Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

If slaughterhouses had glass walls the whole world would be vegetarian.

If modern civilization man had to kill the animals he eats, the number of vegetarians would rise astronomically.

I'm not a vegetarian. Now, don't get me wrong - I like animals. And I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. But there's no way to treat animals well when you're killing 10 billion of them a year. Kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. Let's get the numbers of animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left.

You can't really call yourself an environmentalist if you're still consuming animals. You just can't.

I am an on-and-off vegetarian. Sometimes on, mostly off. I think it is better to be a vegetarian but occasionally, the call of the hot dog overpowers my ethics.

People enjoy our meat and our poultry, as I do as a consumer.

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.

The kind of funny irony is that a lot of people talk about ethical meat eating as if it's a way to care about things, but also not to alienate yourself from the rest of the world. But it's so much more alienating than vegetarianism.

I can hardly eat meat because it has to look like something what it was not when it was alive.

Vegetarians have been around for a very long time - Pythagoreans forbade eating animals more than 2,500 years ago - but even as the environmental evidence mounted, they didn't appear to be winning the argument.

It is all very well for 2% of the population to live in a monastic state of meatlessness while everyone else gorges their way towards environmental meltdown or the nearest heart clinic. Vegetarianism is good for the willing minority, but not much use as a campaign tool.

A human being has been given an intellect to make choices, and we know there are other food sources that do not require the killing of a creature that would protest being killed.

I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.

I think that once I started connecting dots of where my food was coming from and the reality of that, as opposed to maybe what you think it is as a little kid, and the realities of how my food was getting to my plate and what the real effects of that are. When I started connecting those dots, I couldn't disconnect them.

We all buy our meat wrapped in plastic because we don't like to think about the animal that died.

I never eat meat as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway.

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?

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.

In order to get meat, we have to kill. And we are certainly not entitled to any other milk except the mother's milk in our infancy.

My wife Kimora once told me while we were watching "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" that it's a vegetarian movie because the way that the woman was screaming, "Aaaahhh," and trying to run away is how every animal you eat reacted at the slaughterhouse.

I'm really glad my food comes murdered.

The distinction between meat and other animal products is total nonsense. Vegetarianism is a morally incoherent position. If you regard animals as members of the moral community, you really don’t have a choice but to go vegan.

If we each had to butcher our own meat, there would be a great increase in the number of vegetarians.

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.

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.