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

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

How can you eat anything with eyes?  ~Will Kellogg

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

Vegans plant goodwill.  ~Terri Guillemets

Thanksgiving dinner’s sad and thankless
Christmas dinner’s dark and blue
When you stop and try to see it
From the turkey’s point of view.
~Shel Silverstein, "Point of View"

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

If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?  ~Author Unknown

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

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

This is the way Americans want to think of pigs.  Real-life "Babes" see no sun in their limited lives, with no hay to lie on, no mud to roll in.  The sows live in tiny cages, so narrow they can’t even turn around.  They live over metal grates, and their waste is pushed through slats beneath them and flushed into huge pits.  ~Morley Safer, "Pork Power," 60 Minutes, 19 September 1997

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, quoted in Joanne Stepaniak, The Vegan Sourcebook, 1998

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

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

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

I was a vegetarian until I started leaning toward the sunlight.  ~Rita RudnerCOCI

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

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

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

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

We all love animals.  Why do we call some "pets" and others "dinner?"  ~k.d. lang

Vegetarian:  A person who eats only side dishes.  ~Gerald LiebermanNEMYL

There is no substitute for mother’s milk.  ~Martin H. FischerFFM

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

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

Vegetarians taste better.  ~Author Unknown

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, Bloom County Babylon

Vegetarianism is harmless enough though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.  ~Robert Hutchison, address to the British Medical Association, 1930DCMOO

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, Griffith Observatory comic strip, 1977HHQ

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

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

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"

Fork: An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s DictionaryHHQ

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