Some noteworthy quotations on Vegetarianism:
“Vegetarian food leaves a deep impression on our nature. If the whole world adopts vegetarianism, it can change the destiny of humankind.”
Albert Einstein
“Vegetarian food leaves a deep impression on our nature. If the whole world adopts vegetarianism, it can change the destiny of humankind.”
Albert Einstein
“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 since an early age abjured the use of meat.”
Leonardo-da-Vinci
“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
“Flesh eating is unprovoked murder.”
Benjamin Franklin
“Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. He shall eat butter and honey, so that he may know the evil from the good.”
Isaiah 7:14-15
“The eating of meat extinguishes the seed of great compassion”
Mahaparinirvana (Mahayana Version)
The 13th Century Zen Master Doyen, while visiting China, asked this question: “What must the mental attitude and daily activities of a student be when he is engaged in Buddhist meditation and practice? Ju-Ching answered that one of the things he should avoid is eating meat.
“The salvation of birds and beasts, oneself included – this is the object of Shakyamuni’s religious austerities.” Zen Master Ikkyu
“…Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat…”
Genesis 1:29
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
“Thou shalt not kill.”
Exodus 20:13
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 Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab Notes.
“One should treat animals such as deer, camels, asses, monkeys, mice, snakes, birds and flies exactly like one’s own son. How little difference there actually is between children and these innocent animals.”
Srimad Bhagavatam 7.14.9
We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing that we do. Cruelty… is a fundamental sin, and admits of no arguments or nice distinctions. If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, it protests against cruelty, is always clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us – in fact, anyone who does not join in is dubbed a crank.
Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prize 1913
“Every act of irreverence for life, every act which neglects life, which is indifferent to and wastes life, is a step towards the love of death. This choice man must make at every minute. Never were the consequences of the wrong choice as total and as irreversible as they are today. Never was the warning of the Bible so urgent: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that you and your children may live.” (Deuteronomy 30:19)
Erich Fromm
“Cruelty to animals is as if man did not love God.”
Cardinal John H. Newman
“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 (1813)
“Man did not weave the web of life: he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. To harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.”
Native American Chief (1854)
“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
“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