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Vegetarianism Vegetarianism Flesh eating is unprovoked murder. (Ben Franklin) A man of spiritual intensity does not eat corpses. (George Bernard Shaw) Behold I have given you herb yielding seed. To you it shall be for meat. (Bible, Genesis l:29) -1- The whole creation is the temple of God. There is no place where He is not. In minerals life is sleeping; in plants life is dreaming; in birds and animals life is awakening; and in man life is awake. As such we are brothers of all creatures, of plants, of birds and animals. So the flowers and trees, sparrows and doves are as members of our own order. How simple, pure, loving and beautiful they are! We should love all. We should live in fellowship with all creatures, with all life. One must not interfere with the life of any animal in God's creation. (Sant Kirpal Singh, Portrait of Perfection , 143) 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. (Dostoyevsky) All creatures are God’s children, and those dearest to God are those who treat his children kindly. (Mohammed) -2- Pity is always one and the same feeling that you have, be it for an animal, for a man or for a tree. (Leo Tolstoy) When man feels compassion towards all living beings, then he will be noble. (Buddha) I do not like eating meat because I have seen lambs and pigs killed. I saw and felt their pain. They felt the approaching death. I could not bear it. I cried like a child. I ran up a hill and could not breathe. I felt that I was choking. I felt the death of the lamb. (Vaslav Nijinsky) He who harms animals has not understood or renounced deeds of sin. Those whose minds are at peace and who are free from passions do not desire to live at the expense of others. (Acharanga Sutra) Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel, and brutal taking of life. (Dick Gregory) -3- If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian. (Paul McCartney) A country or civilization can be judged by the way it treats its animals. (Mahatma Gandhi) Recognize meat for what it really is: the antibiotic and pesticide-laden corpse of a tortured animal. (Ingrid Newkirk) If you visit the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, it will brand your soul for life. (Howard Lyman) The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable. (Thomas More) Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals. (Theodor Adorno) -4- The butcher with his bloody apron incites bloodshed, murder. Why not? From cutting the throat of a young calf to cutting the throat of our brothers and sisters is but a step. While we are ourselves the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal conditions on the earth? (Isadora Duncan) 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 likewise with their fellow men. (St. Francis of Assisi) The question is not, “Can animals reason?” nor, “Can animals talk?” but, “Can animals suffer? (Jeremy Bentham) To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body. (Mahatma Gandhi) 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) -5- You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity. (Ralph Waldo Emerson) The destruction of animals for food, in its details and tendencies, involves so much cruelty as to cause every reflecting individual – not destitute of the ordinary sensibilities of nature – to shudder. (William A. Alcott) I like animals, all animals. I wouldn’t hurt a cat or a dog or a chicken or a cow. And I wouldn’t ask someone else to hurt them for me. That’s why I’m a vegetarian. (Peter Dinklage) Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. 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 will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men. (Leonardo da Vinci) 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. (Margi Clark) -6- 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 slaughterhouse. (Jane Goodall) Thousands-millions and billions-of animals are killed for food. That is very sad. We human beings can live without meat, especially in our modern world. We have a great variety of vegetables and other supplementary foods, so we have the capacity and the responsibility to save billions of lives. I have seen many individuals and groups promoting animal rights and following a vegetarian diet. This is excellent. (Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama) Life remains immoral or only falsely moral, if there is cruelty and killing for the satisfaction of our daily needs. (Swami Avyaktananda) "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. (Leo Tolstoy) -7- Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? (Plutarch) I, for my part, wonder of what sort of feeling, mind or reason that man was possessed who was first to pollute his mouth with gore, and allow his lips to touch the flesh of a murdered being; who spread his table with the mangled forms of dead bodies, and claimed as daily food and dainty dishes what but now were beings endowed with movement, with perception and with voice. For the sake of some little mouthful of flesh we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that portion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy. (Plutarch) -8- Just as in our days, combats of gladiators, torture of prisoners, and other atrocities are held to be scandalous and shameful, while in earlier times they were thought quite justifiable and right, so in the future will be the murder of animals, to feed upon their corpses, be pronounced to be immoral and indefensible. (Wilhelm Zimmermann, 1819-1885) Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends. (George Bernard Shaw) Would you kill your pet dog or cat to eat it? How about an animal you're not emotionally attached to? Is the thought of slaughtering a cow or chicken or pig with your own hands too much to handle? Instead, would hiring a hit-man to do the job give you enough distance from the emotional discomfort? What animal did you put a contract out on for your supper last night? (Unknown) -9- Flesh-eating by humans is unnecessary, irrational, anatomically unsound, unhealthy, unhygienic, uneconomic, unaesthetic, unkind and unethical. May I elaborate? (Helen Nearing) No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. (Henry David Thoreau) A vegetarian is a person who won't eat anything that can have children. (David Brenner) To become vegetarian is to step into the stream which leads to nirvana. (Buddha) -10- All God's creatures are God's family. (Mohammed) Poor little innocent creatures, if you were reasoning beings and could speak, how you would curse us! For we are the cause of your death, and what have you done to deserve it? (Saint Richard of Wyche) If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth - beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals - would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals? (George Bernard Shaw) I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
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