Stop Eating Your Friends!

“Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends” ~George Bernard Shaw

“We all love animals. Why do we call some “pets” and others “dinner?” ~K.D. Lang

“Recognize meat for what it really is: the antibiotic- and pesticide-laden corpse of a tortured animal” ~Ingrid Newkirk

“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them” ~Samuel Butler

“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

“While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?” ~George Bernard Shaw

“Truely 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

“As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” ~Leo Tolstoy

“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

“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” ~Henry David Thoreau

“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

“I think there will come a time, and this is down the road a great many years, when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that have preceded it: the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say, ‘meat-eaters’ in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism” ~Dennis Weaver

“To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings 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 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

“A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses” ~George Bernard Shaw

“I venture to maintain that there are multitudes to whom the necessity of discharging the duties of a butcher would be so inexpressibly painful and revolting, that if they could obtain a flesh diet on no other condition, they would relinquish it forever” ~W.E.H. Lecky

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

“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

“As soon as I realized that I didn’t need meat to survive or to be in good health, I began to see how forlorn it all is. If only we had a different mentality about the drama of the cowboy and the range and all the rest of it. It’s a very romantic notion, an entrenched part of American culture, but I’ve seen, for example, pigs waiting to be slaughtered, and their hysteria and panic was something I shall never forget” ~Cloris Leachman

“A human can 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

“It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust” ~Percy Shelley

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

“To become vegetarian is to step into the stream which leads to nirvana” ~Gautama Buddha

“People think of animals as if they were vegetables, and that is not right. We have to change the way people think about animals. I encourage the Tibetan people and all people to move toward a vegetarian diet that doesn’t cause suffering” ~The Dalai Lama

“Intellectually, human beings and animals may be different, but it’s pretty obvious that animals have a rich emotional life and that they feel joy and pain. It’s easy to forget the connection between a hamburger and the cow it came from. But I forced myself to acknowledge the fact that every time I ate a hamburger, a cow had ceased to breathe and moo and walk around. There are viable (and usually better) alternatives to the use of animals for food, sport, clothing, & experimentation. I beg you to discontinue any actions that might cause or condone animal torture, abuse, or destruction” ~Moby

A veteran USDA meat inspector from Texas describes what he has seen: “Cattle dragged and choked… knocking ’em four, five, ten times. Every now and then when they’re stunned they come back to life, and they’re up there agonizing. They’re supposed to be re-stunned but sometimes they aren’t and they’ll go through the skinning process alive. I’ve worked in four large [slaughterhouses] and a bunch of small ones. They’re all the same. If people were to see this, they’d probably feel really bad about it. But in a packing house everybody gets so used to it that it doesn’t mean anything.” ~Slaughterhouse 1997

“Vegetarianism serves as the criterion by which we know that the pursuit of moral perfection on the part of humanity is genuine and sincere … If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because … its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling — Killing” ~Leo Tolstoy

“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