Veg*anismo

Section: Citazioni
Subsection: Veg*anismo
Last revision: 25 Dicembre 2005

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

You can't eat your friends and have them too. -- Franz Kafka

If you could see or feel the suffering you wouldn't think twice. Give back life. Don't eat meat. -- Kim Basinger

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends. -- George Bernard Shaw

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

I went snorkeling and noticed how gently the fish welcomed us into their world... as compared to the violence with which we welcomed them into ours. I became a vegetarian. -- Syndee Brinkman

My respect and empathy towards animals includes sea dwellers too -- from dolphins to fish to lobsters. So, of course, I wouldn't dream of eating them. -- Alexandra Paul

We stopped eating meat many years ago. During the course of a Sunday lunch we happened to look out of the kitchen window at our young lambs playing happily in the fields. Glancing down at our plates, we suddenly realised we were eating the leg of an animal who had until recently been playing in a field herself. We looked at each other and said: - Wait a minute, we love these sheep-they're such gentle creatures. So why are we eating them? - It was the last time we ever did. -- Paul and Linda McCartney

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. -- Leonardo Da Vinci

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

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. We feel better about ourselves and better about the animals, knowing we're not contributing to their pain. -- Paul and Linda McCartney

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

Heifer whines could be human cries
Closer comes the screaming knife
This beautiful creature must die
This beautiful creature must die
A death for no reason
And death for no reason is MURDER
-- The Smiths

Suppose that tomorrow 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 they have the right to treat you as you treat the animals you breed, keep and kill for food? -- John Harris

The human commitment to harmony, justice, peace, and love is ironic as long as we continue to support the suffering and shame of the slaughterhouse and its satellite operations. -- Karen Davis, PhD

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 Singer

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 (6th century BC)

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 Singer

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

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 grew up in cattle country--that's why I became a vegetarian. Meat stinks, for the animals, the environment, and your health. -- K.D. Lang

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

We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear. -- Robert Louis Stevenson

A human can 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

If any kid ever realized what was involved in factory farming they would never touch meat again. I was so moved by the intelligence, sense of fun and personalities of the animals I worked with on 'Babe' that by the end of the film I was a vegetarian. -- James Cromwell

We should live in harmony with Earth not conquer it.. or the animals. The other members of the National Football League say I'm in the minority.. but they are. A majority of the world is vegetarian. -- Former Pittsburgh Steeler and NY Giant football Player Glenn Scolnick

I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants. -- A. Whitney Brown

40 years ago on the set of Gunsmoke I read the book The Holy Science. Since then I have not eaten meat. -- Dennis Weaver

The awful cruelty and terror to which tens of thousands of animals killed for human food are subjected in traveling long distances by ship and rail and road to the slaughterhouses of the world. God disapproves of all cruelty.. whether to man or beast. The occupation of slaughtering animals is brutalising to those who are required to do the work.... I believe this matter is well worthy of the serious consideration of Christian leaders. -- Mrs. Booth and General Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army

I would not want to get to know a pig very well if I intended to eat him. -- Pat Leigh

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 (from Utopia)

Since visiting the abatoirs of S. France I have stopped eating meat. -- Vincent Van Gogh

Thousands of animals (now billions) are butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. It cries vengeance upon all the human race. -- Romain Rolland

I spoke often in Congress against the war in Vietnam. and commented on congresspersons hiding from the reality of war by saying 'many eat the meat but few go to the slaughterhouse'. I said it so often I became a vegetarian. -- Rep. Andrew Jacobs.. formerly of Indianapolis

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. -- Henry David Thoreau

Compassion is the foundation of everything positive, everything good. If you carry the power of compassion to the marketplace and the dinner table, you can make your life really count. -- Rue McClanahan

It is strange to hear people talk of Humanitarianism, who are members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to children and animals, and who claim to be God-loving men and women, but who, nevertheless, encourage by their patronage the killing of animals merely to gratify the cravings of appetite. -- Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish

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

This [video footage from the movie Babe] 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

Can one regard a fellow creature as a property item, an investment, a piece of meat, an "it", without degenerating into cruelty towards that creature? -- Karen Davis, PhD

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 restunned 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

A dead cow or sheep lying in the pasture is recognized as carrion. The same sort of carcass dressed and hung up in a butchers stall passes as food. -- J. H. Kellogg

When I was old enough to realize all meat was killed, I saw it as an irrational way of using our power, to take a weaker thing and mutilate it. It was like the way bullies would take control of younger kids in the schoolyard -- River Phoenix

I've always felt somewhat out of place with other kids my own age. I was constantly reminded by people's reaction to our names and our diet that we seemed weird to them. -- River Phoenix

I think there will come a time, and this is down the road a great many years, when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that have preceded it: the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say, 'meat-eaters!' in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism. -- Dennis Weaver

Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, should we know better? -- Peter Cheeke

Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics. -- Peter Singer

The closer you can live to being a vegetarian the better. -- Gary Player

Not that I say, "Oh,I'm not going to associate with certain people.," but I have my world,and I only want to be around people who I feel stimulated by. I have to be honest I do have a new quest: I want to meet more vegetarians, people who are more like minded. There's something real neat about that feeling. It makes you feel so settled to know there's somebody else sitting right there, being so passionate about what i'm passionate about. I don't want to be around selfish people. I try to keep myself surrounded by deep people who will move me. -- Alicia Silverstone

I was sitting here eating my plate of chicken salad, and suddenly I looked down and saw all the meat on my plate and just wasn't hungry anymore. So I've decided I'm not going to eat meat. -- Shiri Appleby

I think there's something odd about eating another living anything. -- Shania Twain

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

Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughter houses. -- Ingrid Newkirk

I never eat anyone I know personally. I wouldn't eat a grouper any more than I'd eat a cocker spaniel. They're so good-natured, so curious. You know, fish really are sensitive, they have personalities, they hurt when they're wounded. -- Sylvia Earle, former chief scientist of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

So you are the people tearing down the Brazilian rainforest and breeding cattle. -- Prince Philip to McDonald's of Canada

We pray on Sundays that we may have light/To guide our footsteps on the path we tread;/We are sick of war, we don't want to fight,/And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead. -- George Bernard Shaw

Vegetarian food leaves a deep impression on our nature. If the whole world adopts vegetarianism, it can change the destiny of humankind. -- Albert Einstein

I do feel that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants. -- Gandhi

Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places! I have since an early age abjured the use of meat. -- Leonardo da Vinci

Flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to moral feeling: killing. By killing, man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity, that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. -- Leo Tolstoy

As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields. -- Leo Tolstoy

My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chided for my singularity, but, with this lighter repast, I made the greater progress, for greater clearness of  head and quicker comprehension -- Benjamin Franklin

Flesh eating is unprovoked murder. -- Benjamin Franklin

Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food. -- God (Genesis 1:29)

Not having known anything better does not alleviate the suffering of the animal. Its fundamental desires remain and it is the frustration of those desires that is a great part of its suffering. There are so many examples: the dairy cow who is never allowed to raise her young, the battery hen who can never walk or stretch her wings, the sow who can never build a nest or root for food in the forest litter, etc. Eventually we frustrate the animal's most fundamental desire of all - to live. -- David Cowles-Hamar.

Awareness is bad for the meat business. Conscience is bad for the meat business. Sensitivity to life is bad for the meat business. DENIAL, however, the meat business finds indispensable. -- John Robbins, Diet for a New America

The earth affords a lavish supply of riches, of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter; only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass. As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love. -- Pythagoras

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:

Refrain at all times from such foods as cannot be procured without violence and oppression. -- Thomas Tryon

To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime. -- Romain Rolland, author, Nobel Prize 1915

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

In their behaviour toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought. -- Isaac Bashevis Singer

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 others when they came into contact with the more civilised. -- Henry David Thoreau

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

To me, veganism is an ultimately imperfect but rational decision to repudiate the cruel, ruthless mass exploitation of animals by modern agribusiness and not benefit by unnecessary cruelty and death. The question, in our society at least, is not what is natural but what is least harmful - to animals, health and environment.  Sure, eating meat the way indigenous people practised it was 'natural', was necessary for survival, but how many in our society would seriously consider chasing game with stone-age implements and living in a bark humpy? Judging by indigenous lifestyles, veganism cannot be called 'natural', but neither can buying a cellophane-wrapped lump of chemically-laced muscle from a genetically-engineered factory farmed animal encased in a flourescent-lit supermarket display. What is true in our artifical, technologically-cocooned, sedentary society is that a diet rich in fibre, vitamins, Omega 3 fatty acids, anti-oxidents and phytoestrogens (to name a few), and low in saturated fat, sodium, harmful bacteria, chemical residues and without cholesterol, i.e. a plant-based or VEGAN diet, is much better for human health, takes much less land and agricultural inputs (water, fuel, etc.) to produce equivalent food value, and causes, by far, the least amount of cruelty to animals. This may not be 'natural', but it is certainly a lot saner, sustainable and compassionate than the alternative.  And if we humans cannot use our gift of intelligence to better our lives and our world, then we do not deserve it. -- Thomas Perry

As happened with tobacco, health warnings about meat eating are multiplying, and awareness of the environmental effects of meat production is rising. Just as cigarettes lost their allure, meat is losing its social cachet in some countries. Food marketers in the United Kingdom estimate that 2 million people in that country are strict vegetarians. -- Alan B. Durning and Holly B. Brough

For most humans, especially for those in modern urban and suburban communities, the most direct form of contact with nonhuman animals is at meal time: we eat them.... The use and abuse of animals raised for food far exceeds, in sheer numbers of animals affected, any other kind of mistreatment. -- Peter Singer

I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It's like...you're just eating misery. You're eating a bitter life. -- Alice Walker

Yet saddest of all fates, surely, is to have lost that sense of the holiness of life altogether; that we commit the blasphemy of bringing thousands of lives to a cruel and terrifying death or of making those lives a living death -- and feel nothing. -- The Right Reverend John Austin Baker, Bishop of Salisbury

I brainwashed youngsters into doing wrong. I want to say sorry to children everywhere for selling out to concerns who make millions by murdering animals. -- Geoffrey Guiliano, the main Ronald McDonald actor in the 1980's who quit and publicly apologised

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

It is in the battery shed that we find the parallel with Auschwitz... To shut your mind, heart and imagination from the sufferings of others is to begin slowly, but inexorably, to die. Those Christians who close their minds and hearts to the cause of animal welfare, and the evils it seeks to combat, are ignoring the Fundamental spiritual teachings of Christ himself -- John Baker, Bishop of Salisbury

The butcher relenteth not at the bleating of the lamb; neither is the heart of the cruel moved with distress. But the tears of the compassionate are sweeter than dew-drops, falling from roses on the bosom of spring. -- Akhenaton

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

Those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed have no right to be shielded from the slaughterhouse or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy. If it is distasteful for humans to think about, what can it be like for the animals to experience it? -- Peter Singer

My dream is that people will come to view eating an animal as cannibalism. -- Henry Spira

The animals you eat are not those who devour others; you do not eat the carnivorous beasts, you take them as your pattern. You only hunger after sweet and gentle creatures who harm no one, which follow you, serve you, and are devoured by you as the reward of their service -- John Jacques Rousseau

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 restunned 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

Before they reach their end, the pigs get a shower, a real one. Water sprays from every angle to wash the farm off them. Then they begin to feel crowded. The pen narrows like a funnel' the drivers behind urge the pigs forward, until one at a time they climb onto the moving ramp... Now they scream, never having been on such a ramp, smelling the smells they smell ahead. I do not want to overdramatize because you've read all this before. But it was a frightening experience, seeing their fear, seeing so many of them go by, it had to remind me of things no one wants to be reminded of anymore, all mobs, all death marches, all mass murders and executions ... -- Richard Rhodes

If a man earnestly seeks a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from animal food... -- Leo Tolstoy

It is very significant that some of the most thoughtful and cultured men are partisans of a pure vegetable diet. -- Mahatma Gandhi

Every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition, has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food. -- Henry David Thoreau

I do not see any reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. After all, man can live without meat. -- Tenzin Gyatso