If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone
would be a vegetarian. ~Paul McCartney
Recognize meat for what it really is: the
antibiotic- and pesticide-laden corpse of a tortured animal. ~Ingrid
Newkirk, National Director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
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. ~Leo Tolstoy
A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows.
~George Bernard Shaw
A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses. ~George Bernard
Shaw
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 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 the savage
tribes have left off eating each other
. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
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
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered
beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth? ~George
Bernard Shaw
I just could not stand the idea of eating meat - I really do think that it
has made me calmer.... People's general awareness is getting much better,
even down to buying a pint of milk: the fact that the calves are actually
killed so that the milk doesn't go to them but to us cannot really be right,
and if you have seen a cow in a state of extreme distress because it cannot
understand why its calf isn't by, it can make you think a lot. ~Kate
Bush
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
This [video footage from the movie Babe] is the way Americans want to think
of pigs. Real-life "Babes" see no sun in their limited lives, with no
hay to lie on, no mud to roll in. The sows live in tiny cages, so narrow
they can't even turn around. They live over metal grates, and their
waste is pushed through slats beneath them and flushed into huge pits.
~Morley Safer, "Pork Power," 60 Minutes, 19 September 1997
"Thou shalt not kill" does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but
to all living beings; and this Commandment was inscribed in the human breast
long before it was proclaimed from Sinai. ~Leo Tolstoy
As soon as I realized that I didn't need meat to survive or to be in good
health, I began to see how forlorn it all is. If only we had a different
mentality about the drama of the cowboy and the range and all the rest of
it. It's a very romantic notion, an entrenched part of American culture,
but I've seen, for example, pigs waiting to be slaughtered, and their hysteria
and panic was something I shall never forget. ~Cloris Leachman
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, Nobel
Prize 1913
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? ~Plutarch
It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation
that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the
sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing
and disgust. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab Notes
Vegetarianism can easily reach religious proportions. Refraining from
meat on moral grounds serves to dignify feelings of guilt toward sad-eyed,
furry creatures and substitutes righteousness for squeamishness. ~Bill
Griffith, Griffith Observatory comic strip, 1977
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
Pigs may not be as cuddly as kittens or puppies, but they suffer just as much.
~James Cromwell
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 doesn't mean anything."
~Slaughterhouse 1997
I eat everything that nature voluntarily gives: fruits, vegetables,
and the products of plants. But I ask you to spare me what animals are
forced to surrender: meat, milk, and cheese. ~Adolf Hitler
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, factory farming pollutes
U.S. waterways more than all industrial sources combined. ~PETA
Think of me tonite
For that which you savor
Did it give you something real,
or could you taste the pain of my death in its flavor?
~Wayne K. Tolson, from "Food Forethought"
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
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
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