Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

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.

Therefore, vegetarianism alone can give us the quality of com-passion, which distinguishes man from the rest of the animal world.

My ahimsa is my own. I am not able to accept in its entirety the doctrine of non-killing of animals.

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. It is only some carnivorous animals that have to subsist on flesh. Killing animals for sport, for pleasure, for adventures, and for hides and furs is a phenomenon which is at once disgusting and distressing. There is no justification in indulging in such acts of brutality . . . Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to a man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not to die, so do other creatures.

I became a vegetarian because I was persuaded that life is as valid for other creatures as it is for humans. I do not need dead animal bodies to keep me alive, strong and healthy. Therefore, I will not kill for food.

So in 1987 I gave up all animal products and became a vegan. Simply so that I could eat and live in accordance with my beliefs that animals have their own lives, that they're entitled to their own lives and that contributing to animal suffering is something that I don't want to be a part of.

My reason for becoming a vegetarian was simple: I loved (and love) animals

Nobody can possibly be so hungry that they need to take a life in order to feel satisfied - they don't after all, take a human life, so why take the life of an animal? Both are conscious beings with the same determination to survive. It is habit, and laziness and nothing else.

When I see a cow, it is not an animal to eat, it is a poem of pity for me and I worship it and I shall defend its worship against the whole world.

I've been a vegetarian for years and years. I'm not judgemental about others who aren't, I just feel I cannot eat or wear living creatures.

I'm not Ted Nugent. My house is run, essentially, by an adopted, fully clawed cat with a mean nature. I would never hunt. I would never wear fur. I would never go to a bullfight. I'm not really a meat and potatoes guy.

Just for a few tiny buds on your tongue you are killing live animals, with no sensitivity, with no awareness, with no love. It seems impossible; how can a man who has known love be capable of doing such things? A man who loves his wife, who loves his children goes on eating meat? Impossible.

We cannot talk simultaneously about animal rights and the 'humane' slaughter of animals.

The moment I began to understand what was going on with the treatment of animals, it led me more and more in the way of the path I am [on] now, which is a complete vegan.

You don't have to love animals to recognize that it is immoral and unjust to exploit them. But if you do love animals, but you continue to participate in their exploitation, you need to rethink your idea of what love means.

No animal has to suffer for me to live.

The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable.

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.

This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.

Becoming a vegetarian is not merely a symbolic gesture. Nor is it an attempt to isolate oneself from the ugly realities of the world, to keep oneself pure and so without responsibility for the cruelty and carnage all around. Becoming a vegetarian is a highly practical and effective step one can take toward ending both the killing of nonhuman animals and the infliction of suffering on them.

I hate the thought of animals being killed just for our pleasure...

Ethically they had arrived at the conclusion that man's supremacy over lower animals meant not that the former should prey upon the latter, but that the higher should protect the lower, and that there should be mutual aid between the two as between man and man. They had also brought out the truth that man eats not for enjoyment but to live.

We are all God's creatures-that we pray to God for mercy and justice while we continue to eat the flesh of animals that are slaughtered on our account is not consistent.

If you love animals, don't eat them.

I think there will come a time 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.