WHAT EMINENT PERSONALITIES SAY
I do feel that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodilywants.
– Mahatma Gandhi
It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.
– 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 joyandlove.
– Pythagorus
Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all living beings, we are all savages.
– Thomas Alva Edison
When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity.
– George Bernard Shaw
A dead cow or sheep lying in a pasture is recognized as carrion. The same sort of carcass dressed and hung up in a butcher’s stall passes as food!
– J. H. Kellog
I do not see any reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. After all, man can live without meat…
– The Dalai Lama
He who does not value life does not deserve it.
– Leonardo da Vinci
I hold flesh-food to be unsuited to our species. We err in copying the lower animal world if we are superior to it.
– Mahatma Gandhi
I look my age. It is the other people who look older than they are. What can you expect from people who eat corpses?
– George Bernard Shaw
Oh, my fellow men, do not defile your bodies with sinful foods. We have corn, we have apples bending down the branches with their weight, and grapes swelling on the vines. There are sweet-flavored herbs, and vegetables which can be cooked and softened over the fire, nor are you denied milk or thyme-scented honey. The earth affords a lavish supply of riches, of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter; only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass.
– Pythagorus
In a similar line of thinking is this quote: “I’m no shrinking violet. I played hockey until half my teeth were knocked down my throat. And I’m extremely competitive on a tennis court. . . But that experience at the slaughterhouse overwhelmed me. When I walked out of there, I knew I would never again harm an animal! I knew all the physiological, economic, and ecological arguments supporting vegetarianism, but it was firsthand experience of man’s cruelty to animals that laid the real groundwork for my commitment to vegetarianism.
– Peter Burwash, champion tennis player in his book, “A Vegetarian Primer”
He who, seeking his own happiness, punishes or kills beings who also long for happiness, will not find happiness after death.
– Buddhist Dhammapada
It may indeed be doubted whether butchers’ meet is anywhere a necessary of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese, and butter, or oil where butter is not to be had, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet. Decency nowhere requires that any man should eat butchers’ meat. Economist Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations Various philosophers and religious leaders tried to convince their disciples and followers that animals are nothing more than machines without a soul, without feelings. However, anyone who has ever lived with an animal–be it a dog, a bird, or even a mouse–knows that this theory is a brazen lie, invented to justify cruelty.
– Isaac Bashevis Singer
To be nonviolent to human beings and to be a killer or enemy of the poor animals is Satan’s philosophy. In this age there is always enmity against poor animals, and therefore the poor creatures are always anxious. The reaction of the poor animals is being forced on human society, and therefore there is always strain of cold or hot war between men, individually, collectively or nationally
– A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
Every act of irreverence for life, every act which neglects life, which is indifferent to and wastes life, is a step towards the love of death. This choice man must make at every minute. Never were the consequences of the wrong choice as total and as irreversible as they are today. Never was the warning of the Bible so urgent: ‘I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that you and your children may live.’ (Deuteronomy 30:19)
– Erich Fromm
To avoid causing terror to living beings, let the disciple refrain from eating meat… the food of the wise is that which is consumed by the sadhus [holymen]; it does not consist of meat… There may be some foolish people in the future who will say that I permitted meat-eating and that I partook of meat myself, but… meat-eating I have not permitted to anyone, I do not permit, I will not permit meat-eating in any form, in any manner and in any place; it is unconditionally prohibited for all.
– The Buddha in Dhammapada
All beings hate pains; therefore one should not kill them. This is the quintessence of wisdom: not to kill anything.
– Sutrakritanga (Jainism)
Beings which kill others should not be killed in the belief that the destruction of one of them leads to the protection of many others.
– Purushartha Siddhyupaya (Jainism)
One act of pure love in saving life is greater than spending the whole of one’s time in religious offerings to the gods.
– Dhammapada (Buddhist)
But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy.
– Plutarch (AD 46-c.120)
The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable.
From thence the beasts be brought in, killed and clean washed by the hands of their bondsmen. For they permit not their free citizens to accustom themselves to the killing of beasts, through the use whereof they think clemency, the gentlest affection of our nature, by little and little to decay and perish.
-Thomas Mo0re (1478-1535)
After they had accustomed themselves at Rome to the spectacles of the slaughter of animals, they proceeded to those of the slaughter of men, to the gladiators.
– Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
Fishing is a pleasure of retirement, yet the angler has the power to let the fish live or die.
– Hung Tzu-ch’eng (1593-1665)
How do we know that we have a right to kill creatures that we are so little above, as dogs, for our curiosity or even for some use to us?
– Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.
– Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling — killing.
– Leo Tolstoy, great Russian philosopher (1828-1910)
The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.
– Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?
– George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man? For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime.
– Romain Rolland (1866-1944)
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.
– Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)
Late upon the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset… there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase ‘Reverence for Life’.
– Dr Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of his fellow man, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.
– Dr Albert Sweitzer (1875-1965)
The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.
– Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature.
– Rachel Carson (1907-1964)
To inflict cruelties on defenseless creatures, or condone such acts, is to abuse one of the cardinal tenets of a civilized society – reverence for life.
– Jon Evans (1917)
Life is life’s greatest gift. Guard the life of another creature as you would your own because it is your own. On life’s scale of values, the smallest is no less precious to the creature who owns it than the largest .
– Lloyd Biggle Jr. (1923)
Behind the man who refuses to kill and eat meat, all the life forms will be standing and worshiping him with folded hands
– Thiruvalluvar in Thirukural under ‘Meat Refusal’
Since visiting abattoirs of South France I have stopped eating meat
– Vincent Van Gogh
Nothing will benefit human wealth and increase chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
– Albert Einstein
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.
– Henry David Thoreau
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, every one would be a vegetarian. We feel better about ourselves and better about the animals, knowing we’re not contributing to their pain.
– Paul & Linda McCartney
We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
Of what use are all your sacrifices to me? I have had enough of the roasted carcasses of rams and of the fat of fattened beasts. I take no pleasure in the blood of calves, lambs and goats. When you spread out your hands, I close my eyes to you; despite however much you pray I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood! Wash yourselves clean. Put your misdeeds from before my eyes and stop doing evil
– Isaiah 1-15-16
We stopped eating meat many years ago. During the course of a Sunday lunch we happened to look out of the kitchen window at our young lambs playing happily in the fields. Glancing down at our plates, we suddenly realized, we are eating the leg of an animal who had until recently been playing in a field herself. We looked at each other and said “wait a minute, we look these sheep, and they are such gentle creatures. So why are we eating them?” It is the last time we ever did.
– Paul D McCartney
Vegetarianism serves as a criterion by which we know that the pursuit of moral perfection on the part of man is genuine and sincere.
– Leo Tolstoy
I don’t want to make my stomach the burial ground of dead animals
– George Bernard Shaw
A human can be healthy without killing animals for food. Therefore if he eats the meat he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.