Food for Thought: 15 Quotations on Vegetarianism

Beautiful fresh green veg is real food...

Sometimes I remember that I myself have eaten meat (albeit reluctantly) as a child and I think how lucky our kids are that they haven't had to go through this; but I worry they take it for granted, having known nothing else: never having had to experience the utter revulsion of finding a vein in a chicken breast or scales in a fish finger, is their rejection of meat as complete as mine? They have all always expressed strongly that they would not want to eat meat or eggs and their diets are now their own choice... but their more favourable situation has not forced them to think and feel their way through the moral and spiritual implications of meat- eating with quite the urgency and vehemence that I had to. Here are a few quotes from famous vegetarians that I hope my kids will read and remember:

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.  ~ Sir Paul McCartney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vegetarianism is a link to perfection and peace. ~River Phoenix 

"Perhaps a man hitched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky Way will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and apologize (belatedly) to the cow."~ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

"Nobody can come up with a good argument for eating animals — nobody can. People as some kind of a joke say, well, 'It's tasty', but it's only tasty once you garnish it and you put salt and pepper, and you cook it, and you have to do 300 things to it to disguise its true taste. If you put garnishes on a chair or fabric, it would probably taste quite nice." ~Morrissey

" [When asked what he would eat if he was in a desert with no food in sight except a cow ] I'd find out what the cow was eating and join it." ~Benjamin Zephaniah

 "Those who kill animals and give them unnecessary pain-as people do in slaughterhouses-will be killed in a similar way in the next life and in many lives to come...In the Judeo-Christian scriptures, it is stated clearly 'Thou shalt not kill.' Nonetheless, giving all kinds of excuses, even the heads of religion indulge in killing animals and, at the same time, try to pass as saintly persons. This mockery and hypocrisy in human society brings about unlimited calamities such as great war, where masses of people go out onto the battlefields and kill each other. Presently they have discovered the nuclear bomb, which is simply waiting to be used for wholesale destruction." Such are the effects of karma. ~AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Maharaja ("Srila Prabhupada"), commentary on Bhagavad Gita

If you would like to read some compelling arguments in favour of vegetarianism, click here.

Sources: http://www.quotegarden.com/             http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/vegetarianism.html#slE4IHHFjvESJ0jy.99 
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vegetarianism