.69 (95% CI: 0.49, 0.97); P-heterogeneity = 0.14].

~ Paul Appleby

For specific causes of death, compared with regular meat eaters, low meat eaters had ~30–45% lower mortality from pancreatic cancer, respiratory disease, and all other causes of death, fish eaters had ~20% lower mortality from malignant cancer and ~20% higher circulatory disease mortality, and vegetarians and vegans had ~50% lower mortality from pancreatic cancer and cancers of the lymphatic/ hematopoietic tissue. These findings were essentially unchanged on further adjustment for BMI, and generally were robust across categories of sex, smoking, and BMI for the 6 most common causes of death.

~ Paul Appleby