Great Quotes and Famous Vegetarians
“The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of ‘real food for real people,’ you’d better live real close to a real good hospital.”
-Neal D. Barnard, M.D., President Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
“Imagine the publicity if someone announced that they have developed a new treatment that cured 40 percent of all people with cancer. The media would be jumping up and down. That kind of benefit can be achieved today just by following a vegetarian diet. Right there you have an answer and no one’s listening.”
-Oliver Alabaster, M.D., Director of the institute for Disease Prevention, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
“Scientific data suggest positive relationships between a vegetarian diet and reduced risk for several chronic degenerative diseases and conditions, including obesity, coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and some types of cancer.”
J Am Diet Assoc. 1997;97:1317-1321.
“The way that we breed animals for food is a threat to the planet. It pollutes our environment while consuming huge amounts of water, grain, petroleum, pesticides, and drugs. The results are disastrous.”
-David Brubaker, PhD, Center for a Livable future, John Hopkins University, Environmental News Network, 9/20/99
“I don’t eat chicken anymore. I won’t eat it. I won’t allow it in my house.”
– Rodney Leonard- U.S. Poultry inspection
“Based on my experience in Los Angeles, my advice to the public is not to eat meat.”
– Gregorio Natavidad- Meat inspector
“I have no intention of eating a fish from the East River. They’re not safe to eat.”
– Mayor White of Cleveland
“Some people are still going to want to eat meat…we do agree though that vegetarianism is a healthier diet.”
– David Stroud of the American Meat Institute
“Ounce for ounce, chicken has essentially the same cholesterol content as beef and nearly as much fat. Two-thirds of retail chicken products harbor deadly microbes such as salmonella and campylobacter. Grilled chicken is especially high in cancer-causing heterocyclic amines, chemicals that form under cooking temperatures according to National Cancer Institute tests. Switching from red meat to small servings of white meat lowers cholesterol only about 5 percent and offers little help for weight problems.”
– Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, President Neal D. Barnard, M.D.
“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on earth as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”
– Albert Einstein
“If man wants freedom why keep birds and animals in cages? Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places! I have since an early age abjured the use of meat.”
– Leonardo-da-Vinci
“Flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act, which is contrary to moral feeling: killing. By killing, man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity, that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel.”
– Leo Tolstoy
“Flesh eating is unprovoked murder.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.”
– Pythagoras
“To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the suffering 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–Nobel Prize Winner
“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
“To produce a single pound of meat takes an average of 2,500 gallons of water-as much as a typical family uses for all its combined household purposes in a month.”
– John Robbins: Diet for A New America
“Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, should we know better?”
-Peter Cheeke, PhD, Contemporary issues In Animal agriculture, 1999
“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.”
-Albert Einstein, letter dated 1950, quoted in H. Eves’ Mathematical Circles Adieu, 1977
“The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? But, can they suffer?”
-Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals & Legislation, 1789
“It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to distance ourselves from our own views, so that we can dispassionately search for prejudices among the beliefs and values we hold.”
-Peter Singer, Princeton University Philosopher and author of Animal Libertarian
“Animals are my friends-and I don’t eat my friends.”
– George Bernard Shaw
“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…They are just too much like us.”
-Dr. Carl Sagan & Dr. Ann Druyan Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1992
“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to fore only when its recipient has no power. Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.”
-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984
“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 bodily wants.”
– Gandhi
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever does.”
– Margaret Mead
Famous Vegetarians-History
| Benjamin Franklin | Charles Darwin | Albert Einstein |
| Buddha | Leonardo Da Vinci | Plato |
| Socrates | Dalai Lama | Isaac Newton |
| Pythagoras | Mahatma Gandhi | Seneca |
| Henry David Thoreau | Krishnamurti | Thomas Edison |
| George Bernard Shaw | Percy Bysshe Shelley | Leo Tolstoy |
Famous Vegetarians-Celebrities
| Steve Martin | Alec Baldwin | Alicia Silverstone | |
| Bob Dylan | Johnny Cash | Carlos Santana | |
| Danny DeVito | Claudia Schiffer | David Duchovny | |
|
Ted Danson |
Dustin Hoffman | Elvis Costello | |
| Hank Aaron | Janeane Garofalo | Joe Jackson | |
| Lenny Kravitz |
Richard Gere |
Indigo Girls | |
| Natalie Portman | Moby | The Beatles | |
| Prince | Peter Gabriel | Woody Harrelson | |
