Some noteworthy quotations on Vegetarianism, continued:
“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

“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

I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, (quoted in You Said a Mouthful)

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.
Leo Tolstoy

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.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

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

“Killing is a denial of love. To kill or to eat what another has killed is to rejoice in cruelty. And cruelty hardens our hearts and blinds our vision, and we are unable to see that they whom we kill are our fellow brothers and sisters in the One Family of Creation.”
G.L. Rudd, author of Why Kill For Food?

“Vegetarianism is a way of life that we should
all move toward for economic survival, physical well-being and spiritual integrity.”
Father Thomas Berry, Fordham University, New York

“The earth affords a lavish supply of riches, of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter; only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass. As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.”
Pythagoras

“One who, while seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other living beings who also desire happinesss, will not find happiness hereafter.”
Lord Buddha, Dhammapada, 131

“He who has renounced all violence towards all living beings, weak or strong, who neither kills nor causes others to kill – him I do call a holy man.”
Lord Buddha, Dhammapada, 405

“Anyone familiar with the numerous accounts of the Buddha’s extraordinary compassion and reverence for living beings – for example his insistence that his monks strain the water they drink lest they inadvertently cause the death of any micro-organisms – could never believe that he would be indifferent to the sufferings of domestic animals caused by their slaughter of food”
Roshi Philip Kapleau, ‘To Cherish All Life’

“The inhabitants are numerous and happy… Throuhout the country the people do not kill any living creature, nor drink intoxicating liquor, they do not keep pigs and fowl, and do not sell live cattle; in the markets there are no butcher shops and no dealers in intoxicating drink… Only the Chandalas (lowest cast) are fisherman and hunters and sell flesh meat.”
Famous 4th century Chinese Buddhist traveller Fa-hsien, travelling in India

“I have enforced the laws against killing certain animals and many others. But the greatest progress of Righteousness among men comes from the exhortation in favour of non-injury to life and abstention from killing living things. “
Pillar Edict of King Ashoka (268-233 BC)

“To be non-violent to human beings and to be a killer or enemy of poor animals is Satan’s philosophy. In this age there is always enmity against animals, and therefore the poor creatures are always anxious. The reaction of the poor animals is being forced on human society, and therefore there is always the strain of cold or hot war between men, individually, collectively or nationally…”
His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

“For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of mind the first man touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, 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 sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? It is certainly not lions or wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us. For the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being.”
Plutarch in his essay ‘On Eating Flesh’

“If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you want to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources, unaided by cleaver or cudgel or any kind of ax.”
Plutarch

“The steam of meat darkens the light of the spirit…One hardly can have virtue when one enjoys meat meals and feasts…”
St. Basil (AD 320 – 79)

“I am full of the burnt offering of rams and the fat of fed beasts. I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of goats…Bring no more vain offerings… When you spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes though you make many prayers, and I will not hear you. For your hands are full of blood…”
Isaiah 1:11-15

“…Therefore the Lord will give you meat and you shall eat. You shall not eat one day or two days, or ten days or twenty days, but till it comes out at your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you, because you have rejected the Lord…”
Numbers 11:18-20

“…He who gives permission, he who kills the animal, he who sells the slaughtered animal, he who cooks the animal, he who administers the distribution of the flesh, and at last he who eats the flesh are all murderers and all of them are punishable under the law of karma.”
The Laws of Manu (5:51)

“Meat can never be obtained without injury to living creatures, and injury to sentient beings is detrimental to the attainment of heavenly bliss; let him therefore shun the use of meat.”
The Laws of Manu (5:48)

“Having well considered the disgusting origin of flesh and the cruelty of fettering and slaying of corporeal beings, let him entirely abstain from eating flesh.”
The Laws of Manu

“Those who never harm others by (physical deeds), by thought and speech, in whatever condition they may be, do not go to Yama’s abode. Men who harm other creatures do not go to heaven, in spite of their reciting Vedas, giving gifts, practicing austerities or performing sacrifices. Harmlessness is a great form of piety. Harmlessness alone is a great penance. Harmlessness is a great gift. This what the sages say.”
Padma Purana III 31-25-28

“…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

I won’t eat anything that has intelligent life, but I’d gladly eat a network executive or a politician.
Marty Feldman