" Vegetarians, dropping meat, tend to fill up with too much starch. This leaves them no more healthy than meat-eaters, with constipation, indigestion, colds, catarrhs, coughs and chest complaints to plague them. Eating sparingly of breads, cakes, crackers, cookies, macaroni, spaghetti, anything largely starch, is a far step on the road to good health. "
" Flesh-eating by humans is unnecessary, irrational, anatomically unsound, unhealthy, unhygienic, uneconomic, unaesthetic, unkind and unethical. "
- Helen Nearing
" I advance no exaggerated or fanciful claim for Vegetarianism. It is not, as some have asserted, a " panacea " for human ills; it is something much more rational - an essential part of the modern humanitarian movement, which can make no true progress without it. Vegetarianism is the diet of the future, as flesh-food is the diet of the past. "
" It is beyond doubt that the chief motive of Vegetarianism is the humane one. Questions of hygiene and of economy both play their part, and an important part, in a full discussion of food reform; but the feeling which underlies and animates the whole movement is the instinctive horror of butchery, especially the butchery of the more highly organized animals, so human, so near akin to man. "
- Henry S. Salt
" 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. "
" I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect ... always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished. "
- Henry David Thoreau
" The soul is the same in all living creatures although the body of each is different. "
- Hippocrates of Kos
" These days many voices proclaim the sanctity of human life. Human life should of course be valued highly, but at the same time the lives of other living beings should also be treasured. Human beings snatch away the lives of other creatures whenever it suits their purposes. The way of thinking that encourages this behavior arises from a specifically human brand of violence that defiles the self-evident laws of the universe, opposes the growth of the myriad things in nature, and destroys feelings of compassion and reverence arising from our Buddha-nature. In view of such needless destruction of life, it is essential that laymen and monks together conscientiously uphold this precept. "
- Hakuun Yasutani-roshi
" With lentils, tomatoes and rice, olives and nuts and bread,Why does a man care to gnaw a slice of something bleeding and dead? "
- Henry Bailey Stevens
" If you visit the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, it will brand your soul for life. "
- Howard Lyman
" In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be, But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And it is impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig.I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse. "
- H G Wells
" We should remember in our dealings with animals that they are a sacred trust to us from our heavenly Father. They are dumb and cannot speak for themselves. "
- Harriet Beecher Stowe