Quotes

Live Lightly so others may live.

"If slaughterhouses had glass walls the whole world would be vegetarian." Linda McCartney

Peace begins in the kitchen: Go vegetarian.

"Hunting... the least honourable form of war on the weak."
Paul Richard (1828-1896)

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

"Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is - whether its victim is human or animal - we cannot expect things to be much better in this world... We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity."
Rachel Carson

From the book Utopia: "In all the round world there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses."
H. G. Wells

"The human species is driving itself full speed into an evolutionary dead-end. We are destroying the planet and everything we do kills animals. We have lost our moral compass. We think in terms of profit and power rather than ethics and compassion. We no longer have any reverence for life or any sense of connection with the natural world. We see ourselves as conquerors of nature rather than citizens of a vast biocommunity. We are technologically sophisticated and morally retarded. We have no conception of the importance of non-human life forms in sustaining ecosystems. We fail to realise that what we do to animals, we do to ourselves. And all the while, we live in a fantasy land of entertainment and distractions whereby we focus more on the sex lives and surgical makeovers of movie stars than the greatest challenge our species has ever faced. I believe that animal liberation is the next great liberation movement on this planet, and that by promoting respect for non-human animals, we are advancing human moral evolution." Steve Best

"Animal liberation is also human liberation. Animal liberationists care about the quality of life for all. We recognize our kinship with all feeling beings. We identify with the powerless and the vulnerable * the victims, all those dominated, oppressed and exploited. And it is the non-human animals whose suffering is the most intense, widespread, expanding, systematic and socially sanctioned of all."
Henry Spira (1927-1998)

"As custodians of the planet it is our responsibility to deal with all species with kindness, love and compassion. That these animals suffer through human cruelty is beyond understanding. Please help to stop this madness."
Richard Gere

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
Martin Luther King, Jr

"One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them."
Martin Luther King, Jr

"Cowardice asks the question 'Is it safe?', expediency asks the question 'Is it politic?', vanity asks the question 'Is it popular?'. But conscience asks the question 'Is it right?' and there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right."
Martin Luther King, Jr

"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

Mercy to animals means mercy to mankind.
-Henry Bergh

nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

The lives of animals are woven into our very being -closer than our own breathing-and our souls will suffer when they are gone.
-Gary Kowalski

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

Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are like us." Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are not like us." Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction.
~Charles R. Magel

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
~William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays, 1922

The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but rather, "Can they suffer?"
~Jeremy Bentham

No one in the world needs a mink coat but a mink.
~Murray Banks

Cruelty is one fashion statement we can all do without.
~Rue McClanahan

Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they're in the game.
~Paul Rodriguez

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
~C.S. Lewis

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.
~Henry David Thoreau

I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.
~Ellen DeGeneres

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of a gun.
~P.G. Wodehouse

If you love animals called pets, why do you eat animals called dinner?
~As seen on a shirt at veganstore.com

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.
~Mark Twain, What Is Man, 1906

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
~Alice Walker

As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer 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

When I was twelve, I went hunting with my father and we shot a bird. He was laying there and something struck me. Why do we call this fun to kill this creature [who] was as happy as I was when I woke up this morning.
~Marv Levy

Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more.
~Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons, 1953

Lisa: "Do we have any food that wasn't brutally slaughtered?"
Homer: "Well, I think the veal died of loneliness."

~Matt Groening, The Simpsons

Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.
~George Bernard Shaw

I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't.... The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.
~Mark Twain

The basis of all animal rights should be the Golden Rule: we should treat them as we would wish them to treat us, were any other species in our dominant position.
~Christine Stevens

If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth - beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals - would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals?
~Attributed to George Bernard Shaw

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
~George Bernard Shaw

I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures.
~Christian Barnard, surgeon

The life spark in my eyes is in no way different than the life spark in the eyes of any other sentient being.
~Michael Stepaniak, quoted in Joanne Stepaniak, The Vegan Sourcebook, 1998

Wear your own skin.
~As seen on a shirt at pangeaveg.com

There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.
~Isaac Bashevis Singer

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
~Thomas A. Edison

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
~Schopenhauer

"But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy."
-Plutarch

Put a small child in a playpen with an apple and a bunny. If s/he eats the apple and plays with the bunny, s/he's normal;but if s/he eats the bunny and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car. Somewhere along the line we must have been TAUGHT to do the wrong thing.
--Maynard

"All beings tremble before violence. All fear death, all love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?"
-Buddha

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. -- One does not meet one's self until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.
-Loren Eisley

Truly man is the king of beast for his brutality excedes theirs. We live by the death of others. We are burial places.
- Leonardo Da Vinci

"He that killeth an ox is as if he slew a man..."
-Isaiah 66:3

Iam the voice of the voiceless;
Through me the dumb shall speak,
Till the deaf world's ears be made to hear
The wrongs of the wordless weak.
And I am my brothers keeper,
And I will fight his fights;
And speak the words for beast and bird
Till the world shall set things right.
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumes flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle: these are our brothers. All things are connected like the blood which unites one's family.
-Chief Seattle

To be nobody but yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night
and day, to make you like everybody else, means to fight the hardest
battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
(E E Cummings)

"Ïnjustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"
Martin Luther King

"Being a vegan means nothing died for me today."
Anon

Go vegan! Break the cycle of violence

Vegan kids * non-violence begins at home

Turn your back on violence * Go vegan!

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."
Edmund J Burke

"Those who claim to care about the well-being of human beings and the preservation of our environment should become vegetarians for that reason alone. They would thereby increase the amount of grain available to feed people elsewhere, reduce pollution, save water and energy, and cease contributing to the clearing of forests."
"When non-vegetarians say that 'human problems come first' I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals."
- Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 1990.

"Our complex global economy is built upon millions of small, private acts of psychological surrender, the willingness of people to acquiesce in playing their assigned parts as cogs in the great social machine that encompasses all other machines. They must shape themselves to the prefabricated identities that make efficient coordination possible... that capacity for self-enslavement must be broken."
(Theodore Roszak - The Voice Of The Earth)