Various AR/Vegan Quotations

(12 Quotations)

• Author Unknown - "I ask for the privilege of not being born [. . .] not to be born until you can assure me of [. . .] a right to live as long as I am physically able to enjoy life [. . .] not to be born until my body is precious and men have ceased to exploit it because it is cheap and plentiful."

• Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790 American statesman, Inventor, Author) - "My refusing to eat meat occasioned an inconveniency, and I have been frequently chided for my singularity. But my light repast allows for greater progress, for greater clearness of head and quicker comprehension."

• Sir Victor Gollancz (Publisher, Writer, Humanitarian: The Unlived Life) – "I think the rapidly growing tendency to regard animals as born for nothing except slavery to so-called humanity absolutely disgusting."

• David Cowles-Hamar (Author, Singer) - "Not having known anything better does not alleviate the suffering of the animal. Its fundamental desires remain and it is the frustration of those desires that is a great part of its suffering. There are so many examples: the dairy cow who is never allowed to raise her young, the battery hen who can never walk or stretch her wings, the sow who can never build a nest or root for food in the forest litter, etc. Eventually we frustrate the animal's most fundamental desire of all - to live."

• Ronnie Lee (Founder: Animal Liberation Front) - "An individual animal doesn't care if its species is facing extinction - it cares if it is feeling pain."

• George Orwell (Animal Farm) - "Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.”

• George Bernard Shaw - "Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends."

• George Bernard Shaw (when asked why he was a vegetarian) - Oh, come! That boot is on the other leg. Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that."

• Henry David Thoreau (Essayist, Poet) - "All good things are wild, and free."

• Henry David Thoreau - "I saw deep in the eyes of the animals the human soul look out upon me. I saw where it was born deep down under feathers and fur, or condemned for a while to roam four-footed among the brambles, I caught the clinging mute glance of the prisoner and swore that I would be faithful."

• Voltaire (Trate sur la tolerance) - "People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines... It appears to me, besides, that [such people] can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel..."

• Alice Walker (Author, Poet) - "I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It's like...you're just eating misery. You're eating a bitter life."