GHANDI, MOHANDAS (1869 - 1948, HINDU NATIONALIST LEADER AND SOCIAL REFORMER)

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated”.

“The only way to live is to let live.”

POPE, ALEXANCER (1688 – 1744, ENGLISH POET)

“But just disease to luxury succeeds,
And every death its own avenger breeds;
The fury passions from that blood began,
And turn’d on man a fiercer savage – Man.”

SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD (1856 – 1950, BRITISH DRAMATIST AND CRITIC)

“Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that.”

“When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.”

“Animals are my friends……..and I don’t eat my friends.”

EMERSON, RALPH WALDO (1803 – 1883, AMERICAN ESSAYIST, PHILOSOPHER AND POET)

“You have just dined; and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

MAETERLINCK, COUNT MAURICE (1862 – 1949, BELGIAN PLAYWRIGHT, ESSAYIST AND POET)

“Were the belief one day to become general that man could dispense with animal food, three would ensue not only a great economic revolution, but a moral improvement as well.”

SHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR (1788 – 1860, GERMAN PHILOSOPHER)

“Since compassion for animals is so intimately associated with goodness of character, it may be confidently asserted that whoever is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.”

PRASAD, DR. RAJENDRA (1844 – 1963, FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF INDIA)

“Any integrated view of life as a whole will reveal to us the connection between the individual’s food and his behaviour towards others, and through a process of ratiocination which is not fantastic, we cannot but arrive at the conclusion that the only means of escaping the hydrogen bomb is to escape the type of mentality which has produced it, and the only way to escape that mentality is to cultivate respect for all life, life in all forms, under all conditions. It is only another name for vegetarianism.”

BESANT, ANNIE (1847 – 1933, ENGLISH PHILOSOPHER, HUMANITARIAN AND SOCIAL REFORMER, ACTIVE IN INDIA’S MOVEMENT FOR INDEPENDENCE)

“People who eat meat are responsible for all the pain that grows out of meat eating, and which is necessitated by the use of sentient animals as food; not only the horrors of the slaughterhouse, but also the preliminary horrors of the railway traffic, of the steamboat and ship traffic; all the starvation and the thirst and the prolonged misery of fear which these unhappy creatures have to pass through for the gratification of the appetite of man…All pain acts as a record against humanity and slackens and retards the whole of human growth.

WILCOX, ELLA WHEELER (AMERICAN POET AND NOVELIST)

“I am the voice of the voiceless.
Through me the dumb shall speak
Til’ the deaf world’s ear shall be made to hear
The wrongs of the wordless weak
The same force formed the sparrow
That fashioned man, the king.
The God of the whole gave a spark of soul
To furred and feathered thing;
And I am my brother’s keeper,
And I will fight his fight.
And speak the word for the beast and bird
Till the world shall set things right.”

VOLTAIRE, FRANCOIS (1694 – 1778, FRENCH WRITER AND PHILOSOPHER)

“Porphyry regards other animals as our brothers, because they are endowed with life as we are, because they have the same principles of life, the same feelings, the same ideas, memory, industry – as we. Human speech alone is wanting to them. If they had it should we dare to kill and eat them? Should we dare to commit these fratricides?”

TOLSTOY, LEO (1828 – 1920, RUSSIAN NOVELIST AND SOCIAL THEORIST)

“Vegetarianism serves as a criterion by which we know that the pursuit of moral perfection on the part of man is genuine and sincere.”

“This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that 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. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!”

TAGORE, RABINDRANATH (1861 – 1941, NOBEL PRIZE WINNING HINDU POET)

“We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing we do. There are many crimes which are the creation of man himself, the wrongfulness of which is put down to his divergence fro habit, custom, or tradition. But cruelty is not of these. It is a fundamental sin, and admits of no arguments or nice distinctions. If only we do not our heart to grow callous it protects against cruelty, is always clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us – in fact, any one who does not join in is dubbed a crank…….if, after our pity is aroused, we persist in throttling our feelings simply in order to join others n preying upon life, we insult all that is good in us. I have decided to try a vegetarian diet.”

BENTHAN, JEREMY (1748 – 1832, ENGLISH PHILOSOPHER, ECONOMIST AND JURIST)

“The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny….It may come one day to be recognised that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for the abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or, perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the awe were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, can they reason? Nor can they talk? But can they suffer?
(from THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS AND LEGISLATION)

OVID (43 B.C. ROMAN POET)

“Forbear, O mortals, to spoil your bodies with such impious food!
There is corn for you, apples, whose weight bears down the bending branches;
There are grapes that swell on the green vines, and pleasant herbs, and greens made mellow and soft with cooking; there is milk and clover-honey.
Earth is generous with her provision, and her sustenance is very kind; she offers, for your tables’ food that requires no bloodshed and no slaughter.”

“Oh, Ox, how great are thy desserts! A being without guile, harmless, simple, willing for work! Ungrateful and unworthy of the fruits of earth, man his own farm labourer slays and smites with the axe that toil-worn neck that had so oft renewed for him the face of the hard earth; so many harvests given!”

“Alas, what wickedness to swallow flesh into our own flesh, to fatten our greedy bodies by cramming in other bodies, to have one living creature fed by the death of another!”

PLUTARCH (GREEK BIOGRAPHER AND HISTORIAN, MOST FAMOUS FOR HIS “LIVES”)

“I for my part do much marvel at what sort of feeling, soul or reason the first man with his mouth touched slaughter, and reached to his lips the flesh of a dead animal, and having set before people courses of ghastly corpses and ghosts, could give those parts the names of meat and victuals that but a little before lowed, cried, moved, and saw; how his sight could endure the blood of the slaughtered, flayed, and mangled bodies; how his smell cold bear their scent; and how the very nastiness happened not to offend the taste while it chewed the scores of others, and participated of the sap and juices of deadly wounds.”

“But whence is it that a certain ravenousness and frenzy drives you in these happy days to pollute yourselves with blood, since you have such an abundance of things necessary for your subsistence? Why do you belie the earth as unable to maintain you?...Are you not ashamed to mix tame fruits with blood and slaughter? You are indeed wont to call serpents, leopards, and lion’s savage creatures; but yet yourselves are defiled with blood, and come nothing behind them in cruelty. What they kill os their ordinary nourishment, but what you kill is your better fare.”

“For we eat not lions and wolves by way of revenge, but we let those go and catch the harmless and tame sort, such as have neither stings not teeth to bite with, and slay them.”

“But if your will contend that yourself were born to an inclination to such food as you have now a mind to eat, do you then yourself kill what you would eat. But do it yourself, without the help of a chopping-knife, mallet, or axe – as wolves, bears, and lions do, who kill and eat at once. Rend an ox with thy teeth, worry a hog with thy mouth, tear a lamb or a hare in pieces, and fall on and eat it alive as they do. But if thou hadst rather stay until what thou eatest is to become dead, and if thou are loath to force a soul out of its body, why then dost thou against NATURE eat an animate thing?
(FROM: “OF EATING OF FLESH”)