Sarah Silverman Quotes

Way back in the 1970s, I was eating a steak, and I looked down, and for the first time it suddenly looked like flesh to me - like a dead creature. In a flash, I realized that every time I ate any kind of meat, something had been killed for me, and I stopped eating all animals, not just cows and pigs but chickens and fish.

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.

Eating meat is a leftover of the greatest brutality [killing]; the transition to vegetarianism is the first and most natural consequence of enlightenment.

I've been a vegetarian since I was about 12 years old. When I became a vegetarian, I got my mom and dad to become vegetarian, and my brother became a vegetarian.

If people learned what they were contributing to every time they ate meat, eggs, or dairy, surely they would be just as motivated as I was to change.

I'm a vegetarian - I think there's a strong possibility, had I not become a vegetarian, I would not be working now. I became a vegetarian about 25 years ago, and I did it out of concern for animals. But I immediately began having more energy and feeling better.

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.

In all the round world there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses.

What man with a human heart, who has ever cared for domestic animals, could look into their eyes, so full of confidence and affection, and willingly give them over to the butcher's knife? How could he devour their flesh as a sweet morsel?

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 realized that 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.

I stopped eating meat about six years ago, when I was working on the movie Selena. During the shoot, I had to hold a chicken for five hours-if you hold it and feel its little heart beating for hours, you just can't think about eating it.

There's no doubt in my mind that going vegetarian has made me feel better not only physically, but also because I learned about the suffering of animals who are raised and killed for food. I feel good knowing that I'm not contributing to that.

My mother was convinced, and on this head I have retained her firm belief, that to kill animals for the purpose of feeding on their flesh is one of the most deplorable and shameful infirmities of the human state; that it is one of those curses cast upon man either by his fall, or by the obduracy of his own perversity.

Part of my becoming a vegetarian was that I would look at my burger, then look at my dogs, and I wasn't able to see a difference.

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.

Thousands of people who say they "love" animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that could make their lives worth living and who endured the awful suffering and the terror of the abattoirs...

When I was twenty-one, a friend gave me a book called Diet for a New America by John Robbins, which exposed the brutal practices of American factory farms. That, coupled with a lecture from Leonardo DiCaprio (when he was nineteen and I was twenty-one) about how such animals are kept and processed, made me lose my desire for factory farm pork and beef right there.

How can you say you're trying to spiritually evolve, without even a thought about what happens to the animals whose lives are sacrificed in the name of gluttony?

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

It appeals to the higher nature of the self to put aside food which once lived - I do not consider myself food, why should I ask all other creatures to consider themselves so?

If a man's aspirations towards a righteous life are serious.. .if he earnestly and sincerely seeks a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from animal food, because, not to mention the excitement of the passions produced by such food, it is plainly immoral, as it requires an act contrary to moral feeling, i. e., killing - and is called forth only by greed.

I stopped eating beef at 13 and stopped eating all meat a few years ago. I would feel guilty that what was on my plate was walking around yesterday. Either I could live with that or stop eating meat. I choose the latter, and I'm happier for it.

To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today... starvation, cruelty - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.

The vegetarian movement ought to fill with gladness the souls of those who have at heart the realization of God's kingdom upon earth, not because vegetarianism itself is such an important step towards the realization of this kingdom (all real steps are equally important or unimportant), but because it serves as a criterion by which we know that the pursuit of moral perfection on the part of man is genuine and sincere.

I personally chose to go vegan because I educated myself on factory farming and cruelty to animals, and I suddenly realized that what was on my plate were living things, with feelings. And I just couldn't disconnect myself from it any longer. I read books like 'Diet for a New America' and saw documentaries like 'Earthlings' and 'Meet your Meat,' and it became an easy choice for me.