The ultimate collection of the best vegan and animal rights quotes.
"You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car."
Harvey Diamond
"It takes nothing away from a human to be kind to an animal."
Joaquin Phoenix
"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."
"We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet - for the sake of hamburgers."
Peter Singer
"Could you look an animal in the eyes and say to it, 'My appetite is more important than your suffering'?"
"A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral."
"How can you eat anything with eyes?"
Will Kellogg
"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 whenever they require it."
Francis of Assisi
"We don't need to eat anyone who would run, swim, or fly away if he could."
James Cromwell
"If slaughterhouses had glass walls, the whole world would be vegetarian."
Linda McCartney
"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."
"There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery."
Charles Darwin
"I hold that the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man."
Mahatma Gandhi
"For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."
Pythagoras
"The human body has no more need for cows' milk than it does for dogs' milk, horses' milk, or giraffes' milk."
Dr Michael Klaper
"One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with’; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself 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."
"Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight."
Albert Schweitzer
"Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man."
Arthur Schopenhauer
"If you really care about animals, then stop trying to figure out how to exploit them ‘compassionately’. Just stop exploiting them."
Gary Francione
"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than blacks were made for whites, or women for men."
Alice Walker
"The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?"
Jeremy Bentham
"Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse - and persuading others not to support it - is."
Peter Singer
"But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy."
Plutarch
"Animals don’t have a voice, but I do. A loud one. A big f*@%'ing mouth. My voice is for them. And I’ll never shut up while they suffer."
Ricky Gervais
"The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different."
Hippocrates
"We do not need to eat animals, wear animals, or use animals for entertainment purposes, and our only defense of these uses is our pleasure, amusement, and convenience."
Gary Francione
"When I see bacon, I see a pig, I see a little friend, and that’s why I can’t eat it. Simple as that."
Paul McCartney
"The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man."
Charles Darwin
"It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions."
Mark Twain
"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
"When it comes to having a central nervous system, and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy."
Ingrid Newkirk
"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being."
Abraham Lincoln
"Of all the creatures, man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he's the one that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot."
Mark Twain
"Life is life - whether in a cat, or dog or man. There is no difference there between a cat or a man. The idea of difference is a human conception for man's own advantage."
Sri Aurobindo
"Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace."
Albert Schweitzer
"We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature."
Rachel Carson
"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."
Thomas Edison
"If a kid ever realized what was involved in factory farming, they would never touch meat again."
James Cromwell
"The horse and the cow, the rabbit and the cat, the deer and the hare, the pheasant and the lark, please us better as friends than as meat."
Elisée Reclus
"Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: They are only animals."
Theodor Adorno
"No animals needs to die in order for me to live. And that makes me feel good."
Howard Lyman
"He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals."
Immanuel Kant
"We all love animals. Why do we call some "pets" and others "dinner?"
K.D. Lang
"Recognize meat for what it really is: the antibiotic and pesticide-laden corpse of a tortured animal."
Ingrid Newkirk
"The thinking person must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another."
Albert Schweitzer
"Deliberate cruelty to our defenceless and beautiful little cousins is surely one of the meanest and most detestable vices of which a human being can be guilty."
William Ralph Inge
"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of 'real food for real people', you’d better live real close to a real good hospital."
Dr Neal Barnard
"Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and ‘animals’ is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them - without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeeling toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us."
Carl Sagan
