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 from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men. -- Leonardo da Vinci

Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child, as it is to the caterpillar. -- Bradley Miller

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

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

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we ever expect ideal conditions on earth. -- George Bernard Shaw

Men dig their graves with their own teeth and die by those fated instruments more than the weapons of their enemies. -- Thomas Moffett

You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car. -- Harvey Diamond

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay. -- George Bernard Shaw

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you anymore. -- Franz Kafka (to the fishes in his aquarium)

When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. -- Ingrid Newkirk

If experiments on animals were abandoned on grounds of compassion, mankind would have made a fundamental advance. -- Richard Wagner

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

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

It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery. -- Percy Bysshe Shelley

What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit for their cruelty. -- Leo Tolstoy

I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. -- Ecclesiastes

Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. -- St. Francis of Assisi

I will not eat anything that walks, runs, skips, hops or crawls. God knows that I've crawled on occasion, and I'm glad that no one ate me. -- Alex Poulos

I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open. -- Dean Ornish, M.D.

I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual improvement to leave off eating animals. -- Henry David Thoreau

Your choice of diet can influence your long term health prospects more than any other action you might take. -- Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop

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

If you have men who will exclude any of god's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewisewith their fellow men. -- St. Francis of Assisi

Basically we should stop doing those things that are destructive to the environment, other creatures, and ourselves and figure out new ways of existing. -- Moby

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. -- Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. -- John F. Kennedy

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

Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends. -- George Bernard Shaw

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. -- German Composer Richard Wagner

Ethics has not only to do with mankind but with the animal creation as well. This is witnessed in the purpose of St. Francis of Assisi. Thus we shall arrive that ethics is reverence for all life. This is the ethic of love widened universally. It is the ethic of Jesus now recognized as a necessity of thought...Only a universal ethic, which embraces every living creature can put us in touch with the universe and the will which is there manifest... -- Albert Schweitzer

There is just no reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. Man can live without meat. -- The Dalai Lama

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. -- Mark Twain

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

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

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

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 (now billions) 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 1915

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

To become vegetarian is to step into the stream which leads to nirvana. -- Buddha

40 years ago on the set of Gunsmoke I read the book The Holy Science. Since then I have not eaten meat. -- Dennis Weaver

Since visiting the abbatoirs of S. France I have stopped eating meat. -- Vincent Van Gogh (in a letter to his brother Theodore)

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

I feel very deeply about vegetarianism and the animal kingdom. It was my dog Boycott who led me to question to right of humans to eat other sentient beings. -- Cesar Chavez (pacifist head of the United Farm Workers)

Nonviolence is not just abstention from war, fighting, or animal flesh. It is abstention from negative thoughts and negative speech. -- Nathaniel Altman

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

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them, that's the essence of inhumanity. -- Isaac Bashevis Singer

We pray on Sundays that we may have light/To guide our footsteps on the path we tread;/We are sick of war, we don't want to fight,/And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead. -- George Bernard Shaw

It is man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man. -- Dr. Albert Schweitzer--Nobel 1952

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

Our task must be to free ourselves... widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. -- Albert Einstein

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

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian. -- Paul McCartney

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalist for the same reasons. -- C. S. Lewis

Among the noblest in the land - Though man may count himself the least - That man I honor and revere, Who without favor, without fear, In the great city dares to stand, The friend of every friendless beast. --Henry W. Longfellow

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

In 1997 alone 36.3 million cattle, 1.58 million veal calves, 92.0 million pigs, 3.91 million sheep and lamb, 22.0 million ducks, 290.2 million turkeys, and 7,903.5 million chickens were slaughtered in the US. 25 million animals were killed each day OR 293 per second. -- National Agricultural Statistics Service

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

Meat and other animal products (dairy and eggs) accumulate "fat soluble toxins" (which are the toxins we are most concerned with. Water-soluble toxin are excreted easily.) If you wish to detoxify, you must avoid commercial meat and animal products! (In his "Diet for a New America" John Robbins quotes a study that found the breast milk of mothers eating a Standard American Diet (SAD) contained one hundred times more pesticides than that found in the milk of vegetarians, and indeed this milk is not really fit to ingest.) Fat-soluble toxins accumulate up the food chain.

Dr. Hagiwara quotes a Japanese dietary ecologist who, like Robbins, warns the only way to avoid a worldwide food crisis will be to improve the efficiency of food production by revamping our meat-based system of agriculture. As a comparison, he notes that one cow requires grass from ten acres of land, and for X amount of time, this one cow will feed 30 people. "The arithmetic of this waste is stunning... During the same time that that cow is sustaining those 30 lives, the protein which could be harvested directly from barley leaves grown on that ten acres of land would sustain 300 lives."