Quotes on Vegan

Animal Rights “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

“While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?” George Bernard Shaw “Truly 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 “If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals.” 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, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other….” Henry David Thoreau “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 “All the arguments to prove human superiority can not shatter this hard fact: in suffering, the animals are our equals.” Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation. “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, mathematician “The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different.” Hippocrates (philosopher) “How can you eat anything with eyes?” Will Kellogg “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” Paul McCartney “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 “Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.” George Bernard Shaw

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

“Every minute of every day, across the globe, 100,000 animals are slaughtered to feed the human lust for meat. This adds up to 50 billion sentient beings a year, not counting fish.” 101 Reasons Why I’m a Vegetarian (2007) ~ Pamela Rice

“The 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham challenged the world about animals with his famous quandary: “The question is not, Can they reason? Can they talk? Can they suffer?”. Curiously, science is every day discovering that in fact animals do all three: reason, communicate, and suffer. The differences between animals and humans are being blurred with every revelation. Man’s closest relatives share over 98 percent of our DNA. All animals, including man, are related by a common ancestor. Today’s question must now be, can we humans use our known capacity for logic, communication, and empathy to take animals off our plates?” 101 Reasons Why I’m a Vegetarian (2007) Pamela Rice

Human Health “When we kill the animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings.” William C. Roberts, M.D., editor of The American Journal of Cardiology

“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 Barnard

“It is a sad fact that for most heart attack victims diet alone would work, if we advocated diet in American medicine – but we don’t. The average patient who comes out of a coronary unit or a cardiologist’s office never gets hooked up to a diet program.” Dr. William P. Castelli, medical director of the Framingham Heart Study, Framingham, MA was interviewed by Cardiovascular News.

“In its World Cancer Report, published last year, the World Health Organization (WHO) quietly dropped the bombshell that 30 percent of cancers in the West can be attributed to dietary factors – placing food second only to tobacco as a preventable cause of cancer. 2.1 million lives a year could be saved. Instead of 20 million people worldwide suffering from cancer, the figure could be 14 million. Of the 10 million new cases every year, 3-million could be prevented by eating wisely. In the fight against cancer, then, the message is clear: legitimate science is leading us inexorably towards a vegan diet.” Vegan Outreach

“Three or more servings of vegetables a day — potatoes not included — reduced risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma by 40%,” stated lead researcher Linda Kelemen, RD, ScD, with the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. “Its been estimated that up to one-third of cancer are related to food we eat. That’s a lot of preventable cancers,” Kelemen said. Antioxidants in fruits and vegetables protect the body from damaging free radicals “like rust-proofing your car.”

“Findings show that a low-fat vegan diet treats type 2 diabetes more effectively than a standard diabetes diet, and may be more effective than single-agent therapy with oral diabetes drugs.” PCRM, Good Medicine

“Our epidemiological studies have shown eating about one ounce of nuts every day will reduce the risk of heart disease in the long run by 30%.” Frank Hu, MD, PhD, associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, said in July 2003.

“Vegan diet reverses diabetes symptoms. People that ate a low-fat vegan diet, cutting out all meat and dairy, lowered their blood sugar more and lost more weight than people on a standard American Diabetes Association diet.” Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest the patient in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the prevention of disease.” Thomas Edison

Ecology “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

For example, growing crops to feed farm animals requires massive amounts of water and land. Nearly half of the water and 80 percent of the agricultural land in the United States is used to raise animals for food, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

“There can be no question that more hunger can be alleviated with a given quantity of grain by completely eliminating animals (from the food production process). About 2,000 pounds of concentrates [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 (corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, etc.) 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 first fed to livestock and then is eaten indirectly by humans in the form of livestock products….”

M. E. Ensminger, Ph.D., internationally recognized animal agriculture specialist, former Department of Animal Science Chairman at Washington State University, currently President of Consultants-Agriservices, Clovis, California

“If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you can do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.” Paul McCartney

“Approximately 800 million people today live with chronic hunger, and 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes every day. Yet the world cycles nearly 43 percent of all the grain that is harvested through animals to produce meat. To get a feedlot steer to gain a pound, you need 7 pounds of corn. Likewise, additional pounds of pig, chicken, and farmed fish will cost you, respectively, 3.5, 2, and 3 pounds in feed.” 101 Reasons Why I’m a Vegetarian (2007) ~ Pamela Rice

“Global warming poses one of the most serious threats to the global environment ever faced in human history. Yet by focusing entirely on carbon dioxide emissions, major environmental organizations have failed to account for published data showing that other gases are the main culprits behind the global warming we see today. As a result, they are neglecting what might be the most effective strategy for reducing global warming in our lifetimes: advocating a vegetarian diet.” Tool Against Climate Change in Our Lifetimes by Noam Mohr

“The world is now full of advice about how to cut your greenhouse emissions. Most of it is grossly misleading. Re-examining the data published by the Australian Greenhouse Office and CSIRO, it can be seen that energy generation contributes a large amount to our emissions. But what do we do with that Energy? If you take a deeper look at the uses of that energy, it emerges that over 30% of our emissions are caused by animal industries.”

“Without any other expensive changes to our infrastructure, by the simple expedient of becoming vegetarian, we could reduce our overall greenhouse gas emissions by 30%. What is more, with the land freed up being returned to native forest, we could extract carbon from the atmosphere equal to the other 70%! That is a 100% reduction with no financial cost. ” Diet and the Atmosphere by Bruce Poon, Melbourne, Australia