The Vegetarian Quotes & Sayings

I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol lowering drugs for the rest of their lives. — Dean Ornish

Even if you are vegetarian, you do want to have a stuffing for Thanksgiving. The stuffing is not so much about the vegetables, but it's very unique to the season. — Daniel Humm

Well, you can't expect a lion to stop pouncing on you just because you are a vegetarian, as the saying goes. Yes! Shit happens to everybody, regardless of how good at heart you are.This is karma and it will screw you. — Kavipriya Moorthy

It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals. — Jonathan Safran Foer

For the last few years I've tried to force myself to write at least one page every day, which doesn't sound like much but it's actually pretty hard to manage. Because I'm not allowed to do a make-up day. I can't do two pages the next day. The punishment for not completing my page is that I have to eat a vegetarian meal the next day. — Dan Chaon

We were a savage little lot, Liverpool kids, not pacifist or vegetarian or anything. But I feel I've gone beyond that, and that it was immature to be so prejudiced and believe in all the stereotypes. — Paul McCartney

If you visit the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, it will brand your soul for life. — Howard Lyman

I became a vegetarian out of concern for animals, but I wasn't a vegetarian long before I realized there's something to that. I don't think I would have worked for the past five years probably were it not for my vegetarian diet. — Bob Barker

My disciples are vegetarian not as a cult, not as a creed. They are vegetarians because their meditations make them more human, more of the heart, and they can see the whole stupidity of people killing living beings for their food. It is their sensitivity, their aesthetic awareness that makes them vegetarians. — Rajneesh

For the gentle werelibrarian, who's strictly vegetarian, there's nothing like Tofillager the MEATLESS TOFU VILLAGER — Adam Rex

The trains [in a country] contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar with its gadgets and passengers represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical. — Paul Theroux

I'm not trying to win an award for being the best vegetarian, just want to be healthy. Take a salt bath. Do things that my parents were never able to do. I'm blessed to do anything I want, so I decide to take the best care of my body and my family in the same way. Holistically. Vitally. — Erykah Badu

I'm all in favor of animal rights, but I'd like to see the food movement take a much stronger stand in defense of basic human rights. If you're a vegan or a vegetarian, you should care about the people who are picking your fruits and vegetables by hand. — Eric Schlosser

CARNIVOROUS, adj. Addicted to the cruelty of devouring the timorous vegetarian, his heirs and assigns. — Ambrose Bierce

"You're wearing your Seduction Hat. Why am I not surprised?"
He offers a pirate's smile. "Did you notice ... I've a new embellishment?" He makes a show of adjusting an owl's tail feather in the band.
I bite back a giggle. "Vegetarian barn owl, I presume?"
"Won't be bothering me again for some time."
"I can guarantee it's not the only one out there."
He loops my arm through his. "Good. I'm always up for a worthy chase." — A.G. Howard

A cat met up with a big male rat in the attic and chased him into a corner. The rat, trembling, said, 'Please don't eat me, Mr. Cat. I have to go back to my family. I have hungry children waiting for me. Please let me go.' The cat said, 'Don't worry, I won't eat you. To tell you the truth, I can't say this too loudly, but I'm a vegetarian. I don't eat any meat. You were lucky to run into me.' The rat said, 'Oh, what a wonderful day! What a lucky rat I am to meet up with a vegetarian cat!' But the very next second, the cat pounced on the rat, held him down with his claws, and sank his sharp teeth into the rat's throat. With his last, painful breath, the rat asked him, 'But Mr. Cat, didn't you say you're a vegetarian and don't eat any meat? Were you lying to me?' The cat licked his chops and said, 'True, I don't eat meat. That was no lie. I'm going to take you home in my mouth and trade you for lettuce.' — Haruki Murakami

The first thing to understand is that being a vegetarian is actually a private matter. I'm still taken aback by the question " then what do you eat?" and am embarrassed as I struggle to produce the weeks food diary. Its not that I'm ashamed of what I eat, but its none of anyone's business. I imagine I would have a similar feeling counting up how many pairs of underwear I went thru in a week. The only reason opening someone's fridge is more socially acceptable than opening someone's medicine cabinet is that people keep beer in their fridge. — Sloane Crosley

I made the choice to be vegan because I will not eat (or wear, or use) anything that could have an emotional response to its death or captivity. I can well imagine what that must feel like for our non-human friends - the fear, the terror, the pain - and I will not cause such suffering to a fellow living being. — Rai Aren

I'm not a vegetarian. Now, don't get me wrong - I like animals. And I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. But there's no way to treat animals well when you're killing 10 billion of them a year. Kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. Let's get the numbers of animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left. — Mark Bittman

Whatever I decide will not work. It's what people want that will work. So no one decided whether you become a vegetarian or anything else. What determines that is the availability of food. If we run out of vegetation due to floods or natural disasters, people will consume meat and if we run out of meat they will consume vegetables. I have no control over that. That would be up to people. — Jacque Fresco

The idea of a vegetarian butcher is absurd; but there is something more absurd than this: The idea of an honest politician! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I'm going to kill him. Even as I said it, I couldn't believe my reaction. Apparently there's something in the Montana water that instantly transforms an agnostic, Starbucks-loving, vegetarian pacifist into a God-and-country-loving protector of all women and cattle. — Renee Carlino

I'm not a vegetarian. But I think people who are vegetarians, they are actually more virtuous than the rest of us. I think they should be admired. — Tyler Cowen

We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals? — Jonathan Safran Foer

I'm vegetarian so eating right definitely gives me the energy you need. — Shannon Elizabeth

I don't eat meat. I've been a vegetarian since 1971. I've gradually become increasingly vegan. I am largely vegan, but I'm a flexible vegan. I don't go to the supermarket and buy non-vegan stuff for myself. But when I'm traveling or going to other people's places, I will be quite happy to eat vegetarian rather than vegan. — Peter Singer

Mr. Deacon, on the other hand, was in favour of abolishing, or ignoring, the existing world entirely, with a view to experimenting with one of an entirely different order. He was a student of Esperanto (or, possibly, one of the lesser-known artificial languages), intermittently vegetarian, and an advocate of decimal coinage. — Anthony Powell

The woman I am currently crazy about was a vegetarian for a year until I started dating her. As is the case with most vegetarians, she had never eaten properly prepared meat, only commercially packaged or otherwise abused flesh. — Steve Albini

I don't have hardly any caffeine, I don't drink alcohol and I watch my red meat intake. My diet at the minute seems to be verging towards the vegetarian, which is surprising me because I tend to just listen to what my body is fancying. — Jayne Middlemiss

I'm not a vegetarian by any means; I eat fish. But the problem with shark finning is they catch the shark, cut their fins and throw them back in the ocean, and to me, that's wrong. If you're going to kill an animal, you should use the entire animal and do it humanely. I'm definitely not a big fan. — Bethany Hamilton

That we're not dealing with your ordinary serial killer. More the Twilight kind. And this one isn't a vegetarian. — Leanna Ellis

The good news is that you just need a bit of compassion to become vegetarian, and this is something widely found in the human race. — Armand Chauvel

Olympia was a town crawling with music. I was new to the whole punk scene. The culture shock continued; Olympia had bagels! We didn't have bagels in Arkansas. You could order vegetarian food all over town! It was so crazy to me - a place with so many vegetarians, the restaurants made special dishes for them? — Beth Ditto

I'm a vegetarian, so I eat a whole bunch of avocados a lot of the time. — Courtney Eaton

I became a vegetarian out of compassion for animals and to live as healthy as possible. I realized soon after that I was truly concerned with nonviolent consumption and my own health, a vegan diet was the best decision. — Davey Havok

A diet that relies heavily on meat production results in higher emissions than a typical vegetarian diet. Different individuals will make different choices. However, the debate about climate change should not be dumbed down to a single slogan, such as 'give up meat to save the planet.' — Nicholas Stern

I waited for him to come out. He didn't. I considered going in after him, but knew the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die. — Derrick Jensen

There are many people who don't do well on a vegetarian or vegan diet, that for them, meat is a very nutritious food. So, I'm not prepared to give up meat. I don't think we need to give up meat, but we certainly need to change the way we raise meat and diminish the amount of it in our diet. — Michael Pollan

There is, however, a moral basis for the vegetarian diet for which the indeterminate value of an animal's life takes on irrelevance. And that moral basis is a concern for the environment, a value as absolute as the value we all place on human life, since humanity will not survive for long on a poisoned planet. To be an environmentalist who happens to eat meat is like being a philanthropist who doesn't happen to give to charity. — Howard Lyman

We should not be too proud of being vegetarian, for example. We must acknowledge that the water in which we boil our vegetables contain many microorganisms, not to mention the vegetables themselves, But even when we cannot be completely nonviolent, by being vegetarian we are going in the direction of nonviolence....Our effort is only to proceed in that direction. — Thich Nhat Hanh

In modern parlance we speak of the interconnectedness of all life, suggesting that one cannot really be healthy when the environment is sick. — Richard A. Young

My wife Kimora once told me while we were watching "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" that it's a vegetarian movie because the way that the woman was screaming, "Aaaahhh," and trying to run away is how every animal you eat reacted at the slaughterhouse. — Russell Simmons

Whenever I visit a market and see the chickens crowded together in tiny cages that give them no room to move around and spread their wings and the fish slowly drowning in the air, my heart goes out to them. People have to learn to think about animals in a different way, as sentient beings who love life and fear death. I urge everyone who can to adopt a compassionate vegetarian diet. — Dalai Lama

Occasionally, a dog will be presented as some training method for having a baby. "My girlfriend and I got a dog. We are going to see if we can handle that before we have kids." This is a little like testing the waters of being a vegetarian by having lettuce on your burger. Okay, maybe that metaphor doesn't make sense, but neither does using a dog as a training method for having a baby. — Jim Gaffigan

I have been vegetarian for twelve years. And I have never been seriously ill. Vegetarian food strengthens the immune system. I think that meat makes you sick. — Bryan Adams

I make a lot of jokes about vegetarians in my act but most of them don't have the strength to protest. — Ardal O'Hanlon

Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race's mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic. — H.P. Lovecraft

Factory farming is terrible for the environment - not to mention that it's gross. The best thing you can do, if you think about it, is to become a vegetarian and just spread the word. The world would change for the better for animals, humans, and the planet if everyone took that step. — Christofer Drew

I'm a vegetarian. You're a what? I don't eat meat. How can you not eat meat? I just don't. He says he does not eat meat. What? No meat? No meat. Steak? No ... Chickens! No ... And what about the sausage? No, no sausage, no meat! He says he does not eat any meat. Not even sausage? I know! What is wrong with him? What is wrong with you? Nothing, I just don't eat meat! — Jonathan Safran Foer

Jim needed his equal: a powerful, aggressive, and sexy woman. He got me, Dali, a skinny vegetarian girl who had to wear glasses with lenses as thick as Coke bottle bottoms, threw up when she smelled blood, and was about as useful in a fight as a fifth leg on a donkey. To top it all off, my own mother, who loved me more than the whole world, wouldn't describe me as pretty. She told people that I was smart, brave, and educated. Unfortunately none of it helped me right now, because tonight I wanted to be sexy. I wanted to seduce Jim. — Nalini Singh

I was raised really, really healthy, pretty much vegetarian and a very clean lifestyle, I don't smoke, I don't drink. I'm more addicted to the things that make me feel good - endorphins after working out. — Elizabeth Berkley

To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today ... starvation, cruelty - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Jainism is the first religion that has made vegetarianism a fundamental necessity for transforming consciousness. And they are right. Killing just to eat makes your consciousness heavy, insensitive; and you need a very sensitive consciousness - very light, very loving, very compassionate. It is difficult for a non-vegetarian to be compassionate; and without being compassionate and loving you will be hindering your own progress. — Rajneesh

Environmentalism is a luxury. Just like being a vegetarian is a luxury. When you have to worry about eating - you're not going to be worried about where the food's coming from, or who made your shoes. Poverty, whether planned or not planned, is a way of making environmentalism moot. — Sherman Alexie

In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help. — Neel Mukherjee

I was a vegan for two years, and I really enjoyed it. Then, I got to a point in my life at which I wanted to do something else, so now I'm a vegetarian. You should make your diet one that best fits you and how you feel. Listen to your body. The most important thing is to exercise, drink lots of water, and take really good care of yourself. — Lea Michele

I've learned so much from my ups and downs as a life long vegan. I'm really excited to share my experiences and insights so that you can get the most out of your vegan diet. — Ursula Escher

If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people, — E. O. Wilson

If you don't take care of this the most magnificent machine that you will ever be given ... where are you going to live? — Karyn Calabrese

I don't do the gym and I don't diet. I'm vegetarian but I don't diet. — Pamela Anderson

I turned vegetarian after 9/11. A friend of mine came back from New York and said that he couldn't stand the smell of burnt flesh. It immediately reminded me of a barbecue. — Alyssa Milano

The more red meat and blood we eat, the more bloodthirsty we get, the more violent we get. The more vegetarian food we eat, the more peace is taken into us. — Ziggy Marley

Because there's no reason to think Paige had to eat anything. Paige is not a low demon. She's a little girl. A vegetarian. A born humanitarian. A budding Dalai Lama, for chrissake. She only attacked the angel to defend me. That's all.
Besides, she didn't eat him, she just ... gnawed on him a little. — Susan Ee

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 — George Bernard Shaw

Are you a vegetarian?' I ask, based on the evidence in front of me.
She nods.
'Why?'
'Because I have this theory that when we die, every animal that we've eaten has a chance at eating us back. So if you're a carnivore and you add up all the animals you've eaten
well, that's a long time in purgatory, being chewed.'
'Really?'
She laughs. 'No. I'm just sick of the question. I mean, I'm a vegetarian because I think it's wrong to eat other sentient creatures. And it sucks for the environment. — David Levithan

In fact, just heading toward veganism lifts a not insignificant burden from the earth. According to food pundit Michael Pollan, who's not a vegetarian, if everybody did even "Meatless Monday," it would be the environmental equivalent of taking 20 million midsize cars off the road. — Victoria Moran

The way she told it, she was such a criminal even the most God-fearing church ladies got bored of reporting on her; she did the marketing on Sunday, dropped by any church she liked or none at all, was a feminist (which Mrs. Asher sometimes confused with communist), a Democrat (which Mrs. Lincoln pointed out practically had "demon" in the word itself), and, worst of all, a vegetarian (which ruled out any dinner invitations from Mrs. Snow). — Kami Garcia

The real challenge for a vegan is getting vitamin B and omega-3s, but you can get those in a vegetarian supplement. — Emily Deschanel

I was raised as a Catholic and received the body and blood of Jesus Christ every Sunday at communion until I was thirty years of age, when I became a vegetarian. — Joe Queenan

I love to cook, it's one of my most favorite things in the world. That's why I stopped being a vegetarian - I didn't want to serve people things I hadn't tasted myself. — Claudia Black

When she passed on the ham the explanation was she was a vegetarian. Kat had asked why she was eating eggs, then, if she didn't eat meat. Smiling, she replied, I don't kill animals for food, but I am pro-choice. — James R Tuck

I became a vegetarian for about maybe a year. It was more of a little detox for me. I tend to do a lot of detoxes. I was on the Body Ecology Diet before I got pregnant, which I believe is one of the reasons I was able to get pregnant. — Tia Mowry

What every human being should do is eat a vegetarian diet based on whole foods. Period. That's it. Animal protein is bad for you. Dairy is bad for you. Forget the ads: Milk and eggs are bad for you. — Roger Ebert

I, personally, no longer take part in the ecstatic public condemnation of people unless they've committed a transgression that has an actual victim, and even then not as much as I probably should. I miss the fun a little. But it feels like when I became a vegetarian. I missed the steak, although not as much as I'd anticipated, but I could no longer ignore the slaughterhouse. — Jon Ronson

Only fools argue whether to eat meat or not. They don't understand truth, nor do they meditate on it. Who can define what is meat and what is plant? Who knows where the sin lies, being a vegetarian or a non-vegetarian? — Guru Nanak

Being vegan or vegetarian isn't just about compassion for animals. Most of the destruction of the planet is the result of all the clear-cutting, groundwater contamination, grain production, fuel consumption, greenhouse gas, viral proliferation - the direct result of livestock production. — William McNamara

Ralph Nader choose the man with whom to share the responsibility of running a distant third, California activist Peter Camejo. You may remember that Camejo ran for president in 1976 on the Socialist Workers Party ticket. Actually, you might only remember that if you run a lesbian, vegetarian, bookstore. — Jon Stewart

Sure! Why should any experts be the arbiters ... That's like telling someone they can't be a vegetarian. — Virginia Johnson

I worked on the line, I've been an executive chef, I've worked for the Mets, I've worked for various steakhouses, vegetarian restaurants, a lot of Middle Eastern stuff. I've worked my fair share of a lot of different things. I've worked at festivals and street fairs, you know? I've been through it all. — Action Bronson

I was a vegetarian when we shot the first film(Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle), and I generally eat organic as much as possible. I know this is so disappointing to the audience, which is why I don't talk about it a lot, but I don't smoke weed, I don't eat fast food. — Kal Penn

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Eating a vegetarian diet can contribute more to saving ourselves and the planet than any other single effort. — Sharon Gannon

Most people see a documentary about the meat industry and then they become a vegetarian for a week. — Jason Reitman

At home in Ghaziabad, everyone is a pure vegetarian. In fact, when I want to cook non-veg there, my mum shoos me out on the terrace where I have my cooking utensils. I'm told categorically that whatever non-veg or egg, etc., that I have to cook, I should do upstairs and not enter her kitchen at all. — Suresh Raina

For the most part, I'd say if you crossed a cat with a smart dog, made him a matriarchal vegetarian, gave him sleek beauty, a mass of muscle, and the desire to run, then what you'd have is a horse. — Tom Spanbauer

I was vegetarian, trying to eat from fast-food restaurants without meat. I didn't know how to eat properly and I was starving. I was adrenalized to the eyeballs from performing. I was afraid that I was sick with AIDS. We were playing five shows a week. I even went through a period of abstinence where I didn't drink and stopped having sex. Which is crazy. Maybe I'm answering too many questions at once here, but this is where my mind was at the age of 25. — Michael Stipe

After a conversation with someone that went on all night, but I didn't take much persuading, and the next day I was a vegetarian. It came down to one question, can you be healthy without killing animals? If the answer is 'yes' then the only reason you're killing is because you like the taste. But you can't take a life just because you like its taste. — Martin Shaw

It's such a hopeful, almost utopian word, that word "phase." As if any minute, "we" would suffer some sort of Joad overload, come to "our" senses, and for heaven's sake, do something about our godforsaken shoes. But the book phase never ended. The book phase would bloom and grow into a whole series of seasonal affiliations including our communist phase, our beatnik phase, our vegetarian phase, and the three-year period known as Please Don't Talk to Me. Now that we are finishing up the third decade of the book phase, we ask ourselves if we have changed. Sure, we still dress in the bruise palette of gray, black, and blue, and we still haven't gotten around to piercing our ears. But we wear lipstick now, we own high-heeled shoes. Concessions have been made. — Sarah Vowell

Vegetarian food leaves a deep impression on our nature. If the whole world adopts vegetarianism, it can change the destiny of humankind. — Albert Einstein

From the vantage of a mid-1970's consensus that regarded the United States as having entered a post-Protestant era, the rise of a Religious Right dominated not only by Protestants but by fundamentalists was not the way the story was supposed to go. People like Jerry Falwell looked like party crashers who, rather than slikinking from bar to buffet in hopes of going unnoticed, demanded that the vegetarian, alcohol-imbibing hosts serve meat and tell the bartender to go home. — D.G. Hart

Many people are turned off at eating vegetarian because of the misconception that all dishes are just an arrangement of bland vegetables. — Marcus Samuelsson

I told her that my happy yellow teapot has a kinky backstory involving a nineteenth-century vegetarian sex cult in upstate New York whose members lived for three decades as self-proclaimed "Bible communists" before incorporating into the biggest supplier of dinnerware to the American food-service industry, not to mention harboring their most infamous resident, an irritating young maniac who, years after he moved away, was hanged for assassinating President Garfield. — Sarah Vowell

For the first time, she became vividly aware of how much of her life she had spent with her husband. It had been a period of time utterly devoid of happiness and spontaneity. A time that she'd so far managed to get through only by using up every last reserve of perseverance and consideration. All of it self-inflicted. — Han Kang

I remember eating in school in the years after the Second World War. Most of my friends had miserable portions of Spam with an inedible, glutinous pudding served in containers we called 'coffins.' As a vegetarian, I had a lump of loathsome cheese and some bread. — Robert Winston

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, the whole world would be vegetarian. — Linda McCartney

If you live, ego disappears. Life knows no ego, it knows only living and living and living. Life knows no self, no center; life knows no separation. You breathe - life enters into you; you exhale you enter into life. There is no separation. You eat, and trees enter into you through the fruit. Then one day you die, you are buried in the earth, and the trees suck you up and you become fruits. Your children will eat you again. You have been eating your ancestors - the trees have converted them into fruits. You think you are a vegetarian? Don't be deceived by appearances. We are all cannibals. — Osho

It is the other way round: food cannot make you spiritual, but if you are spiritual your food habits will change. Eating anything will not make much difference. You can be a vegetarian and cruel to the extreme, and violent; you can be a non-vegetarian and kind and loving. Food will not make much difference. In India there are communities who have lived totally with vegetarian food; many Brahmins have lived totally with vegetarian food. They are non-violent but they are not spiritual. — Rajneesh

On going vegetarian." I was sitting here eating my plate of chicken salad, and suddenly I looked down and saw all the meat on my plate and just wasn't hungry anymore. So i've decided I'm not going to eat meat." — Shiri Appleby

There's no question that largely vegetarian diets are as healthy as you can get. The evidence is so strong and overwhelming and produced over such a long period of time that it's no longer debatable. — Marion Nestle

Goodwill to Spazzy up in gerbil heaven. Sorry sorry sorry. I stopped eating meat the day of the massacre, as penance for Spazzy. I've been a vegetarian since age six, all for the love of a gerbil. — Rachel Cohn