These great These great vegetarians, such as Pythagoras, Plato, Leo
Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Nikola
Tesla, Shopenhauer, Thoreau, Leonardo D
a
Vinci, Voltaire etc. knew there could be no spiritual advancement while
attaining ones nourishment from cruelty and the exploitation of others.
Albert Einstein:
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survi
val of
life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
Leonardo DaVinci
"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." DaVinci claimed that flesh eaters were
using their bodies as "grave yards."
Charles Darwin:
"The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man."
Thomas Edison:
"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."
George Bernard Shaw:
"We pray on Sundays that we
may have light to guide our footsteps on the path we tread; We are sick
of war we don't want to fight. And yet we gorge ourselves upon the
dead."
Percy Bysshe Shelley:
"Let the advocate of animal
food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and as
Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth and, plunging his
head into its vitals slake his thirst with the steaming blood."
Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Walden, "Economy" (1854):
One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for
it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a
part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones;
walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with
vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of
every obstacle.
Henry David Thoreau:
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, as surely as the savage tribes
have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more
civilized.
Mark Twain:
It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.
Benjamin Franklin:
Flesh eating is "unprovoked murder." On the subject of vegetarianism,
Franklin noted that one will achieve "greater progress, from the greater
clearness of head and quicker comprehension."
Thomas A Edison, 1847-1931:
"The Doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his
patient in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and
prevention of disease."
Francis of Assisi:
"Not to hurt our
humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not
enough. We have a higher mission-to be of service to them wherever they
require it."
Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi:
"To my mind the
life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I hold
that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to
protection by man from the cruelty of man."
Abraham Lincoln:
"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being."
Thomas Paine:
"Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and
everything of cruelty to animals, is a violation of moral duty."
Henry Salt:
"The emancipation of men from cruelty and injustice will bring with it
in due course the emancipation of animals also. The two reforms are
inseparably connected, and neither can be fully realized alone."
Albert Schweitzer:
"...the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race
existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is
incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form
extended responsibility to everything that has life."
George Bernard Shaw:
"Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character."
Leo Tolstoy:
"If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals."
Alice Walker:
"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 created for men."
President Abraham Lincoln:
I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
Pythagoras:
Animals share with us the privilege of having a soul.
Pythagoras:
The earth affords a lavish supply of richess of innocent foods, and
offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter; only beasts
satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because
horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass.
George Bernard Shaw:
A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
George Bernard Shaw:
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
George Bernard Shaw:
Animals are my friends; I don't eat my friends.
John Robbins (p. 49 Diet for a New America):
Our understanding of what constitutes intelligence is utterly relative.
If an aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, for example, all of Western
civilization would probably flunk. We have a very convenient and
self-serving way of defining intelligence. If an animal does something,
we call it instinct. If we do the same thing for the same reason, we
call it intelligence.
"I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian." ~ George Bernard Shaw
In addition to his writings on non-violence, Leo Tolstoy's advocacy of
vegetarianism led to his friendship with Mohandas Gandhi. He wrote
several essays about vegetarianism, but perhaps never more compellingly
than when he said:
"flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act, which is contrary to moral feeling: killing."
Nikola Tesla was a humanitarian who loved animals. He argued that
animal slaughter was “wanton and cruel” and eventually became a
vegetarian.
Voltaire was an advocate of civil rights and
freedom. He also believed in the virtues of vegetarianism. He once wrote
that "men fed upon carnage, and drinking strong drinks, have all an
impoisoned and arid blood which drives them mad in a hundred different
ways." This sounds like an early precursor of the phrase "you are what
you eat."
