Vegetarians

Chipotle veggie burgers

Seventy quotations and sayings delve into sides to these matters. Those without an author name added, may be credited T. Kinnes.

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Vegetarians are more intelligent, research shows. [London Evening Standard on the bright side of vegetarianism]*

*A study of thousands of men and women revealed that those who stick to a vegetarian diet have IQs that are around five points higher than those who regularly eat meat. Writing in the British Medical Journal, researchers from the University of Southampton tracked the fortunes of more than 8,000 volunteers for 20 years. Those who were brainiest as children were more likely to have become vegetarian as adults, shunning both meat and fish, and were also more likely to have gained degrees and hold down high-powered jobs. There was no difference in IQ between strict vegetarians and those who classed themselves as veggie but still ate fish or chicken. However, vegans - vegetarians who also avoid dairy products - scored significantly lower.

[Extracts from London Evening Standard's article "Vegetarians are more intelligent, research shows." 15 December 2006.]

I think, therefore I am . . . a vegetarian. [Author Unknown]

To eat is a necessity, to eat intelligently is an art. [La Rochefoucauld]

Animals do not 'give' their life to us, as the sugar-coated lie would have it . . . They struggle and fight to the last breath, just as we would do if we were in their place. [John Robbins]

Food is an important part of a balanced diet. [Fran Lebowitz]

Avoiding harm to all creatures. . . this is true knowledge. All else is ignorance. [Krishna, in Bhagavad-gita 13:8]

Hunting is not a sport. In a sport, both sides should know they're in the game. [Paul Rodriguez]

Musicians and poets may have strong feelings about vegetarian food and love alike.

Vegetarians claim to be immune from most diseases but they have been known to die from time to time. [George Bernard Shaw]

A healthy vegetarian cuisine may be fit for bread and mushroom and vegetable ingredients combined into meals greater and better than its separate parts, for a good meal is rather often a matter of synergies.

Vegetarianism is an art - too. As in music there has to be OK ingredients for us to appreciate it at length.

A very good ffff is always preferable to a not that good lobster.

The smell of good bread baking is a delight due to the alcohol released.

Vegetarian cooking is not all that difficult. And beside there are a lot of vegetarian cookbooks around.

There are many miracles in the world to be celebrated and, for me, garlic is the most deserving. [Leo Buscaglia]

Grandma's cooking: "She didn’t waste time thinking too much about the celery. She got the best celery she could and then she dealt with it." [Mario Batali]

Garlic, basil, parsley, coriander and cheering hopefully go together.

After a veggie dinner one may feel delighted or otherwise. It depends.

Grilling, broiling, barbecuing looks like a matter of building a pyre and sacrifice to the baldness of life.

I wish that more and more adventurous young men would give up the gun in favour of the camera. [Jawaharlal Nehru]

The increased meat intake in a nation suggests life is getting harder on the common man, believe it or not.

A vegetarian is a person who won't eat anything that can have children. [David Brenner]

Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are like us.' Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are not like us.' Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction. [Charles R. Magel]

Haunting involves many terrible Karmic aspects. In murdering a father or mother animal, very likely some young creatures are made orphans, left unprotected in the wilderness. And, often, clumsy haunters only succeed in wounding the creatures; thus escaping immediate destruction, the maimed animals may roam in agony for days upon days, until Death finally supervenes. More misery in trapping: caught in the wicked traps, many creatures actually gnaw off their own paws, to gain the precious freedom. [Cf. Swami Noshervanji on hunting]

He who . . . who serves it up, and he who eats it, may be considered as co-slayers of the animal. [With Manu]

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. [Francis of Assisi]

Injury to sentient beings is detrimental to heavenly bliss. [Manu]

We are bombarded with glossy, manufactured images of meat eaters surrounded by lots of expensive equipment and folks. The message is clear: the public buys into this image. Others eat meat for other reasons as well.

Meat can never be obtained without injury to living creatures, and injury to sentient beings is detrimental to (the attainment of) heavenly bliss; let him therefore shun (the use of) meat. / Having well considered the origin of flesh and the (cruelty of) fettering and slaying corporeal beings, let him entirely abstain from eating flesh. - Manu Samhita, 5.48-49.

It is not impossible that vegetarians suffer from terrifying visions of not being attacked by angry bulls and cattle they have slaughtered or bought pieces of, and the like – but how likely may it be?

Addiction to meat eating may arise from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own, secret pains inside. You might be using a steak or something to cover up such pains or torments over and over.

I, however, cannot force myself to use "meat drugs" to cheat on my loneliness. [Cf. Franz Kafka]

Components of wellness: proper breaking of the smoking habit, good quality control of vegetarian food and much else.

Our national problem is hardly vegetarian food of an imbalanced horror.

To be an "improbably recovering vegetarian" should it make you sad or sulky? At any rate, vegetarian alcohol has been the ruin of many.

I got sober. I stopped killing myself with tempted veal. If I could stop doing that, what other savoury possibilities might open up in its wake? Going on might be worth the risk of going on a loner.

One should profit from avoiding cigarettes and eating meat as substitutes for being a rather interesting person.

The time is overripe for the government to knock down the barriers to healthy grocery food coupled with good prevention, treatment and recovery for the growing number of lardy ones and accommodate to better, stress-free living when possible. Compassion is not all there is to solving this massive problem.

Let us ask what is best - not what is customary. Let us love temperance - let us be just - let us refrain from bloodshed. [Seneca]

One should treat animals such as deer, camels, asses, monkeys, mice, snakes, birds and flies exactly like one's own son . . . these innocent animals. [Narada Muni, Bhagavata Purana 7:14:9]

Nonviolence . . . and mercy to all life forms are the goals of godly persons who are endowed with My nature. [Krishna, Bhagavad-gita 16:1]

To a vegetarian the sensations that some bottled, organic foods give, are sour.

The massive, global twin problems of overeating and of not having enough food seldom go away on their own.

I hardly think it has been proved once and for all that emotionally charged behaviour stems altogether from vegetarian food.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans. [Alice Malsenior Walker]

Vegetarianism is somehow of deep, international morality. And one can repent of moral vegetarianism for both sane reasons and other reasons.

Justice prevails over non-vegetarianism if she comes to the end of the line. [Cf. Hesiod on transgression]

Against various snub codes of meat-eaters there is vegetarianism and much else.

Do you revile gentle vegetarianism where the repercussions of dire meat-eating like in wait for your soul?

If your children "have sinned against vegetarianism" after they have come of age, have you considered you could have "sinned against been frivolous" with them earlier?

One good deed of consideration could outweigh eating many steaks. If not, a fine act might serve as a shield against repercussions ahead.

Blessed is he whose vegetarianism covers his sinful former ways - if that happens.

In the vegetarianism of of the wicked there may be snares, but hardly just reasons to sing and rejoice.

The factory farm is . . . an obvious moral evil so sickening and horrendous. . . All this so we can have our accustomed veal or lamb or fried chicken or pork chop or hot dog. [Matthew Scully, abr.]

The first man . . . 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]

The smell of factory farms . . . many notice these places only when the odours reach their homes, affecting their own quality of life. We create these animals for our profit and pleasure, playing with their genes, violating their dignity as living creatures, forcing them to lie and live in their own urine and excrement, turning pens into penitentiaries and frustrating their every desire except what is needed to keep them breathing and breeding. And then we complain about the smell. [With Matthew Scully]

Thou shalt not kill" does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings; and this Commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai. [Leo Tolstoy]

We don't need to eat anyone who would run, swim, or fly away if he could. [James Cromwell]

We have found ways . . . to torture and maim animals and make their lives a misery, almost a living hell . . . in the multinational food industry, . . . and in laboratories where often the most important thing being researched is the latest in lipstick or face cream. [David Oderberg (Professor of Philosophy at Oxford)]

Apart from the sensitive approach, where we attempt to cause as little harm as feasible on sensitive, higher life forms like humans, it also matters that we survive in too hard conditions where eating meat is not folly.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education. [Mark Twain]

Dear Lord, I've been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us. . . a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird. . . a social being. . . capable of actual affection. . . nuzzling its young with almost human-like compassion. Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family. [Berke Breathed, Bloom County Babylon]

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]

I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men. [Leonardo da Vinci]

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. . .. [Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854]

I think there are several gliding scales into it when it comes to the food to eat; it is often not so much an either-or matter, for example either vegetarian or meat-eating. So, many vegetarians have milk and milk products, eat eggs, fish, and light meat, and still count for vegetarians. I for my part is no meat-eater in between meals.

In Norway we have a word for sushi: bait. [From José Simons]

[It] boils down to priorities. What do you consider more important in your life? Disregard for the suffering of others? Your taste buds? Or what? [Yajnavalkya Dasa]

My situation is a solemn one. Life is offered to me on condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better . . . My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarfs in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures. [George Bernard Shaw]

One of the very nicest things about a pleasant life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are singing and devote our attention to eating. [Cf. Luciano Pavarotti and William Wright, hum]

People take to bad stimulants like coffee, smokes, and further, after overtaxing their systems for some time. These things tell they could profit from calming down substantially some way or other instead of stabilising or step up stresses. But for those who cannot stay away from red meat, their overall conditions could be too hard, not gentle. If so, life in the USA is far too taxing today.