You ask of me then for what reason it was that Pythagoras abstained from eating of flesh. I for my part do much admire in what humor, with what soul or reason, the first man with his mouth touched slaughter, and reached to his lips the flesh of a dead animal, and having set before people courses of ghastly corpses and ghosts, could give those parts the names of meat and victuals, that but a little before lowed, cried, moved, and saw; how his sight could endure the blood of slaughtered, flayed, and mangled bodies; how his smell could bear their scent; and how the very nastiness happened not to offend the taste, while it chewed the sores of others, and participated of the saps and juices of deadly wounds.

But we are nothing put out of countenance, either by the beauteous gayety of the colors, or by the charmingness of the musical voices, or by the rare sagacity of the intellects, or by the cleanliness and neatness of diet, or by the rare discretion and prudence of these poor unfortunate animals; 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. ¹

Morals, Plutarch 46 – 120 CE

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Socrates [Plato]: Let us then consider, first of all, what will be their way of life, now that we have thus established them. Will they not produce corn, and wine, and clothes, and shoes, and build houses for themselves? And when they are housed, they will work, in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They will feed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle.

Glaucon: But, said Glaucon, interposing, you have not given them a relish to their meal.

Socrates [Plato]: True, I replied, I had forgotten; of course they must have a relish–salt, and olives, and cheese, and they will boil roots and herbs such as country people prepare; for a dessert we shall give them figs, and peas, and beans; and they will roast myrtle-berries and acorns at the fire, drinking in moderation. And with such a diet they may be expected to live in peace and health to a good old age, and bequeath a similar life to their children after them.

Plato (428-424 BCE) The Republic of Plato – Book II

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You, (my meat-eating friends), put your health at risk – that’s your business. But animal-based diets put the land, the water, the air, a society’s collective health, and even our collective pharmaceutical resources at risk. That’s my business. That’s everyone’s business.

Do you realize that 75% of Americans call themselves environmentalists?
You don’t think that we could solve this problem in a heartbeat?
All we need is for the environmentalists to live what they profess – and we would be on a new course in the world.

Living as I do as a total vegan, gives me great joy that no animal has to die for me to live.

Howard Lyman, Former cattle rancher, author (Mad Cowboy)

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Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.

Steinfeld, H. et al. (2006) Livestock’s long shadow. FAO, Rome. 2006.

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By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world. By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive.

By respect for life, we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive.

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.

Albert Schweitzer, French philosopher, physician, priest and musician – The Nobel Peace Prize 1952

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Whenever people say “We mustn’t be sentimental”, you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add “We must be realistic”, they mean they are going to make money out of it.

Brigid Brophy (1929–1995)

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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, naturalist and author (1809–1882)

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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, Russian novelist (1828–1910)

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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, MD, President, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

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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, PhD

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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 (1879–1955)

What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: 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) Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.

So I am living without fats, without meat, without fish, but am feeling quite well this way. It always seems to me that man was not born to be a carnivore.

Albert Einstein, in a letter to Hans Muehsam, dated March 30, 1954

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When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why then should man expect mercy from God? It is unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, writer and Nobel laureate in 1978 (1902–1991)

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A dead cow or sheep lying in the pasture is recognized as carrion. The same sort of carcass dressed and hung up in a butcher’s stall passes as food.

J. H. Kellogg, American physician (1852–1943)

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It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practice elementary compassion towards our fellow creatures.

Violence begins with the fork.

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

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There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer (1749–1832)

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The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian-American economist (1908–2006)

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Some people think the plant-based, whole-foods diet is extreme. Half a million people a year will have their chests opened up and a vein taken from their leg and sewn onto their coronary artery. Some people would call that extreme.

Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn US Surgeon and plant-based diet advocate since 1984

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It is not your right — based on YOUR traditions, YOUR customs and YOUR habits — to deny animals THEIR freedom so you can harm them, enslave them and kill them. That’s not what rights are about. That’s injustice.

Gary Yourofsky

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You have to make a conscious decision to change [eating habits] for your own well-being, that of your family and your country.

Bill Clinton

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I decided to pick the diet that I thought would maximize my chances of long-term survival.

Al Gore

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I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows.

George Bernard Shaw, The Star, Apr. 5, 1890

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We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

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One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (1817-1862)

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The best doctor gives you the least medicine.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) 

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But I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.

Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany (1615)
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

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Somebody Else’s Problem field relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything that:

Life, the universe and everything
Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

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This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

Douglas Adams – The Puddle
Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

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Last updated on Sunday 9 June 2024 at 11:47 by administrators

1. Plutarch (1878) Plutarch’s Morals. Vol. V. Little, Brown, and Company. [online]. Available from: http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1215.