- “Through the deeply theraputic practice of asana, we begin to purify our karmas, thereby healing our past relationships with others and reestablishing a steady and joyful connection with the Earth, which means all beings.”
―
Sharon Gannon,
Yoga and Vegetarianism: The Path to Greater Health and Happiness
- “Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse – and persuading others not to support it – is.”
―
Peter Singer,
The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
- “Those working in slaughterhouses, for example, are often underpaid and overworked, lack insurance, and are required to use dangerous equipment without adequate training. Turnover and rates of injury for jobs in anymal industries are among the highest in the United States. Slaughterhouse employees are almost always poor, they are often immigrants, and they are inevitably viewed by their employers as expendable. Moreover, if we would not like to kill pigs, hens, or cattle all day long, then we should not make food choices that require others to do so. Our dietary choices determine where others work. Will our poorest laborers work in fields of green or in buildings of blood? Fieldwork is difficult, but I worked in the fields as a child, and I am very glad that I never worked in a slaughterhouse.”
―
Lisa Kemmerer,
Animals and World Religions
- “People eat meat and think they will become strong as an ox, forgetting that the ox eats grass.”
―
Pino Caruso
- “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
- “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,
My Booky Wook
- “He tried to hate all of humanity for being so fragile and ephemeral but he couldn’t keep it up because hating everyone is the same as hating no one.”
―
Agustina Bazterrica,
Cadáver exquisito
- “Indigenous religious traditions around the world continue to provide an ancient yet living vision of nature as sacred, requiring human respect and entailing human responsibilities. Anymals are understood to be “people” living in community as humans live in community—all of whom are part of a larger community of living beings. Indigenous religious traditions teach people that we owe respect, responsibility, and compassion to our nonhuman kin, and remember a time of great peace, before predation began. Most indigenous peoples believe that all beings are endowed with souls. Anymals are generally thought to hold exceptional abilities and remarkable powers.”
―
Lisa Kemmerer,
Animals and World Religions
- “I realized I could only play-act at the spiritual life as long as my appetites were stronger than my empathy.”
―
Victoria Moran,
Main Street Vegan: Everything You Need to Know to Eat Healthfully and Live Compassionately in the Real World
- “The chickens? Why those poor little birds live shitty-ass lives before being hauled off in hellish fucking trucks to clusterfucks known as “slaughterhouses”, where they’re killed by turd-faced asshats who have no sense of decency, and their legs and wings are served at dumbfuck football parties.”
―
Granny PottyMouth
- “It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.”
―
Jonathan Safran Foer,
Eating Animals
- “See this abdicated beast, once kingOf them all, nibble his claws:Not anger enough left—no, nor despair—To break his teeth on the bars.”
―
Cecil Day-Lewis,
The Complete Poems of C. Day Lewis
- “Io non ti conosco” mormorò, stringendo più forte la cornetta, che aveva poggiato sulla forcella ma teneva ancora in mano. “Quindi non c’è nessun bisogno di un perdono reciproco. Perché non ti conosco”.”
―
Han Kang,
The Vegetarian
- “Meat is necessary when there is hard physical work to be done, or in a very cold climate, or when edible plants cannot be found…Animal flesh provides all the substances we need, both for the intensive working of our organism and for maintaining a normal temperature in cold climates.”
―
G.I. Gurdjieff
- “Another version of me lives in the soy-milky way galaxy in a parallel universe. That version of me is vegan.”
―
Rajesh`
- “I can’t tell you how many times over the years people tried to give me soy cheese and tempeh fake-meat, and other ickiness and pass it off as yummy. I’m sorry but no, you cannot make vegetable protein taste like bacon, no matter how much salt and liquid smoke you put in it! I wanted to celebrate good food, prepared in ways that make it good for you, which is surprisingly easy to do if you know the basics. If you use exceptional products that have inherent natural goodness, you don’t need to swamp them in butter or cream to make them taste good.” For dinner we’d had grilled skirt steaks, spicy Thai sesame noodles from my friend Doug’s recipe, braised cauliflower, and for dessert, poached pears and Greek yogurt with lavender flowers and black sage honey. Filling, balanced, nutritionally sound.”
―
Stacey Ballis,
Good Enough to Eat
- “I was eating a steak at a local restaurant last night, when a random woman said: “Y’know, you’d be much better off being a vegetarian.” “Are you crazy?” I said, “The cow was a vegetarian and look what happened to it!”
―
Quentin R. Bufogle
- “The number of individuals enslaved and slaughtered on factory farms every year exponentially surpasses—by trillions—any form of exploitation of human beings anywhere, at any time.”
―
Lisa Kemmerer,
Animals and World Religions
- “There is a stereotype that vegans talk about being vegan all the time. The irony is, once people find out I’m vegan, I quickly become their confessor, counselor, and sounding board.”
―
Colleen Patrick-Goudreau,
Vegan’s Daily Companion: 365 Days of Inspiration for Cooking, Eating, and Living Compassionately
- “We can’t talk about our own health without understanding our place in our environment, because in order to fulfill our potential we have to live in the context of our surroundings.We have to know our place in the ecosystem of which we are a part, and this means living ‘consciously’: being aware of nature and how it affects us and how we, in turn, affect nature.”
―
Sebastian Pole,
Discovering the True You with Ayurveda: How to Nourish, Rejuvenate, and Transform Your Life
- “People eat meat and think they will become strong as an ox, forgetting that the ox eats grass.”
―
Pino Caruso
- “Only love for all beings can save the world.”
―
Jeffrey A. White
- “I am not well-versed in theory, but in my view, the cow deserves her life. As does the ram. As does the ladybug. As does the elephant. As do the fish, and the dog and the bee; as do other sentient beings. I will always be in favor of veganism as a minimum because I believe that sentient beings have a right not to be used as someone else’s property. They ask us to be brave for them, to be clear for them, and I see no other acceptable choice but to advocate veganism. If these statements make me a fundamentalist, then I will sew a scarlet F on my jacket so that all may know I’m fundamentally in favor of nonviolence; may they bury me in it so that all will know where I stood.”
―
Vincent J. Guihan
- “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? … It is certainly not lions and wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace. But nothing abashed us, not the flower-like tinting of the flesh, not the persuasiveness of the harmonious voice, not the cleanliness of their habits or the unusual intelligence that may be found in the poor wretches. No, for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being.”
―
Plutarch,
Moralia
- “it is a federal system of sadistic torture, vivisection, and animal genocide, which has been carried on for decades under the fraudulent guise of respectable medical research. And nobody on the outside knows, or wants to know, or is willing to find out. My parents, my friends, my teachers, wouldnt listen to me, or suggested that if it was bothering me that much I just had to quit the job. Just like that. As if that would have solved anything. As if I could ever live with such cowardice. You can’t imagine, or maybe you can, how many people are convinced – without knowing the first thing about it – Animal research is essential. Americans have been hopelessly brainwashed on this issue. The animal rights people, by and large, acknowledge the essential futility of trying to change the system. So they address the smaller issues, fighting for legislation which would provide one extra visit per week to the labs by a custodian of the US dept of agriculture. Or demanding that a squirrel monkey be given an extra 12 square inches in his holding pen, before being led to the slaughter. That sort of thing. For whomever, and whatever it’s worth, I hope my little write up is clear. I dont have the guts to do whats necessary. I pray there’s someone out there who does. God help all of us.”
―
Michael Tobias,
Rage and Reason
- “No animals needs to die in order for me to live. And that makes me feel good.”
―
Howard Lyman
- “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
- “Will you dance for me? Let your breasts roam for a moment — I need to see how they dance.”Okay.’ She danced, and as she danced, she tried to think of the most delicious salads she could imagine — with artichokes and sundried tomato and blue cheese dressing, and beets, lots of beets.”
―
Nicholson Baker,
House of Holes
- “Those working in slaughterhouses, for example, are often underpaid and overworked, lack insurance, and are required to use dangerous equipment without adequate training. Turnover and rates of injury for jobs in anymal industries are among the highest in the United States. Slaughterhouse employees are almost always poor, they are often immigrants, and they are inevitably viewed by their employers as expendable. Moreover, if we would not like to kill pigs, hens, or cattle all day long, then we should not make food choices that require others to do so. Our dietary choices determine where others work. Will our poorest laborers work in fields of green or in buildings of blood? Fieldwork is difficult, but I worked in the fields as a child, and I am very glad that I never worked in a slaughterhouse.”
―
Lisa Kemmerer,
Animals and World Religions
- “This is the body’s nurse; but since man’s witFound the art of cookery, to delight his sense,More bodies are consumed and kill’d with itThan with the sword, famine, or pestilence.”
―
John Davies of Hereford