Vegetarian quotes from cool people.

Life is life--whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage...
Sri Aurobindo (poet and philosopher)

Even the animals have a sense of right or wrong. It is very well shown in Kipling's Jungle Book.
Sri Aurobindo (poet and philosopher)

[George Bernard] Shaw is an acute thinker. He refuses to be deceived into the belief of the greatness of man. He says that man must rise higher.
Sri Aurobindo (poet and philosopher)

I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures.
Christian Barnard (surgeon)

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

For fidelity, devotion, love, many a two-legged animal (man) is below the dog and the horse. Happy would it be for thousands of people if they could stand at last before the Judgement Seat and say "I have loved as truly and I have lived as decently as my dog." And yet we call them "only animals"!
Henry Ward Beecher (abolitionist)

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.
Jeremy Bentham (philosopher)

What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
Jeremy Bentham (philosopher)

When he bethought him of the first beginning of all things, he was filled with a yet more overflowing charity, and would call the dumb animals, howsoever small, by the names of brother and sister, forasmuch as he recognized in them the same origin as in himself.
Saint Bonaventure (theologian)

Respect your fellow earthlings.
Berke Breathed ("Bloom County" cartoonist)

Opus told me that his six-year pickled-herring habit ended after reading the Compassionate Cook. He discovered the rutabaga frappe recipe and has been practicing it ever since.
Berke Breathed ("Bloom County" cartoonist)

The person who kills for fun is announcing that, could he get away with it, he'd kill you for fun. Your...life may be of no consequence to anyone else but is invaluable to you because it's the only one you've got. Exactly the same is true of each individual deer, hare, rabbit, fox, fish, pheasant and butterfly. Humans should enjoy their own lives, not taking others'.
Brigid Brophy (author and playwright)

I despise and abhor the pleas on behalf of that infamous practice, vivisection... I would rather submit to the worst of deaths, so far as pain goes, than have a single dog or cat tortured to death on the pretense of sparing me a twinge or two.
Robert Browning (poet)

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke (statesman and orator)

I just couldn't stand the idea of eating meat--and I really do think that it has made me calmer...People's general awareness is getting much better, even down to buying a pint of milk: the fact that the calves are actually killed so that the milk doesn't go to them but to us can't really be right, and if you've seen a cow in a state of extreme distress because it can't understand why its calf isn't by it, it can make you think a lot.
Kate Bush (singer and songwriter)

Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is--whether its victim is human or animal--we cannot expect things to be much better in this world... We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing we set back the progress of humanity.
Rachel Carson (marine biologist)

But what pleasure can it possibly be to a man of culture...when a splendid beast is transfixed with a hunting spear?
Marcus Tilluis Cicero (orator and philosopher)

Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out of his conscience, thus helping to bring the collective conscience to life.
Norman Cousins (author)

The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job is to salvage Mother Nature...We are facing a formidable enemy in this field. It is the hunters...and to convince them to leave their guns on the wall is going to be very difficult.
Jacques Cousteau (oceanographer)

If human civilization is going to invade the waters of the earth, then let it be first of all to carry a message of respect.
Jacques Cousteau (oceanographer)

Perhaps the time has come to formulate a moral code which would govern our relations with the great creatures of the sea as well as with those on dry land. That this will come to pass is [my] dear wish.
Jacques Cousteau (oceanographer)

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.
Charles Darwin (biologist)

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties... The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.
Charles Darwin (biologist)

Animals whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equals.
Charles Darwin (biologist)

I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.
Leonardo Da Vinci (artist and scientist)

Killing an animal to make a coat is sin. It wasn't meant to be, and we have no right to do it. A woman gains status when she refuses to see anything killed to be put on her back. Then she's truly beautiful.
Doris Day (actress)

There can be no justification for causing suffering to animals simply to serve man's pleasure or simply to enhance man's lifestyle.
The Dean of York

You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car.
Harvey Diamond (author)

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature, and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (novelist)

Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you--alas, it is true of almost every one of us!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (novelist)

[The day should come when] all of the forms of life...will stand before the court--the pileated woodpecker as well as the coyote and bear, the lemmings as well as the trout in the streams.
William O. Douglas (late U.S. Supreme Court Justice)

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Frederick Douglass (abolitionist)

Even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is Vanity.
Ecclesiastes 3:19

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
Thomas Edison (inventor)

We and others indeed believe that along with the preeminence that Homo sapiens has achieved goes a very great moral responsibility--a stewardship if you will--upon which we must not turn our backs. Perhaps especially because we have the power to destroy them we must respect the rights of our co-habitants of earth.
Paul Ehrlich (bacteriologist, Nobel 1908)

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
Albert Einstein (physicist, Nobel 1921)

Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
Albert Einstein (physicist, Nobel 1921)

It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.
Albert Einstein (physicist, Nobel 1921)

One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.
Loren Eiseley (anthropologist)

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (author)

Not to hurt our humble brethren (the animals) is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission--to be of service to them whenever they require it... If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.
Saint Francis of Assisi (mystic and preacher)

To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)

I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the beings called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with such things as crawl upon earth.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)

Vivisection is the blackest of all the black crimes that a man is at present committing against God and his fair creation.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)

I abhor vivisection with my whole soul. All the scientific discoveries stained with innocent blood I count as of no consequence.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)

It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practice elementary compassion towards our fellow creatures.
Mahatma Gandhi (statesman and philosopher)

I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch and I will be heard.
William Lloyd Garrison (author)

Please have a heart and stop outdated and cruel animal tests.
Jennie Garth (actress)

As custodians of the planet it is our responsibity to deal with all species with kindness, love, and compassion. That these animals suffer through human cruelty is beyond understanding. Please help to stop this madness.
Richard Gere (actor)

You Shall Love Each Other. Thou shalt not kill.
God (supreme being)

In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes.
Jane Goodall (ethologist)

If only we could...understand that we should respect the individual ape just as we should respect the individual human; that we should recognize the right of each ape to live a life unmolested by humans, if necessary helped by humans, in the same way as we should recognize these rights for individual human beings; and that the same moral and ethical attitudes should apply to ape beings and human beings alike.
Jane Goodall (ethologist)

...what has been called the "Golden Rule" [should be enlarged] from the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom.
Thomas Hardy (novelist)

Every year tens of thousands of animals suffer and die in laboratory tests of cosmetics and household products...despite the fact that the test results do not help prevent or treat accidental or purposeful misuse of the products. Please join me in using your voice for those whose cries are forever sealed behind the laboratory doors.
Woody Harrelson (actor)

How good it is to be well-fed, healthy, and kind all at the same time.
Henry Heimlich (physician)

Most animal experimentation is useless.
Henry Heimlich (physician)

The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different.
Hippocrates (philosopher)

First it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. Now it is necessary to civilize man in relation to nature and the animals.
Victor Hugo (poet, novelist, and playwright)

No truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endowed with thought and reason as well as men. The arguments are in this case so obvious, that they never escape the most stupid and ignorant.
David Hume (philosopher)

Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.
Aldous Huxley (novelist, essayist, and poet)

We are indeed told...that the belief in the unity of origin of man and brutes involves the brutalization and degradation of the former. But is this really so? Could not a sensible child confute, by obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would force this conclusion upon us?
Thomas H. Huxley (biologist)

Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
Thomas H. Huxley (biologist)

One person can make all the difference in the world...For the first time in recorded human history, we have the fate of the whole planet in our hands.
Chrissie Hynde (musician)

Woe to those who add house after house and join field to field until everything belongs to them and they are the sole inhabitants of the land.
Isaiah (Biblical prophet)

Certainly one of the highest duties of the citizen is a scrupulous obedience to the laws of the nation. But it is not the highest duty.
Thomas Jefferson (3rd U.S. President)

I tremble for my species when I reflect that God is just.
Thomas Jefferson (3rd U.S. President)

Men who have practiced tortures on animals without pity, relating them without shame. How can they still hold their heads high among human beings?
Samuel Johnson (author and lexicographer)

During my medical education at the University of Basel I found vivisection horrible, barbarous, and above all unnecessary.
Carl G. Jung (psychologist)

Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you anymore.
Franz Kafka (novelist)

How can you eat anything with eyes?
Will Kellogg (creator "Kellogg's Corn Flakes")

When I was 12, I went hunting with my father and we shot a bird. He was laying there and something struck me. Why do we call this fun to kill this creature [who] was as happy as I was when I woke up this morning.
Marv Levy (football head coach)

I submit that an individual who breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.
Martin Luther King Jr. (civil rights leader)

There is not an animal on the earth, nor a flying creature on two wings, but they are people like unto you.
The Koran (sacred scripture of Islam)

The recklessness with which we sacrifice our sense of decency to maximize profit in the factory farming process sets a pattern for cruelty to our own kind.
Jonathan Kozol (author)

And the thing which is missing is love, some feeling for, as well as some understanding of, the inclusive community of rocks and soils, plants and animals, of which we are a part.
Joseph Wood Krutch (naturalist and essayist)

When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man, we call him a vandal. When he wantonly destroys one of the works of God, we call him a sportsman... How anyone can profess to find animal life interesting and yet take delight in reducing the wonder of any animal to a bloody mass of fur and feathers is beyond my comprehension.
Joseph Wood Krutch (naturalist and essayist)

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
Milan Kundera (author and playwright)

After a great deal of research, we discovered that we could develop new, innovative, and safe products without testing them on animals.
Kenneth Landis (President, Benettons)

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

If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalist for the same reasons.
C. S. Lewis (novelist and essayist)

It should not be believed that all beings exist for the sake of the existence of man. On the contrary, all the other beings too have been intended for their own sakes and not for the sake of anything else.
Maimonides (physician and philosopher)

It is only man, mischievous man, that can make death a sport.
Bernard Mandeville (Physician and satirist)

There are a lot of directors who will injure animals to further a plot. I will have none of it.
James Mason (actor)

I abhor vivisection. It should at least be curbed. Better, it should be abolished. I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific discovery, that could not have been obtained without such barbarism and cruelty. The whole thing is evil.
Charles Mayo (founder of the Mayo Clinic)

If mankind and the world as a whole are to have a future, it will be necessary that we reduce the selfish tendencies in our ethics in favor of a higher regard for the community and for the whole of Creation.
Ernst Mayr (biologist)

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. We feel better about ourselves and better about the animals, knowing we're not contributing to their pain.
Paul and Linda McCartney (musicians)

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.
Linda and Paul McCartney (musicians)

Cruelty is one fashion statement we can all do without.
Rue McClanahan (actress)

Compassion is the foundation of everything positive, everything good. If you carry the power of compassion to the marketplace and the dinner table, you can make your life really count.
Rue McClanahan (actress)

I have always felt that the way we treat animals is a pretty good indicator of the compassion we are capable of for the human race.
Ali McGraw (actress)

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead (anthropologist)

Animal life, somber mystery. All nature protests against the barbarity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his inferior brethren.
Jules Michelet (historian)

Animals form an inalienable fragment of nature, and if we hasten the disappearance of even one species, we diminish our world and our place in it.
James Michener (novelist, Pulitzer 1947)

As to what concerns fidelity, there is no animal in the world so treacherous as man.
Michel Montaigne (essayist)

Behind every beautiful fur, there is a story. It is a bloody, barbaric story.
Mary Tyler Moore (actress)

How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!
John Muir (naturalist and explorer)

The world, we are told, was made especially for man--a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?
John Muir (naturalist and explorer)

They were shooting pigeons... How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change an innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain. At one moment--graceful, mysterious, desirable and free--and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion.
Iris Murdoch (author)

I haven't bought any leather articles for a very long time. My ideal is to be able to avoid all animal products, in food as well as clothing.
Martina Navratilova (tennis champion)

When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.
Ingrid Newkirk (activist)

I do not like eating meat because I have seen lambs and pigs killed. I saw and felt their pain. They felt the approaching death. I could not bear it. I cried like a child. I ran up a hill and could not breathe. I felt that I was choking. I felt the death of the lamb.
Vaslav Nijinsky (dancer and choreographer)

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear.
George Orwell (author)

My respect and empathy towards animals includes sea dwellers, too -- from dolphins to fish to lobsters. So, of course, I wouldn't dream of eating them.
Alexandra Paul (actress)

It is a cruel folly to offer up to ostentation so many lives of creatures, as to make up the state of our treats.
William Penn (Quaker colonizer of America)

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.
Plutarch (essayist and biographer)

Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?
Plutarch (essayist and biographer)

For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.
Pythagoras (philosopher and mathematician)

Animals share with us the privilege of having a soul.
Pythagoras (philosopher and mathematician)

Because the heart beats under a covering of hair, of fur, feathers, or wings, it is, for that reason, to be of no account?
Jean Paul Richter (satirist)

To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime.
Romain Rolland (author, Nobel 1915)

I will not kill or hurt any living creature needlessly, nor destroy any beautiful thing, but will strive to save and comfort all gentle life, and guard and perfect all natural beauty upon the earth.
John Ruskin (author and critic)

Remember those macaques who would rather go hungry than profit from harming their fellows; might we have a more optimistic view of the human future if we were sure our ethics were up to their standards?
Carl Sagan (astronomer and biologist)

Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!
Arthur Schopenhauer (philosopher)

Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character; and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.
Arthur Schopenhauer (philosopher)

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
Arthur Schopenhauer (philosopher)

It is man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man.
Albert Schweitzer (missionary and statesman, Nobel 1952)

Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.
Albert Schweitzer (missionary and statesman, Nobel 1952)

We need a boundless ethics which will include animals also.
Albert Schweitzer (missionary and statesman, Nobel 1952)

When I help an insect out of his troubles all that I do is attempt to remove some of the guilt contracted through [humanity's] crimes against animals.
Albert Schweitzer (missionary and statesman, Nobel 1952)

...the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony and man--all belong to the same family... The White Man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers.
Chief Seattle (Indian chief)

What with our hooks, snares, nets, and dogs, we are at war with all living creatures, and nothing comes amiss but that which is either too cheap or too common; and all this is to gratify a fantastical palate.
Seneca (Roman Stoic philosopher)

Since, then, the animals are creatures with wants and feelings differing in degree only from our own, they surely have their rights.
Ernest Thompson Seton (writer and illustrator)

We and the beasts are kin.
Ernest Thompson Seton (writer and illustrator)

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.
Anna Sewell (author)

Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)

This is the true joy in life; being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, and being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod.
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)

Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)

Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.
George Bernard Shaw (playwright, Nobel 1925)

It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (poet)

It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (poet)

People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (author, Nobel 1978)

As long as human beings go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (author, Nobel 1978)

There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (author, Nobel 1978)

As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: In their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (author, Nobel 1978)

Even in the worm that crawls in the earth there glows a divine spark. When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter God.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (author, Nobel 1978)

Mutilating animals and calling it "science" condemns the human species to moral and intellectual hell...this hideous Dark Age of the mindless torture of animals must be overcome.
Grace Slick (musician)

...it is difficult to picture the great Creator conceiving of a program of one creature (which He has made) using another living creature for purposes of experimentation. There must be other, less cruel ways of obtaining knowledge.
Adlai Stevenson (statesman and diplomat)

Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.
Robert Louis Stevenson (novelist and poet)

We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.
Robert Louis Stevenson (novelist and poet)

Animals give me more pleasure through the viewfinder of a camera than they ever did in the crosshairs of a gunsight. And after I'm finished "shooting", my unharmed victims are still around for others to enjoy. I have developed a deep respect for animals. I consider them fellow living creatures with certain rights that should not be violated any more than those of humans.
Jimmy Stewart (actor)

Man is connected by his nature...with the whole tribe of animals, and so closely with some of them, that the distance between his intellectual faculties and theirs...appears, in many instances, small, and would probably appear still less, if we had the means of knowing their motives, as we have of observing their actions.
Henry St. John (statesman)

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 their divergence from 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 allow our heart to grow callous, it protests 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.
Rabindranath Tagore (poet, Nobel 1913)

All good things are wild, and free.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)

If...the machine of government...is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)

If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behavior.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.
Henry David Thoreau (essayist and poet)

And in fasting, if he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because...its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling--killing.
Leo Tolstoy (author)

What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit for their cruelty.
Leo Tolstoy (author)

I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.
Mark Twain (author)

In studying the traits and dispositions of the so-called lower animals, and contrasting them with man's, I find the result humiliating to me.
Mark Twain (author)

The Queen has done all she could on the dreadful subject of vivisection, and hopes that Mr. Gladstone will speak strongly against such a practice which is a disgrace to humanity...
Queen Victoria

If experiments on animals were abandoned on grounds of compassion, mankind would have made a fundamental advance.
Richard Wagner (composer)

Nothing but total abolition will meet the case of vivisection. I am quite disgusted at the frequency of the most horrible experiments to determine the most trivial facts...evidently carried on for the interest of the 'research' and the reputation it gives.
Alfred Russell Wallace (co-discoverer of evolution)

The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous.
Emile Zola (author)