97 Vegetarian Quotes That Will Make You Think, Cry, Laugh & Share!

Written by Steve G Johnson

Who doesn’t like quotes? They are inspiring, thought provoking, funny, sad, and even uplifting.

Drawing inspiration from a list of debt quotes I recently read by ManVsDebt, I thought I would compile a list of vegetarian quotes.

Hopefully, you will find this resource valuable. Even if you are not a vegetarian, you can still be inspired by these quotes. I’ve even highlighted a few of my favorites.

Don’t forget to follow @stevegjohnson! So, without further ado…

Charles Darwin

“The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.”
— Charles Darwin

“There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties… The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.”
— Charles Darwin

“The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.”
— Charles Darwin

George Bernard Shaw

“When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity.”
— George Bernard Shaw

“Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.”
— George Bernard Shaw

“My situation is a solemn one. Life is offered to me on condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism. My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarfs in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures.”
— George Bernard Shaw

“A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows.”
— George Bernard Shaw

“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

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

Philosophers, Naturalists And Writers

“Fork: An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.”
— Ambrose Bierce

“Most vegetarians I ever see looked enough like their food to be classified as cannibals.”
— Finley Peter Dunne

“I don’t hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality, and moral choice – and that is precisely why we are under an obligation to recognize and respect the rights of animals.”
— Brigid Brophy

“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

“I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.”
— Isaac Bashevis Singer

“‘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

“I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.”
— Oscar Wilde

“One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”
— Henry David Thoreau

“As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap the joy of love.”
— Pythagoras

“When a human being kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why then should man expect mercy from God? It is unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give.”
— Isaac Bashevis Singer

“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

“Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you anymore.”
— Franz Kafka

“Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.”
— Milan Kundera

“Even in the worm that crawls in the earth there glows a divine spark. When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter God.”
— Isaac Bashevis Singer

“Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson

“What is it that should trace the insuperable line?… The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
— Jeremy Bentham

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

“As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.”
— Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

Other Cool Old Guys

“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

“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

“Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.”
— Albert Schweitzer

“Flesh eating is unprovoked murder.”
— Ben Franklin

“A dead cow or sheep lying in the pasture is recognized as carrion. The same sort of carcass dressed and hung up in a butcher’s stall passes as food.”
— J. H. Kellogg

“Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.”
— James A. Froude

“It is certainly not lions and 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, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beautyand grace. But nothing abashed us, not the flower-like tinting of the flesh, not the persuasiveness of the harmonious voice, not the cleanliness of their habits or the unusual intelligence that may be found in the poor wretches. No, 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

“Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places.”
— Leonardo Da Vinci

“The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts… Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?”
— John Muir

“The time will come when men will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.”
— Leonardo da Vinci

“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

“It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practice elementary compassion towards our fellow creatures.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

“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

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”
— Albert Einstein

“Vegetarianism is harmless enough though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.”
— Robert Hutchison

“Life is life – whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man’s own advantage.”
— Sri Aurobindo

“How can you eat anything with eyes?”
— W.K Kellogg

Modern ‘Gurus’

“You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I’ll buy you a new car.”
— Harvey Diamond

“If you visit the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, it will brand your soul for life.”
— Howard Lyman

“The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of ‘real food for real people,’ you’d better live real close to a real good hospital.”
— Neal D. Barnard, MD

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

“The human body has no more need for cows’ milk than it does for dogs’ milk, horses’ milk, or giraffes’ milk.”
— Michael Klaper

Singers, Comedians And Other Celebrities

“We all love animals. Why do we call some ‘pets’ and others ‘dinner?’”
— k.d. lang

“A vegetarian is anybody who will not eat anything that can have children.”
— David Brenner

“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

“We don’t need to eat anyone who would run, swim, or fly away if he could.”
— James Cromwell

“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

“If you knew how meat was made, you’d probably lose your lunch.”
— k.d. lang

“I just could not stand the idea of eating meat – I really do think that it has made me calmer… People’s general awareness is getting much better, even down to buying a pint of milk: the fact that the calves are actually killed so that the milk doesn’t go to them but to us cannot really be right, and if you have seen a cow in a state of extreme distress because it cannot understand why its calf isn’t by, it can make you think a lot.”
— Kate Bush

“I was a vegetarian until I started leaning toward the sunlight.
— Rita Rudner

“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”
— Paul McCartney

Vulcans

“In the strict scientific sense we all feed on death, even vegetarians.”
— Spock

Other Notable People

“I will not eat anything that walks, runs, skips, hops or crawls. God knows that I’ve crawled on occasion, and I’m glad that no one ate me.”
— Alex Poulos

“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

“About 2,000 pounds of grains must be supplied to livestock in order to produce enough meat and other livestock products to support a person for a year, whereas 400 pounds of grain eaten directly will support a person for a year. Thus, a given quantity of grain eaten directly will feed 5 times as many people as it will if it is eaten indirectly by humans in the form of livestock products.”
— M.E. Ensminger, PhD

“Tongue – a variety of meat, rarely served because it clearly crosses the line between a cut of beef and a piece of a dead cow.”
— Bob Ekstrom

“In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people.”
— Ruth Harrison

“Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.”
— Bradley Miller

“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

“Vegetarian: a person who eats only side dishes.”
— Gerald Lieberman

“Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant? I’m halfway through my fishburger and I realize, Oh my God. I could be eating a slow learner.”
— Lynda Montgomery

“[I]t is difficult to picture the great Creator conceiving of a program of one creature (which He has made) using another living creature for purposes of experimentation. There must be other, less cruel ways of obtaining knowledge.”
— Adlai Stevenson

“There is no substitute for mother’s milk.”
— Martin H. Fischer

“Coexistence… what the farmer does with the turkey, until Thanksgiving.”
— Mike Connolly

“I’ve found without question that the best way to lead others to a more plant-based diet is by example – to lead with your fork, not your mouth.”
— Bernie Wilke

“For the most part, we carnivores do not eat other carnivores. We prefer to eat our vegetarian friends.”
— Robert Brault

“My perspective of veganism was most affected by learning that the veal calf is a by-product of dairying, and that in essence there is a slice of veal in every glass of what I had thought was an innocuous white liquid – milk.”
— Rynn Berry

“Poor animals! How jealously they guard their pathetic bodies…that which to us is merely an evening’s meal, but to them is life itself.”
— T. Casey Brennan

“I abhor vivisection. It should at least be curbed. Better, it should be abolished. I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific discovery, that could not have been obtained without such barbarism and cruelty. The whole thing is evil.”
— Charles Mayo

“If you’re not vegan, you’re not vegetarian.”
— V.L. Allineare

“Dear Lord, I’ve been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us… a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird… a social being… capable of actual affection… nuzzling its young with almost human-like compassion. Anyway, it’s dead and we’re gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family.”
— Berke Breathed

“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

“Vegetarianism can easily reach religious proportions. Refraining from meat on moral grounds serves to dignify feelings of guilt toward sad-eyed, furry creatures and substitutes righteousness for squeamishness.”
— Bill Griffith

“Think of me tonite
For that which you savor
Did it give you something real,
or could you taste the pain of my death in its flavor?”
— Wayne K. Tolson, from “Food Forethought”

Author Unknown

“Vegetarians taste better.”

“I eat everything that nature voluntarily gives: fruits, vegetables, and the products of plants. But I ask you to spare me what animals are forced to surrender: meat, milk, and cheese.”

“If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?”

“Heart attacks… God’s revenge for eating his little animal friends.”

“Do vegetarians eat animal crackers?”

“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? Did you at least make sure that none went to waste and to take a moment to be grateful for its sacrifice?”

“If we aren’t supposed to eat animals, then why are they made of meat?”

Humorous

“All normal people love meat. If I went to a barbeque and there was no meat, I would say, ‘Yo Goober! Where’s the meat?’ I’m trying to impress people here, Lisa. You don’t win friends with salad.”
— Homer Simpson

“I am not a vegetarian because I love animals. I’m a vegetarian because I hate plants.”
— A. Whitney Brown

“People are more violently opposed to fur than to leather because it’s safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.”
— Alexei Sayle

“Vegetarian – that’s an old Indian word meaning ‘lousy hunter.’
— Andy Rooney

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

Eye Opening

“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.’”
— Excerpt From Slaughterhouse

Do you have any favorites, or perhaps a quote that I missed? Please let me know in the comments below.

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1 comment

Anne Moss (@israelimom)

January 20, 2010 at 7:36 AM

Some nice ones there! I’m not sure all of them are always pro-vegetarian
Anne Moss´s last blog ..Four Healthy Vegan Sandwich Ideas

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