“The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to caprice of a tomertor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, “can they reason?” nor “can they talk?” but, “can they suffer?”
~Jeremy Bentham (when writing at the time when black slaves had been freed by the French but the British dominations were still being treated in the way we now treat animals.)
“Truely 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
“I don’t hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality, and moral choice – and that is precisely why we are under an obligation to recognize and respect the rights of animals.”
~Brigid Brophy
“…The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
~Jeremy Bentham
“If we don’t NEED to eat animals to survive, is taste a good enough reason to murder them without pity?”
~Edward Sanchez
“Deep inside, everyone’s a vegetarian. I just eat a few less animals than most. Once you come to terms why you don’t eat dogs, cats, monkeys and dolphins, you’ll begin to understand why I don’t eat cows, pigs, chickens and lambs.”
~Edward Sanchez
“Unlike any other animal, you have a choice. You can choose to kill and destroy, or you can choose to save and create. I chose the latter.”
~Edward Sanchez
“Why do we find it so horrible to kill a baby? It’s because they are voiceless and defenceless. The same applies to animals. Killing them is cowardice.”
~Edward Sanchez
“It’s not guilt that stop
s me eating meat. It’s the pride I take in living without killing.”
~Edward Sanchez
“It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of appetite is nothing but an act of murder. ”
~Edward Sanchez
“I’d rather die than live by the death of others.”
~Edward Sanchez
“All beings tremble before violence. All fear death, all love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?”
~Buddha
“Poor animals! How jealously they guard their pathetic bodies . . . that which to us is merely an evening’s meal, but to them is life itself.”
~T. Casey Brennan
“Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.”
~Albert Schweitzer
“The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that’s the essence of inhumanity”
~George Bernard Shaw
“Life is life–whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man’s own advantage.”
~Sri Aurobindo
“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
“It is a human beings sympathy with all creatures that makes a truly human being.”
~Dr Albert Schweizer
“To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body.”
~Mahatma Gandhi
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
~Mahatma Gandhi
“We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment f animals.”
~Immanuel Kant
“One common response is ‘I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know.’
Cruelty to animals is an abuse of power, and when people take advantage of animals and do cruel and wicked things to them, they debase themselves.”
~Thomas Scully
“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”
~Albert Einstein
The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.
~Albert Einstein
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the ‘Universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”
~Albert Einstein
“As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap the joy of love.”
~Pythagoras
“Flesh eating is unprovoked murder.”
~Ben Franklin
“The eating of meat extinguishes the seed of great compassion.”
~Mahaparinirvana (Buddhist)
“About 2,000 pounds of grains must be supplied to livestock in order to produce enough meat and other livestock products to support a person for a year, whereas 400 pounds of grain eaten directly will support a person for a year. Thus, a given quantity of grain eaten directly will feed 5 times as many people as it will if it is eaten indirectly by humans in the form of livestock products….”
~M.E. Ensminger, PH.D.
“We all love animals. Why do we call some ‘pets’ and others ‘dinner?’”
~K.D. Lang
“Would you kill your pet dog or cat to eat it? How about an animal you’re not emotionally attached to? Is the thought of slaughtering a cow or chicken or pig with your own hands too much to handle? Instead, would hiring a hit-man to do the job give you enough distance from the emotional discomfort? What animal did you put a contract out on for your supper last night? Did you at least make sure that none went to waste and to take a moment to be grateful for its sacrifice?”
~Anonymous
“Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”
~Thomas Edison
“Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don’t harass them, don’t deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you-alas, it is true of almost every one of us!”
~Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs as our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.”
~Robert Louis Stevenson
“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
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
~James A. Froude (1818-1894)
“There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties… The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.”
~Charles Darwin
“The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.”
~Charles Darwin
“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I think if you want to eat more meat you should kill it yourself and eat it raw so that you are not blinded by the hypocrisy of having it processed for you.”
~Margi Clark
“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
“If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth — beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals — would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals?”
~George Bernard Shaw
“In their behaviour toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they’re the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.”
~Isaac Bashevis Singer
“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
“To be a vegetarian is to disagree — to disagree with the course of things today. Starvation, world hunger, cruelty, waste, wars — we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it’s a strong one.”
~Isaac Bashevis Singer, author, Nobel Prize 1978
“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
“Recognize meat for what it really is: the antibiotic- and pesticide-laden corpse of a tortured animal.”
~Ingrid Newkirk
“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”
~Paul McCartney
“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
A veteran USDA meat inspector from Texas describes what he has seen: “Cattle dragged and choked… knocking ‘em four, five, ten times. Every now and then when they’re stunned they come back to life, and they’re up there agonizing. They’re supposed to be re-stunned but sometimes they aren’t and they’ll go through the skinning process alive. I’ve worked in four large [slaughterhouses] and a bunch of small ones. They’re all the same. If people were to see this, they’d probably feel really bad about it. But in a packing house everybody gets so used to it that it dosn’t mean anything.” ~Slaughterhouse 1997
“I wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man abstained from flesh, 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? We slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace. But nothing abashed us not the flower-like 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
(46-120 A.D.)
Greek historian, biographer, and essayist