69 Quotes About Vegetarian

As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love. Pythagoras

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

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

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. Mary Midgley

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

Dr. Jens Kjeldsen-Kragh, M.D., of the Institute of Immunology and Rheumatology at the National Rheumatism Hospital of Oslo, conducted a study about the usefulness of vegetarian foods in arthritis. He found that switching to a vegetarian diet resulted in improved grip strength and much less pain, joint swelling, tenderness and morning stiffness in about 90 per cent of a group of arthritis patients, compared with controls eating an ordinary diet. The patients noticed improvement within a month, and it lasted throughout the entire year-long experiment. Dr. Kjeldsen-Kragh concluded that about 70 per cent of the patients improved because they avoided fats that are likely to instigate the inflammation process. H.K. Bakhru

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. Han Kang

It's not that there are no challenges to becoming a vegetarian or vegan, but in the media, including authors of popular books on food and food politics, contribute to the 'enfreakment' of what is so often patronizingly referred to as the vegan or vegetarian 'lifestyle.' But again, the marginalization of those who care about animals is nothing new. Diane Beers writes in her book For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States that 'several late nineteenth-century physicians concocted a diagnosable for of mental illness to explain such bizarre behavior. Sadly, they pronounced these misguided souls suffered from "zoophilpsychosis."' As Beers describes, zoophilpsychosis (an excessive concern for animals) was more likely to be diagnosed in women, who were understood to be 'particularly susceptible to the malady.' As the early animal advocacy movement in Britain and the United States was largely made up of women, such charges worked to uphold the subjugation both of women and of nonhuman animals. Sunaura Taylor

This is why militarism is a feminist issue, why rape is an environmental issue, why environmental destruction is a peace issue. Lierre Keith

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. Sereda Aleta Dailey

I love animals, especially with barbeque sauce. J. Richard Singleton

What if there were health food stores on every corner in the hood, instead of liquor stores! ? SupaNova Slom

Humans – who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals – have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them – without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us. Carl Sagan

No animals needs to die in order for me to live. And that makes me feel good. Howard Lyman

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. Colin McGinn

Ethically, she couldn't cause the suffering of any living thing. Logically, bacon cheeseburgers were delicious. Thomm Quackenbush

If you don't take care of this the most magnificent machine that you will ever be given...where are you going to live? Karyn Calabrese

We all love animals. Why do we call some "pets" and others "dinner? K.d. Lang

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit. Anthony Bourdain

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

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. Jasper Fforde

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? Catherynne M. Valente

It is difficult to ascertain what role these articles play in marginalizing the vegetarian experience when there are so many more pressing issues that confront individuals who might otherwise choose to try to become vegetarian or vegan, such as the lack of healthy affordable food in low-income neighborhoods, often largely inhabited by people of color, and a government that subsidizes and promotes animal and sugar-heavy diets over ones with vegetables and fruits. yet rather than focus on these series structural barriers, many articles on vegetarianism and veganism often present the challenge of avoiding meat and animal products as challenge to one's very own normalcy and acceptability. Sunaura Taylor

Meat may taste good, but the guilt of eating it tastes far worse. Evan Baldonado

Fed by plants, fed up with the world Evan Baldonado

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

I won't eat what I can't kill. It seems shoddy, hypocritical. Jeanette Winterson

Why don't you like the foods I like?" he asks sometimes. "Why don't you like the foods I make?" I answer. Lydia Davis

In my mother's book, a vegetarian is somebody who is not concern with his or her diet and health. "Someone who prefer bush and grass, as if they is sheeps and cows, is somebody who don't have enough food to put in his mouth, " she always say. Only vegetarians eat dryfood regularly–and like to eat it, too. It is not considered normal for a person to cook food that doesn't have some amount o' meat or fish to go with it. Only someone who is starving, who don't have money to buy a fish head or a single flying fish or even the head of a dolphin–in other words, a person who is "catching his arse"–has to eat dryfood. A person at this stage is a person one remove from having to cook bakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Austin Clarke

This is the body's nurse; but since man's wit Found the art of cookery, to delight his sense, More bodies are consumed and kill'd with it Than with the sword, famine, or pestilence. Unknown

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. Colleen PatrickGoudreau

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. Dean Ornish

Living beings wide and far are creatively enticed into the idea of living only on the substance of leafy greenery by alluring allegations that seem to make apparent sense. Some want to avoid the dying aspect of life and prolong the bodily functions of their organs within their potential corpses over time and reduce the waste products given off by our walking structures to lessen worldly contamination. Others want to avoid consuming Earth’s usual containing features from being overly exhumed, or because we have never not lovingly smothered Earth’s natural oxygen sucking creatures, and so we do not consume the things that are taking nutrients from us so that we can preserve them instead, because we find it morally dissatisfying. Ella Cooper

It is easy to take a stand about a remote issue, but speciesists, like racists, reveal their true nature when the issue comes nearer home. To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada, while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, or the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks. Peter Singer

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. . Jonathan Safran Foer

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

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. Douglas Adams

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. Albert Schweitzer

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. Jonathan Safran Foer

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. Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

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

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

People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It’s wrong. They’re packed body to body, and can’t escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It’s wrong. They feel their slaughters. It’s wrong, and people know it’s wrong. They don’t have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I’m not better than anyone, and I’m not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what’s right. I’m trying to convince them to live by their own. Jonathan Safran Foer

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? 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

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

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. Kelly Batten

She was not a vegetarian and knew firsthand animals had to die for her delectation, but she never liked to think about it. Thomm Quackenbush

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. Derrick Jensen

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. Davey Havok

There is no particular merit in being nice to one's fellow man.. We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is a result of our emotions - love apathy, charity of malice - and what part is predetermines by the constant power play among individuals. True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buries from view), consists of attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental débâcle, a débâcle so fundamental all others stem from it. Milan Kundera

Your body is a Temple. You are what you eat. Do not eat processed food, junk foods, filth, or disease carrying food, animals, or rodents. Some people say of these foods, 'well, it tastes good'. Most of the foods today that statically cause sickness, cancer, and disease ALL TATSE GOOD; it's well seasoned and prepared poison. THIS IS WHY SO MANY PEOPLE ARE SICK; mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually; because of being hooked to the 'taste' of poison, instead of being hooked on the truth and to real foods that heal and provide you with good health and wellness. Respect and honor your Temple- and it will honor you. . SupaNova Slom

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. Leviak B. Kelly

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

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

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. Jonathan Safran Foer

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

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). Gary E. Fraser

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. Chris Martin

I don't do the gym and I don't diet. I'm vegetarian but I don't diet. Pamela Anderson

I'm not strictly vegetarian, but meat doesn't play a big part in my diet. Katie Holmes

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

I'm vegetarian, but I love Thanksgiving dinner: faux turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes. Leigh Lezark

A vegetarian is a person who won't eat anything that can have children. David Brenner

I was a vegetarian until I started leaning toward the sunlight. Rita Rudner