Eating Animals' Flesh / Meat-Eating (great quotations)
The eating of meat extinguishes the seed of great compassion.
--Mahaparinirvana Sutra ( The Buddha)
It is strange to hear people talk of Humanitarianism, who are members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to children and animals, and who claim to be God-loving men and women, but who, nevertheless, encourage by their patronage the killing of animals merely to gratify the cravings of appetite. --Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish (1844-1936)
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 (1850-1894)
Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends. --George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
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 (1879-1955)
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 (1904- )
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. We feel better about ourselves and better about the animals, knowing we're not contributing to their pain. --Paul (1942- ) and Linda McCartney
Suppose that tomorrow 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 they have the right to treat you as you treat the animals you breed, keep and kill for food? --John Harris (1946- )
"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
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 (6th century BC)
"As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields." --Leo Tolstoy, author
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 (c.AD 46-c.120)
I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men. --Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519)
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 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)
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 that we were 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 love these sheep--they're such gentle creatures. So why are we eating them?" It was the last time we ever did. --Linda and Paul McCartney (musicians)
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 (dancer and choreographer)
Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you anymore. --Franz Kafka (novelist)
"Those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed have no right to be shielded from the slaughterhouse or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy. If it is distasteful for humans to think about, what can it be like for the animals to experience it?" --Peter Singer
"My dream is that people will come to view eating an animal as cannibalism." --Henry Spira
"Awareness is bad for the meat business. Conscience is bad for the meat business. Sensitivity to life is bad for the meat business. DENIAL, however, the meat business finds indispensable." --John Robbins, Diet for a New America
"There will come a time...when civilised people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that preceded it: the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say "meat-eaters!" in disgust and regard us in the same way we regard cannibals and cannibalism" --Dennis Weaver
"The animals you eat are not those who devour others; you do not eat the carnivorous beasts, you take them as your pattern. You only hunger after sweet and gentle creatures who harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service" --John Jacques Rousseau