quotations about vegetarianism
From a purely outsider's point of view, vegetarians are a confusing lot. I have vegetarian friends who eat fish. I have vegetarian friends who eschew beef bouillon but who eat chicken. I have vegetarian friends (not many) who become indignant when it becomes clear I do not appreciate the purity of their diet: they do not drink milk, eat cheese, eggs or bird's nests, and only wear the hides of freshly slaughtered polyesters.
CHERYL PECK
Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs
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.
CALDWELL ESSELSTYN
Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease
I refuse to eat animals because I cannot nourish myself by the sufferings and by the death of other creatures.
EDGAR KUPFER-KOBERWITZ
Animals, My Brethren
Vegetarians, dropping meat, tend to fill up with too much starch. This leaves them no more healthy than meat-eaters, with constipation, indigestion, colds, catarrhs, coughs and chest complaints to plague them. Eating sparingly of breads, cakes, crackers, cookies, macaroni, spaghetti, anything largely starch, is a far step on the road to good health.
HELEN NEARING
Simple Food for the Good Life
Some people think vegetarianism is an extremist suppression of sensual passion. That is an obstacle.
ZHANG SI
"Using Vegetarianism to Put Animal Welfare on the Table", Sixth Tone, April 7, 2017
All normal people love meat. If I went to a barbecue and there was no meat, I'd say, "Yo Goober! Where's the meat?" I'm trying to impress people here, Lisa. You don't win friends with salad.
HOMER SIMPSON
The Simpsons
You're thinking I'm one of those wise-ass California vegetarians who is going to tell you that eating a few strips of bacon is bad for your health. I'm not. I say its a free country and you should be able to kill yourself at any rate you choose, as long as your cold dead body is not blocking my driveway.
SCOTT ADAMS
Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!
Sunday dinner isn't sunny
Easter feasts are just bad luck
When you see it from the viewpoint
Of a chicken or a duck.
SHEL SILVERSTEIN
"Point of View", Vegetarian Times, November 1982
I advance no exaggerated or fanciful claim for Vegetarianism. It is not, as some have asserted, a "panacea" for human ills; it is something much more rational -- an essential part of the modern humanitarian movement, which can make no true progress without it. Vegetarianism is the diet of the future, as flesh-food is the diet of the past.
HENRY S. SALT
"The Humanities of Diet", Ethical Vegetarianism
Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demiglace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.
ANTHONY BOURDAIN
Kitchen Confidential
I'm a postmodern vegetarian -- I eat meat ironically.
BILL BAILEY
Part Troll
Nothing compares with a cafe that feels like home. But that kind of cafe can be tough to find when you're a vegetarian.
MYCHEL MATTHEWS
"Eating veggies in meat-and-potatoes country", Twin Falls Times-News, April 4, 2017
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
On Civil Disobedience
Were all members of the animal kingdom, Leave your brothers and sisters in the sea.
PRINCE
"Animal Kingdom", The Truth
The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled.
MARY MIDGLEY
Animals and Why They Matter
Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
BIBLE
Genesis 1:29
It is a cruel folly to offer up to ostentation so many lives of creatures, as make up the state of our treats; as it is a prodigal one to spend more in sauce than in meat.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Anyone who lives in the fantasy world that vegetarianism is taking over needs to give their head a shake, meat lovers are ever increasing their consumption. U.S. Beef Production is projected to be 26.564 billion pounds in 2017, up 2.8 billion pounds from 2015.
JIM LONG
"Pork Commentary: US -- No Shortage of Meat Protein", The Pig Site, April 25, 2017
Vegetables contain more nutriment than an equal amount of dead flesh. This will sound a surprising and incredible statement to many people, because they have been brought up to believe that they cannot exist unless they defile themselves with flesh, and this delusion is so widely spread that it is difficult to awaken the average man from it.
C. W. LEADBEATER
Vegetarianism and Occultism
The repugnance I have come to feel about eating such animals is an extension of what I would feel about eating my pet cat rather than the product of some calculation of quanta of suffering.
THOMAS WELLS
"The Incoherence of Peter Singer's Utilitarian Argument for Vegetarianism", ABC Online, October 25, 2016