Talk:Vegetarianism


 * "Had God meant me to be vegetarian, He would not have made these teeth so pointy, nor animals so tasty."

Never saw this quote before. Sounds like a personal quote, attributed to "anonymous". I have removed this from the article: if anyone can quote anywhere which has this quote, please add it back with such info. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 15:49, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

adorno-quote
i have some doubt about this quote. besides the problem to quote adorno at all -you should read philosphical texts, not just break them into good looking units to get them quotable..- i don't believe you'll find this quote in his work. so please reveal the source or delete it.

Also, the human body is created more like those of herbivores than carnivores or omnivores.

In Genesis (the First book of the Bible), Man (Humanity) was told that he could eat all plants, and evry peice of it. After the Fall, some plants became toxic, and animals were given to fill the gap.

WTF!?
The human body is NOT like that of a herbivore! We do NOT have 4 stomachs, nor do we have a large intestine that takes up three quarters of the abdomen! Jeez, take some anatomy classes for crying out loud. 05:12, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

It's only cows that have four stomachs, and our intestinal tract is comparitaviely longer than that of similarly sized carnivorous animals.

But comparitaviely shorter than that of similarly sized herbivores; we are omnivores.

Geez
This article is little more than hippies and whiners trying to force their ideals onto other people.

Hippies and whiners must also be most of the greatest minds in human history

well, wasn't one A. Hitler a vegetarian? Hmm? sounds like a bad blow for your side, doesn't it?

Was Albert Einstein a vegetarian ? ~ klayman

Actually, Hitler was a meat-eater who claimed that he was a vegetarian after the death of his neice. There are several eye-witness accounts of him eating meat.

Also, Einstein only supported the idea of vegetarianism for most of his life before trying it out at the very end.

However, the point I'd like to make is that it doesn't really matter--a diet doesn't dictate a person's personality. This article, while waaaaay to heavy on the ethical vegetarian quotes from PETA sites (I agree with you there!) was put up not to "force ideals onto other people," but rather to provide quotes about vegetarianism to anyone who bothered to look it up on Wikiquote. --Vegan magpie 20:25, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Meat-Only for barbarians?
AAAAAAAAAA-AAAAAAAAHHHHH-AAAAAHHHHH-AAHAAHHH-AAAAAHHHHH!!!!!! [beats chest]

-->

Pretty sure this is a page of quotes of things that people have said, notable peoples opinions i guess, not just facts. Besides, i belive barbarians spoke with more of a grunting dialect, probably in some ancient greek language (greek maybe), you moron.


 * oh moron, eh? I like that. well, I'm not going to get down in the mud with some faceless little twerp I will never, ever meet in the real world, and wouldn't want to if my life were hinged on it.

PETA quotes
i read this article ages ago and it was good. Now it's full of quotes from celebrities representing PETA. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this, but it would be nice to have a seperate section for the PETA celebrity quotes, and the more "quotable" quotes, if that makes sense.

Quotes
Is it just me or are some of these quotes a bit... superfluous? Leaving aside the fact that the pro-meat side is a bit under-represented, there seem to be both a whole load of quotes from non-entities here or quotes that essentially boil down to celebrities literally describing their eating habits - I mean, do we really need to know Shania Twain's dinner menu?--203.87.117.133 00:29, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

You're right. Who gives a @^#& about what some random celebrity's taste in food is? Let's delete some celebrity preferences and put in some anti-veg quotes to balance out the quotes page. 05:15, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Quote invented?
In the quote from Leonardo "The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men." - Leonardo da Vinci (Quote invented by Dimitri Merejovski in a novel)

whats with the '(Quote invented by Dimitri Merejovski in a novel)'? im fairly certain that the quote was not invented. its sourcable from Leonardos diaries. Its not invented.

Whats that about? mabye the '(Quote invented by Dimitri Merejovski in a novel)' should be removed.

Yes, that quote was invented by Dimitri Merejovski in his book “The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci”. And I didn’t found it in the notebooks… However, it seems that Leonardo himself was a vegetarian. Take a look: http://www.ivu.org/history/davinci/hurwitz.html N. Metello

For you anti-vegetarians ...
When I went through and categorized, I put an "anti-vegetarian" section. I hope this makes you happy, and you can add to it if you can think of any better ones than the ones currently up. --Vegan magpie 20:16, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Einstein quote
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." I can't seem to find that quote on Einsteins page, but it listed on this one. Maybe it was removed because it was incorrect? Zanoi 01:56, 3 March 2011 (UTC)


 * you'll never find a reliable source that he really said that. he was vegatarian only in the last half year of his life, because of a disease.

Unsourced

 * "You never hear anybody talk about mad tofu disease."
 * John Robbins
 * Consider the biggest animals on the planet: elephants, and buffaloes, and giraffes. These are vegetarian animals. They grow to thousands of pounds of muscle and bone without ever eating cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizzas.
 * Michael Klaper
 * "Nobody can come up with a good argument for eating animals — nobody can. People as some kind of a joke say, well, 'It's tasty', but it's only tasty once you garnish it and you put salt and pepper, and you cook it, and you have to do 300 things to it to disguise its true taste. If you put garnishes on a chair or fabric, it would probably taste quite nice."
 * Morrissey
 * " If beef is your idea of `real food for real people,' you'd better live real close to a real good hospital."
 * Neal Barnard
 * "Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends."
 * George Bernard Shaw
 * " ‘Steak’ just sounds better than carcass."
 * Imar Hutchins
 * "I look my age; and I am my age. It is the other people who look older than they are. What can you expect from people who eat corpses and drink spirits?" – George Bernard Shaw, in a conversation with him Archibald Henderson in 1924
 * "We found that many animal-based nutrients … are strongly associated with risk of developing these types of cancers." – Dr. Susan Mayne
 * "Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rates of coronary disease of any group in the country ... they have a fraction of our heart attack rate, and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate." — William Castelli, M.D., director of the Framingham Heart Study, the longest-running clinical study in medical history
 * "The link between animal products and heart disease is now very well documented. It’s no surprise that half of all Americans develop heart disease, because the typical U.S. diet puts almost everyone at risk." – Dean Ornish, MD, head of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute in California
 * "Insecticides, pesticides, products that are used in paint and preservation of wood, hormones, and animal drugs all turn up in meat." - Carol Tucker Foreman, Former Assistant Secretary of Agriculture
 * "I don’t understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it’s medically conservative to cut people open or put them on powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives." – Dean Ornish, MD, head of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute in California
 * "You don’t have to give antibiotics to broccoli." - Michael Klamper, MD
 * "It is incredible how much prejudice has been allowed to operate in favor of meat, while so many facts are opposed to the pretended necessity of its use." – Phillip Hecquet
 * "Go veg—for animals, for your health, for life. " – Masta Killa from Wu-Tang Clan, from the pro-vegetarian add he did for PETA
 * "In the next ten years, one of the things you're bound to hear is that animal protein … is one of the most toxic nutrients of all that can be considered." – T. Colin Campbell
 * "Linda McCartney sausages were my favorite. They’re much better than eating real sausages and you don’t have to contemplate half way through exactly what s inside them. ... You can have them, a bit of fried bread, tinned tomatoes. Delicious. " – Simon Cowell
 * "I never really liked meat. I was a child that had to be forced to eat my meat. Whatever you ate before [going vegetarian] that you loved—like turkey slices—they've got a substitute now that's not hard to find." – Masta Killa, from Wu-Tang Clan
 * ”The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.” – Neal Barnard
 * "I am a vegan now, and it was a conscious decision. I studied a lot about African culture and health and the best way to take care of the body. … I really wanted to be healthy. I found out a lot about the body and what drugs they put in meat. My taste buds started changing, and I didn't crave meat and dairy products anymore" – Brandy Norwood
 * "I don't eat meat, fish, or eggs. I was never a big meat-eater, but I've got more energy now. I eat a lot of tofu, and I drink soy shakes with fruit every morning. I always have soybeans, black beans, or chickpeas for lunch or dinner" – Shania Twain
 * "It was a lot easier for me to lose the weight rather than putting it back on when I had to start shooting Spider-Man 2 because I'm a vegetarian, and it feels uncomfortable if you feel you're eating too much." – Tobey Maguire
 * "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
 * "Fruits, nuts, cereal, and vegetation were the basis of the human diet over the millennia. Our modern diet is really an anathema to our whole historical evolution." – Oliver Alabaster, MD
 * " [A]lthough we think we are one and we act as if we are one, human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores." - Dr. William C. Roberts, M.D., editor of the authoritative American Journal of Cardiology
 * " Man came before the axe and fire so he couldn't be carnivorous.The length of mans digestive tube is 5-8 meters and the distance between the mouth and the coccyx is 50 to 80 centimetres, which gives us a result of 10 as in other frugivorous animals and not 3 as in the carnivorous or 20 as in the herbivorous animals.The only animal with probable omnivorous morphology that exists, is the bear, which has some pointed teeth and others that are flat." - Thomas Henry Huxley
 * "You can't tear flesh by hand, you can't tear hide by hand. Our anterior teeth are not suited for tearing flesh or hide. We don't have large canine teeth, and we wouldn't have been able to deal with food sources that require those large canines" – Richard Leakey
 * "There is no doubt, that man is not built to be a carnivorous animal. What a sweet, pleasing and innocent sight is the spectacle of a table served that way and what a difference to a make up of fuming animal meat, slaughtered and dead! Man in no way has the constitution of a carnivorous being. Hunt and voracity are unnatural to him. Man has neither the sharp pointed teeth or claws to slaughter his prey. On the contrary his hands are made to pick fruits, berries and vegetables and teeth appropriate to chew them." – John Ray
 * "There is no biological need for milk." - Suzanne r. Havala, MS, RD
 * "Do we have the right to rear animals in order to kill them so that we may feed appetites in which we have been artificially conditioned from childhood?" - Ashley Montagu
 * "Animal life, sombre mystery. All nature protests against the barbarity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his inferior brethren."
 * Jules Michelet
 * "So-called farms today treat animals like so many boxes in a warehouse, chopping off beaks and tails and genitals with no painkillers at all, inflicting third-degree burns repeatedly by branding cows, […] and just a horrible catalog of abuses that, if done to dogs or cats, would be illegal on grounds of animal cruelty."
 * James Cromwell, in the PETA website
 * "I’ve been a vegan since I was about 3 years old and involved in animal rights for years. I’ve seen a number of animal rights films throghout the years, nona has affected me as profoundly as Earthlings. "
 * Joaquin Phoenix, interview from the official Earthlings website
 * "Chickens, pigs, and other animals … are interesting individuals with personalities and intelligence. … What people need to understand is that if they're eating animals, they are promoting cruelty to animals."
 * Pamela Anderson, in the PETA website
 * "I’m opposed to fur and any kind of use of animal products. I don’t eat them, and I don’t wear them. I’m not for the killing of any creature, whether it be seals, cows, dogs or any animal. So anytime it comes to any kind of animal cruelty, I’m totally against it."
 * Bryan Adams, PETA interview, 2007
 * "Every time we sit down to eat, we make a choice. Please choose vegetarianism. Do it for … animals. Do it for the environment, and do it for your health."
 * Alec Baldwin, in the PETA website, he worked with PETA.
 * "If you could feel or see the suffering, you wouldn't think twice. Give back life. Don't eat meat."
 * Kim Basinger
 * "I am a very strict vegetarian. ...I just really, really love animals, and I act on my values."
 * Natalie Portman
 * "Chickens raised for food today are … covered in excrement, they're diseased, and they're drugged up with all sorts of toxins that you are ingesting if you eat chickens. One recent study found that chicken flesh in this country has four times as much arsenic—yes, arsenic, the poison (which is used in the drugs the chickens are given) as any other meat … I have been a vegan for many years."
 * Russell Simmons
 * "I think there's something odd about eating another living anything."
 * Shania Twain
 * "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." – Constance Marie
 * "The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men."
 * Leonardo da Vinci (Quote invented by Dimitri Merejovski in a novel)
 * "I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily."
 * Marguerite Yourcenar
 * "Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals."
 * Theodor Adorno
 * "Meat is for beasts to feed on."
 * Ovid
 * "Cruelty is cruelty, whether it’s cruelty to children, to the elderly, to dogs and cats, or to chickens."
 * Russell Simmons
 * "Yes, I am a vegetarian. I find the thought of stuffing fragments of corpses down my throat quite repulsive, and I am amazed that so many people do it every day."
 * J. M. Coetzee
 * "The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men."
 * Alice Walker.
 * "If you can justify killing to eat meat, you can justify the conditions of the ghetto. I cannot justify either one."
 * Dick Gregory.
 * "Once people spend time with farm animals in a loving way ... a pig or cow or a little chicken or a turkey, they might find they relate with them the same way they relate with dogs and cats. People don't really think of them that way because they're on the plate. Why should they be food when other animals are pets? I would never eat my doggies." - Alicia Silverstone
 * "Eating animals as food is not far away from athropophagy and cannibalism.”
 * Alexander von Humboldt
 * "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian."
 * Paul McCartney
 * "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
 * "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
 * "No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does."
 * Henry David Thoreau
 * "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."
 * Thomas More
 * "Those who believe that the slaughtering of animal for food and goods are flawed in their thinking. That is, the belief that the natural order, the order that animals eat animals, is immoral in anyway is a justification of the lifestyle and opinions of another."
 * Jared Miller, research on human nature.
 * "As long as there are slaughterhouses... there will be battlefields."
 * Leo Tolstoy
 * "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. Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
 * Albert Einstein
 * "If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you can do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty."
 * Paul McCartney
 * "Certainly, 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." - Moby, VegNews interview
 * "Studies have shown that [animal waste] lagoons emit toxic airborne chemicals that can cause inflammatory, immune, irritation and neurochemical problems in humans." - California State Senate, 2004
 * "While millions of people across the globe are faced with droughts and water shortages, much of the world's water supply is quietly being diverted to animal agriculture. As the Western diet spreads to the rest of the world, even desert nations in Africa and the Middle East are pouring what little water they have into meat production." - www.goveg.com
 * "What we often fail to recognize is how efficient a vegan diet is. Less land, less water, more food for our spiraling population." – Ed Begley Jr.
 * "There's so many animals, there's not enough land anymore and everything's swamped with pesticides and fertilizers... It's destroying just about everything - topsoil, wildlife, water, birds. If everyone went veggie we'd need only about half the amount of land and we could have real forests and wild places again…. Animals use up huge amounts of water and there are billions of them. You can feed ten times the number of people on the food they give to animals… If you can feed ten times the number of people by not passing food through animals first and then killing them. That's got to make people think… It’s sucking in the world's supplies of grain and soya which are needed for people. It's costing lives. That's why we've got to get our message out there." – Paul McCartney, PETA interview
 * "The same amount of land used to graze and feed cattle could feed ten people, if however we cultivated it with lentils, kidney beans or peas it could feed a hundred people....The Orinoco basin can produce sufficient bananas to feed the whole of mankind comfortably." – Alexander von Humboldt
 * "This is the quintessence of wisdom: not to injure any living being." – Mahavira
 * "I hope that al those who eat animals and yet consider themselves to be living religious lives will read [Diet for Transcendence], and that it will lead them to see that the exploitation of animals is incompatible with any religion which professes compassion." - Peter Singer
 * "Plant life instead of animal food is the keystone of regeneration. Jesus used bread instead of flesh and wine in place of blood at the Lord’s Supper." - Richard Wagner
 * "Life remains immoral or only falsely moral, if there is cruelty and killing for the satisfaction of our daily needs." - Swami Avyaktananda
 * "I beg all of the mankind who wants peace/ Try to have great compassion and stop killing!" - Mencius
 * "There is a true correlation between our food choices and violence in the world. The only person who would disagree with that is a meat-eater." - Peter Burwash
 * "Thanks be to God: singe I gave up flesh and wine, I have been delivered from all physical ills." - John Wesley
 * "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." - St. Francis of Assisi
 * " God gave our first parents the food He designed that the race should eat. It was contrary to His plan to have the life of any creature taken. There was to be no death in Eden. The fruit of the trees in the garden was the food man's wants required." - Ellen G. White
 * " It seems obvious to me that a Christ-child who is depicted in the scriptures as being born in the stable, surrounded by animals, is not meant to be the figurehead of a Great Slaughter and a feast of gluttony and self indulgence. " – Lady Dowding
 * "To become vegetarian is to step into the stream which leads to nirvana." - Buddha.
 * "Vegetarian: old Indian word for "lousy hunter." – Bumper sticker
 * "Behold the Venus flytrap, the complete answer to the philosophy of vegetarianism" – Tom Edwards
 * "Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self righteousness." – Robert Hutchinson
 * "Have you just started that meal or are you just finishing it?" – Winston Churchill to vegetarian cabinet minister Strafford Cripps as they ate a meal together
 * "If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?" – John Cleese
 * "Red meat is not bad for you. Now, blue-green meat--that's bad for you!" – Tom Smothers
 * "There's no such thing as soy milk. It's soy juice."
 * Lewis Black
 * "I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants." - A. Whitney Brown

Theme sections
I think that the sections "Vegetarianism", "Ethical", "Environmental" and "Anti-vegetarian quotes" should be emptied and their quotations moved in the article body.--Spinoziano (talk) 13:16, 20 September 2016 (UTC)
 * ✅ I also removed some inadequate citations that were in those sections in order to clean up the page.--Spinoziano (talk) 15:56, 17 October 2016 (UTC)