Vegetarianism

Vegetarianism is a practice that consists of a diet that excludes meat (including game and slaughter by-products), fish (including shellfish and other sea animals) and poultry. The reasons for choosing vegetarianism may be related to morality, religion, culture, ethics, aesthetics, environment, society, economy, politics, taste, or health.

Humor

• "You never hear anybody talk about mad tofu disease."
  • John Robbins

• "Consider the biggest animals on the planet: elephants, and buffaloes, and giraffes. These are vegetarian animals. They grow to thousands of pounds of muscle and bone without ever eating cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizzas."
  • Michael Klaper, M.D.
• "I am a vegetarian for health reasons - the health of the chicken."
  • Isaac Bashevis Singer, in Judaism and Vegetarianism
• "Some say if animals are not used for food they will overrun the earth. In India the Hindus do not kill cows, but they are not overrun by them."
  • An eminent Hindu quoted by Ralph Waldo Trine (1866-1958) in Every Living Creature, p. 32
• "[The animals] are now especially bred for eating purposes, and if the demand decreased, the supply would decrease also. Further, how is it that we are not overrun by wild animals of all sorts? […] People need not worry about the future welfare of the bovine race, if they would only be a little more humane in their treatment of its present representatives!"
  • Hereward Carrington, The Natural Food for Man, p. 159-160
• "If eating meat why not eat the most highly organised form of meat, which is not beef or mutton, but human flesh? If you still believe in the eating of flesh, then you must admit that at least as far as the fitness of food is concerned the cannibal has the best of the argument."
  • Ha'nish Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish, Mazdaznan Dietetics and Cookery Book, 1913, p. 199
• "The Animals, you say, were “sent” For man’s free use and nutriment. Pray, then, inform me, and be candid, Why came they aeons before man did, To spend long centuries on earth Awaiting their Devourer’s birth? Those ill-timed chattels, sent from Heaven, Were, sure, the maddest gift e’er given – “Sent” for man’s use (can man believe it?) When there was no man to receive it!"
  • Henry Stephens Salt, The Sending of the Animals
• "Vegans and vegetarians are commonly baited by nonvegetarians with “what if” scenarios that typically have no relevance to or bearing on most people’s real-life situations."
  • Joanne Stepaniak, M.S. Ed., Being Vegan
• "I was told that my diet was so poor that I could not repair the bones that were broken and operated on. So I have just had an Xradiograph taken; and lo! perfectly mended solid bone so beautifully white that I have left instructions that, if I die, a glove stretcher is to be made of me and sent to you as a souvenir."
  • George Bernard Shaw , Letter to Mrs.Patrick Campbell
• "The average age of a meat-eater is 63. I am on the verge of 85 and still at work as hard as ever. I have lived quite long enough and am trying to die; but I simply cannot do it. A single beef-steak; would finish me; but I cannot bring myself to swallow it. I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism"
  • George Bernard Shaw , American Vegetarian
• "My will contains directions for my funeral which will be followed not by mourning coaches but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small travelling aquarium of live fish, all wearing scarves in honour of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow-creatures. It will be, with the exception of Noah's Ark, the most remarkable thing of the kind ever seen."
  • George Bernard Shaw , London Daily Chronicle
• "First, how do you prove that mankind is invested with the right of killing them, and that brutes have been created for the purpose you assert them to be? Secondly, it is to be observed that the flesh of man himself possesses the same nourishing and palatable qualities? Are we then to become cannibals for that reason? "
  • Lewis Gompertz (1779-1861), Moral Inquiries
• "O impudence of power and might,/ Thus to condemn a hawk or kite,/When thou, perhaps, carniv'rous sinner,/Hadst pullets yesterday for dinner!'."
  • John Gay, The Fables, Volume 1 (1727), Pythagoras and the Countryman
• "Here's a test you can try at home: put a two-year-old in a playpen with an apple and a rabbit. If it plays with the apple and eats the rabbit, you've got a carnivore."
  • Dan Piraro
• "A pitiful fellow! Such a ridiculous kind of pity his, as those silly souls have, who would not kill an innocent chicken for the world; but when killed to their hands, are always the most greedy devourers of it."
  • Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, volume 4
• "Sooner or later, we'll all be on the menu."
  • Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone ("To Serve Man")
• "When I see bacon, I see a pig, I see a little friend, and that’s why I can’t eat it. Simple as that. But I’ll eat Linda’s veggie bacon. All her food was so good. Steve Martin came around for a barbecue once. I was grilling and he said, “Oh, no, I can’t have any of that.” I asked why not and he said, “Sorry, I’m vegetarian.” I said, “You didn’t know we are?! Everything on the grill is veggie!” He said, “Ahhh” and ate three veggie burgers and then asked where he could buy them. "
  • Paul McCartney, Animal Times interview, Fall, 1998
• "So then Mom decided my father ought to do a vegan diet, too. Well, my father grew up on a cattle ranch, but the nice thing is, my dad’s been sitting at the same dinner table for fifty-one years, and he can’t find his way around the kitchen! He’s been reying my Mom for fifty-one years to put the plate in front of him. So Mom went to the local health food store and bought hot dogs that are called “Not Dogs” and veggie burgers – which used to taste like cardboard, but now they’re really good. She can get Canadian bacon made of a wheat derivative. It’s all vegetarian. Instead of cow’s milk, it’s soy milk, rice milk, fake eggs – all that stuff! Dad just keeps cleaning his plate. Now I’ve got two vegetarian parents, and only one of them know it!"
  • Neal Barnard, M. D, Wramc Us Too, Inc Newsletter, 2003
• " For all we know that English people are/ Fed upon beef - I won't say much of beer/ Because 'tis liquor only, /and being far/ From this my subject, has no business here; / We know too, they are very fond of war,/ A pleasure - like all pleasures - rather dear;/ So were the Cretans - from which I infer/ That beef and battle both were owing her."
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan
• "Opposers of compassion urge: 'If we should live on vegetable food, what shall we do with our cattle? What would become of them? They would grow so numerous they would be prejudicial to us - they would eat us up if we did not kill and eat them!' But there is abundance of animals in the world whom men do not kill and eat; and yet we hear not of their injuring mankind, and sufficient room is found for their abode. Horses are not usually killed to be eaten, and yet we have not heard of any country overstocked with them. [...] Because some [animals] have no compassion, feeling, or reason, are we to possess no compassion, feeling, or reason?"
  • George Nicholson (1760 - 1825), Remarks on defenses of flesh-eating
• "And yet (would you believe it?) I have seen the very men who have thus boasted of their tenderness, at the same time devouring the flesh of six different animals tossed up in a fricassee. Strange contrariety of conduct! They pity, and they eat the objects of their compassion!"
  • Oliver Goldsmith, On The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith
• "I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalm'd off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion consider'd, with my [vegetarian] master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc'd some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I din'd upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."
  • Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
• "Quite rightly, we do not normally take the behaviour of animals as a model for how we may treat them. We would not, for example, justify tearing a cat to pieces because we had observed the cat tearing a mouse to pieces. Carnivorous fishes don’t have a choice about whether to kill other fish or not. They kill as a matter of instinct. Meanwhile, humans can choose to abstain from killing or eating fish and other animals. Alternatively, the argument could be made that is part of natural order that there are predators and prey, and so it cannot be wrong for us to play our part in this order. But this “argument from nature” can justify all kinds of inequities, including the rule of men over women and leaving the weak and the sick to fall by the wayside. "
  • Peter Singer, The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
• "Perhaps a man hitched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky Way will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and apologize (belatedly) to the cow."
  • Milan Kundera, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• "I was born a vegetarian. I wanted to do the shoot because I feel there is no need to cause another living thing pain or harm. There are so many other things we can eat. I have never eaten meat in my life, and I'm 5 foot 10 and not exactly wasting away. A wise man once said, 'Animals are my friends, and I'm not in the habit of eating my friends' – that is exactly how I feel"."
  • Joss Stone, in a PETA vegetarian ad
• "Nobody can come up with a good argument for eating animals — nobody can. People as some kind of a joke say, well, 'It's tasty', but it's only tasty once you garnish it and you put salt and pepper, and you cook it, and you have to do 300 things to it to disguise its true taste. If you put garnishes on a chair or fabric, it would probably taste quite nice."
  • Morrissey
• " [When asked what he would eat if he was in a desert with no food in sight except a cow ] I'd find out what the cow was eating and join it."
  • Benjamin Zephaniah
• " If beef is your idea of `real food for real people,' you'd better live real close to a real good hospital."
  • Neal Barnard, M. D
• "A dead cow or sheep lying in a pasture is recognized as carrion. The same sort of carcass dressed and hung up in a butchers stall passes as food."
  • John Harvey Kellogg, quoted by Gail Davis in Vegetarian Food for Thought
• "Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends."
  • George Bernard Shaw
• "I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants."
  • A. Whitney Brown
• " ‘Steak’ just sounds better than carcass."
  • Imar Hutchins
• "I'd rather see you drink a glass of wine than a glass of milk."
  • Jack LaLanne, Interview by Dennis Hughes, Share Guide
• "There's no such thing as soy milk. It's soy juice."
  • Lewis Black

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