"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

"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

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men."
- Leonard Da Vinci

"Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: We are burial places."
- Leonardo Da Vinci

"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

"It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind."
- 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

"Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more."
- Franz Kafka

"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

"Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, should we know better?"
- Peter Cheeke

"To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the suffering 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 (Now Millions) 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 (1915 Nobel Prize)

"Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rates of coronary disease of any group in the country...Some people scoff at vegetarians, but they have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate. They outlive other men by about six years now."
- Dr.William Castelli, M.D.

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 (6th Century BC)

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

"Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends."
- George Bernard Shaw

"We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Honourable men may honourably disagree about some details of of human treatment of the non-human, but vegetarianism is now as necessary pledge of moral devotion as was the refusal of emperor-worship in the early church...Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no claim to be serious moralists."
- Stephen Clark

"As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out."
- Alice Walker

"The animals, you say, were "sent" for man's free use and nutriment. Pray, then, inform me, and be candid, why came they ions before man did, to spend long centuries on earth awaiting their devourer's birth? Those ill-timed chattels, sent from heaven, were, sure, the maddest gift ever given "sent" for man's use (can man believe it?) when there was no man to receive it!"
- Henry Salt (1851-1939)

"But to deliver animals to be slaughtered and cooked, and thus be filled with murder, not for the sake of nutriment and satisfying the wants of nature, but making pleasure and gluttony the end of such conduct is transcendently iniquitous and dire!"
- Porphyry (233-304)

"All living beings love their life, desire pleasure, and are averse to pain; they dislike any injury to themselves; everybody is desirous of life, and to every being, his life is very dear" This is the quintessence of wisdom: Not to injure any living being."
- Lord Mahavira (599-527 BC)

"The eating of meat extinguishes the great seed of compassion."
- Buddha (563-483 BC)

"In 1968 I became a vegetarian after realizing that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry and unhappy like we do."
- Cesar Chavez