Best 160 quotes in «vegetarianism quotes» category

I became a vegetarian because I was persuaded that life is as valid for other creatures as it is for humans. I do not need dead animal bodies to keep me alive, strong and healthy. Therefore, I will not kill for food.

I can't think of anything better in the world to be but a vegan.

If a man can control his body and mind and thereby refrains from eating animal flesh and wearing animal products, I say he will really be liberated.

I don't teach vegetarianism; it is a by-product of meditation. Wherever meditation has happened, people have become vegetarian, always, for thousands of years.

If you step back and look at the data, the optimum amount of red meat you eat should be zero.

If there would come a voice from God saying, 'I'm against vegetarianism!' I would say, 'Well, I am for it!' This is how strongly I feel in this regard.

In every country in the world, killing human beings is condemned. The Buddhist precept of non-killing extends even further, to include all living beings.

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.

It is necessary to correct the error that vegetarianism has made us weak in mind, or passive or inert in action. I do not regard flesh-food as necessary at any stage

If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you want to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources, unaided by cleaver or cudgel or any kind of ax

It is not how we breed, keep and kill animals for human consumption that has been the impetus for vegetarianism for thousands of years. It is that we breed, keep and kill animals for human consumption. Throughout the centuries the common thread in the arguments against eating animals is the fact that since we have no nutritional requirement for the flesh or fluids of animals, killing them to simply satisfy our taste-buds or habits or customs amounts to senseless slaughter, and senseless slaughter is no small thing.

It is the fate of every truth to be an object of ridicule when it is first acclaimed.

Male and female have the power to fuse into one solid, both because both are nourished in both and also because soul is the same thing in all living creatures, although the body of each is different.

My dream is that people will come to view eating an animal as cannibalism.

Many things made me become a vegetarian, among them the higher food yield as a solution to world hunger.

I've been a vegetarian for years and years. I'm not judgemental about others who aren't, I just feel I cannot eat or wear living creatures.

The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.

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.

Plant life instead of animal food is the keystone of regeneration. Jesus used bread instead of flesh and wine in place of blood at the Lord's Supper.

Recognize meat for what it really is: the antibiotic- and pesticide-laden corpse of a tortured animal.

Since I first went to India twenty some years ago, there's been a palpable change. There's now pizza everywhere, meat is much more popular than it's ever been. Vegetarianism is "that quaint thing our parents did.

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 for the sweet and gentle creatures which harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service.

The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit.

The eating of meat extinguishes the seed of Great Kindness.

Thousands of people who say they "love" animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that could make their lives worth living and who endured the awful suffering and the terror of the abattoirs...

The most energetic workers I have encountered in my world travels are the vegetarian miners of Chile.

'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.

Vegetarian food leaves a deep impression on our nature. If the whole world adopts vegetarianism, it can change the destiny of humankind.

Unless we have courage to recognize cruelty for what it is - whether its victim is human or animal - we cannot expect things to be much better in the world.

Vegetarianism is a way of living consciously on the planet.

Vegetarianism -- You are what you eat, and who wants to be a lettuce?

We are the living graves of murdered beasts, slaughtered to satisfy our appetites. How can we hope in this world to attain the peace we say we are so anxious for?

The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

Animal fats (largely saturated) raise LDL cholesterol (29) and increase risk; these obviously come from foods eaten less or not at all by vegetarians. Total or LDL cholesterol is typically lower in vegetarians (30, 31). HDL cholesterol is not consistently different (30, 32), although it does tend to be a little lower in Adventists (33), perhaps because of the lack of alcohol consumption. Vegetarians are consistently thinner, or at least less overweight, than are nonvegetarians within the same studies (34, 32). It is also probable that vegetarians have lower blood pressures than others (32, 35, 36), although the reasons are still controversial, and effects are sometimes small as in British vegetarians (37).

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

When we eat vegetarian foods, we needn't worry about what kind of disease our food died from; this makes a joyful meal!

A human body in no way resembles those that were born for ravenousness; it hath no hawk’s bill, no sharp talon, no roughness of teeth, no such strength of stomach or heat of digestion, as can be sufficient to convert or alter such heavy and fleshy fare. But if you will contend that you were born to an inclination to such food as you have now a mind to eat, do you then yourself kill what you would eat. But do it yourself, without the help of a chopping-knife, mallet or axe, as wolves, bears, and lions do, who kill and eat at once. Rend an ox with thy teeth, worry a hog with thy mouth, tear a lamb or a hare in pieces, and fall on and eat it alive as they do. But if thou had rather stay until what thou eat is to become dead, and if thou art loath to force a soul out of its body, why then dost thou against nature eat an animate thing? There is nobody that is willing to eat even a lifeless and a dead thing even as it is; so they boil it, and roast it, and alter it by fire and medicines, as it were, changing and quenching the slaughtered gore with thousands of sweet sauces, that the palate being thereby deceived may admit of such uncouth fare.

Almost all our health concerns can be traced back to our belly. Ensure a healthy gut and the rest will take care of itself.

What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

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.

A peculiarity of the nature of your mind is that, in contrast to your physical constitution (dosha) that is fixed from birth, it can be altered through discrimination and choice.

As per the law of karma, that which is your meat today, this dear beloved animal will make mincemeat of you tomorrow. In another birth.

A simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focusing. Eating animals has an invisible quality. Thinking about dogs, and their relationship to the animals we eat, is one way of looking askance and making something invisible visible.

As we struck across the ridges and hollows of the undulating terrain, our attention was caught by a slight rustling in a clump of long grass to our left. In a few strides we had drawn level, and pushed aside the straggling stalks, to reveal the quivering body of a rabbit, on its side, oddly contorted. Ralph bent to examine it, and its fright became even greater; there was agony in its staring eyes. Gently, he tried to pick it up, only to withdraw his hand with a moan of disgust; moist and warm redness stained his fingers, and his face became set and sullen. Very little additional examination was required to establish that the creature had been shot by one of the Hall’s marauding parties, but that the job had been botched, and the victim had managed to effect a temporary escape to sink down here, and drain away to oblivion. It was remotely possible that the wound was the work of some more instinctive predator, but by far the greater likelihood rested with an incompetent marksman. As we watched, the animal began to succumb with paroxysms of twitching, and life fled from it very shortly. ‘Is it worth our fee, then, to work for people who enjoy this kind of thing?’ I enquired, bitterly, after we had walked a little way in silence. Ralph stared straight ahead. ‘I have accepted her terms, and she must accept mine. I only said I would look into the cause of her “little difficulty”. I did not say I would deal with it. I shall keep my word—exactly so.

As told by Kafka's close friend Max Brod: "Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. 'Now at least I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore.' It was the time he turned strictly vegetarian.

As we embrace our passions and delve into the mystery of life, we unite with the majestic complexity of nature; and if we follow the signs, this can help us understand who we really are.

Bill Read, an East London speaker who kept a workmen's eating house, used to bellow that vegetarianism was a capitalist plot to lower labour costs by making the working-class feed on grass.

Because we cannot scrub our inner body we need to learn a few skills to help cleanse our tissues, organs, and mind. This is the art of Ayurveda.

Before us stretched a corridor of meat, great torsos of meadow animals strung in glistening flayed exhibitions, heads with limp exhausted comic-book tongues dangling at too sharp an angle, heads with dull-eyed slaughter-greeting looks, heads smiling and winking, perhaps the subtlest camouflage this severed coyness, heads piled in pyramids like park cannonballs, some of them cruelly facing a sausage display of their missing extremities, a thick and thin suspended rain of sausages, a storm of jellied blood, and further down the corridor no recognizable animal shapes but chunks of their bodies, shaped not by hide or muscle but by cleaver, knife and appetite.

Before child labor laws, there were businesses that treated their ten-year-old employees well. society didn’t ban child labor because it’s impossible to imagine children working in a good environment, but because when you give that much power to businesses over powerless individuals, it’s corrupting. When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it’s corrupting.