Vegetarian Quotes
46 quotes
"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."
"The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled."
"It's a pretty amazing to wake up every morning, knowing that every decision I make is to cause as little harm as possible. It's a pretty fantastic way to live."
"I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol lowering drugs for the rest of their lives."
"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."
"As per the law of karma, that which is your meat today, this dear beloved animal will make mincemeat of you tomorrow. In another birth."
"For the first time, she became vividly aware of how much of her life she had spent with her husband. It had been a period of time utterly devoid of happiness and spontaneity. A time that she'd so far managed to get through only by using up every last reserve of perseverance and consideration. All of it self-inflicted."
"This is why militarism is a feminist issue, why rape is an environmental issue, why environmental destruction is a peace issue."
Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability
"The number one element on the list for changing and improving one's lifestyle is definitely in the area of health for most people. Good health paves the way for even more awesomeness to happen all-the-way-around."
"I love animals, especially with barbeque sauce."
"What if there were health food stores on every corner in the hood, instead of liquor stores!?"
"No animals needs to die in order for me to live. And that makes me feel good."
"Our treatment of animals, in every department, is deeply and systematically immoral. Becoming a vegetarian is only the most minimal ethical response to the magnitude of the evil."
"If you don't take care of this the most magnificent machine that you will ever be given...where are you going to live?"
"We all love animals. Why do we call some "pets" and others "dinner?"
"Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit."
"The cucumber and the tomato are both fruit; the avocado is a nut. To assist with the dietary requirements of vegetarians, on the first Tuesday of the month a chicken is officially a vegetable."
"It appeals to the higher nature of the self to put aside food which once lived - I do not consider myself food, why should I ask all other creatures to consider themselves so?"
"I won't eat what I can't kill. It seems shoddy, hypocritical."
"Meat may taste good, but the guilt of eating it tastes far worse."
"Fed by plants, fed up with the world"
"Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig-an animal easily as intelligent as a dog-that becomes the Christmas ham."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"Why don't you like the foods I like?" he asks sometimes. "Why don't you like the foods I make?" I answer."
"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."
"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."
"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
"There is general agreement that red meat consumption increases the risk of colon or colorectal cancer. This was the only food association with cancer that was labeled ‘‘convincing’’ in the recent report from the World Cancer Research Fund, American Institute for Cancer Research (42). The evidence, of course, largely came from studies of meat consumption in nonvegetarians, although data from Adventist vegetarians in California concur (43)."
"I'm vegetarian, but I love Thanksgiving dinner: faux turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes."
"It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals."
"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."
"Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially."
"The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another, even the lowliest creature; but to do so is to renounce our manhood and shoulder a guilt which nothing justifies."
"Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless - it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement with the problem is."
"Two friends are ordering lunch. One says, 'I'm in the mood for a burger,' and orders it. The other says, 'I'm in the mood for a burger,' but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?"
"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."
"To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today... starvation, cruelty - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one."
"Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something."
"We strive for a world where every earthling has the right to live and grow. That's why we don't eat animals."
Ruby Roth, That's Why We Don't Eat Animals: A Book About Vegans, Vegetarians, and All Living Things
"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."
"I asked a girl once why she was vegetarian. I said, is it because you love animals? And she replied, no it's because I had plants. To that I said, don't ever let someone take you to see the Palace Gardens- you'd both end up in jail."
"She was not a vegetarian and knew firsthand animals had to die for her delectation, but she never liked to think about it."
"I waited for him to come out. He didn't. I considered going in after him, but knew the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die."
"I'll stop eating steak when you stop killing spiders." Absurdity: comparing cows to spiders. Arachnids are pure evil. They're like a cigarette manufacturer or a terrorist. They're organized religion on eight legs."
"Cats were not and are not tool makers the way humans became toolmakers. They are specifically adapted as obligate carnivores, This means the vegetarian cat is an oxymoron at best and a blatant lie at worst. Cats need meat. The concept of a Garden of Eden would be rather atrocious to them."
"It's nice to believe that when confronted with facts people will just suddenly respond to them but, in fact, most people don't really work like that."
"Being voted the world's sexiest vegetarian is about as cool as it gets. It's not quite as cool as Brad Pitt, but it'll do."