Other quotes on the vegetarian / vegan choice …
This is an addendum to the article: You don’t look like a vegan! https://narendubey.medium.com/you-dont-look-like-a-vegetarian-80867b4e64db
Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)
“In the afternoon, at the table, the three of us would eat with the appetite of famished wolves; not he, he would not eat meat, only a little morsel on Sundays, and then only after being urged by our landlady for a long time. Four potatoes with a suspicion of gravy and a mouthful of vegetables constituted his whole dinner. To our insistence that he make a hearty dinner and eat meat, he would answer, To a human being physical life ought to be a paltry detail; vegetable food is sufficient, all the rest is luxury.”
from Van Gogh: A Self-Portrait; Letters Revealing His Life as a Painter. New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, CT. 1961. pages 37–39.
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was an American polymath and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. Franklin was a prodigious inventor; among his many creations were the lightning rod, the Franklin stove and bifocal glasses.
“Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occcasion, I considered with my master Tryon, the taking of fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher and poet. He was a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School.
“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
The Other Emerson, 2010 by Branka Arsić , Cary Wolfe, Stanley Cavell. page 109.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher. Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.
“I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual development to leave off the eating of animals as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.”
Thoreau was not a strict vegetarian, but preferred that diet. Brooks, Van Wyck. The Flowering of New England. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc., 1952. p. 310
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)
Tolstoy received multiple nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and nominations for Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902 and 1910.
“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 pleasure. And to act so is immoral.”
“If a man earnestly seeks a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from animal food…”
Tolstoy, Leo (1892). “The First Step”. Retrieved 21 May2016. Preface to the Russian translation of Howard William’s The Ethics of Diet
Thomas Alva Edison — American inventor and businessman
“Vegetarianism has a powerful influence upon the mind and its action, as well as upon the health and vigor of the body. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”
“Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution.”
Thomas Alva Edison, quoted by Michael J. Gelb and Sarah Miller Caldicott in Innovate like Edison: the Success System of America’s Greatest Inventor, 2007
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.
“Animals are my friends…and I don’t eat my friends.”
Weintraub, Stanley. “Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950)”. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/36047.
Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam — Nuclear Scientist and former President of India
“I, like many others, have practised non-violence throughout my life, and express it by not eating any form of meat”
Quoted in an article by NDTV
