Michael Greger Quotes

We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?

If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat.

If the entire world decided to become vegan tomorrow, a whole host of the world's problems would disappear overnight. Climate change would decrease by 25 percent, deforestation would cease, rainforests would be preserved, our water- and air-quality would increase, life-expectancy rates would increase, and our rates of cancer would plummet, so certainly, with that one action of becoming vegan you are quite effectively making the world a better place.

Becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species.

People are becoming more environmentally aware and caring more for animals and really wanting to improve their health.

We must act now and wake up to our moral obligations. The poor and vulnerable are members of God's family and are the most severely affected by droughts, high temperatures, the flooding of coastal cities, and more severe and unpredictable weather events resulting from climate change. We, who should have been responsible stewards preserving our vulnerable, fragile planet home, have been wantonly wasteful through our reckless consumerism, devouring irreplaceable natural resources.

None of that is necessary. It's not as if we're in a situation where it is us or them.There's something peculiar about talking about the moral status of animals, when we are killing and eating them for no reason whatsoever.

It's upsetting to me that so many people think of themselves as environmentalists and still eat meat and dairy products. I think it's something people should be considering given the emergency situation we're in regarding water supplies, global warming, and the destruction of ecosystems. There's a lot of overlap between animal rights and the environment.

If that hideousness came here, it wouldn't be any more hideous for the animals — they are all bound for a ghastly death anyway. But it would wake up consumers... I openly hope that it comes here. It will bring economic harm only for those who profit from giving people heart attacks and giving animals a concentration camp-like existence. It would be good for animals, good for human health and good for the environment.

Most people don’t question the practice of eating meat. Many of these people care about animals and the environment, some deeply. But for some reason-force of habit, cultural norms, resistance to change-there is a fundamental disconnect whereby these feelings don’t translate into changes of behavior.

Our relationship to the environment matters, our relationship to animals matters, and our relationship to culture matters.

It’s not a requirement to eat animals, we just choose to do it, so it becomes a moral choice and one that is having a huge impact on the planet, using up resources and destroying the biosphere.

Being vegetarian here also means that we do not consume dairy and egg products, because they are products of the meat industry. If we stop consuming, they will stop producing. Only collective awakening can create enough determination for action.

I've been vegan for 15 years, and it turns out it makes a very big impact on the environment to eat fewer animal products, which cause more greenhouse gases than all of transportation combined. The United Nations did a study just over two years ago, and that blew my mind. I started thinking that if people are vegetarian for just one day a week, that makes a huge difference!

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.

Why are vegans made fun of while the inhumane factory farming process regards animals and the natural world merely as commodities to be exploited for profit?

Vegetarian is the New Prius!

Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.

For me the two biggest issues are climate change and animal welfare/animal agriculture. And oddly enough animal agriculture is such a contributor to climate change. According to the United Nations, 25% of climate change comes from animal agriculture, so every car, bus, boat, truck, airplane combined has less CO2 and methane emissions than animal agriculture.

I have little space from the suffering of elephants right now. I wake up with it and go to sleep with it. The plight of animals in shelters, of kids used for labor for the metals in our electronics and endless other things, the fate of our water supply to dye our blue jeans and water our lawns, the sad painful life of conventionally raised meat...For me, I am working to not contribute to this. I really don't want to hurt others for my benefit.

However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporations, the root of the problem is always found to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us as conservationists always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world is being destroyed, no doubt about it, by the greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand.

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

Whether you eat meat of not, you can be part of this decision to limit the meat industry destroying our planet's resources.

It is an indication of the extent to which people are now isolated from the animals they eat that children brought up on storybooks that lead them to think of a farm as a place where animals wander around freely in idyllic conditions might be able to live out their entire lives without ever being forced to revise this rosy image.

Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?