Exploring the path to vegetarianism can be both a personal and transformative journey. Whether you're considering making the switch or looking for motivation to stay committed, inspirational quotes can provide insight, encouragement, and a fresh perspective. We've gathered a curated collection of 65 powerful quotes that celebrate the values, benefits, and compassion behind vegetarianism. Let these words inspire you to embrace a lifestyle that supports health, animals, and the planet.
1. “Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.” - George Bernard Shaw
2. “I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.” - Isaac Bashevis Singer
3. “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.” - Neal Barnard
4. “The human body has no more need for cows' milk than it does for dogs' milk, horses' milk, or giraffes' milk.” - Michael Klaper
5. “I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and 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.” - Leonardo da Vinci
6. “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 A. Edison
7. “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
8. “Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.” - Albert Schweitzer
9. “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.” - Leo Tolstoy
10. “Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.” - Franz Kafka
11. “It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.” - Albert Einstein
12. “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
13. “While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?” - George Bernard Shaw
14. “My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chided for my singularity, but, with this lighter repast, I made the greater progress, for greater clearness of head and quicker comprehension. Flesh eating is unprovoked murder.” - Benjamin Franklin
15. “You're thinking I'm one of those wise-ass California vegetarians who is going to tell you that eating a few strips of bacon is bad for your health. I'm not. I say its a free country and you should be able to kill yourself at any rate you choose, as long as your cold dead body is not blocking my driveway.” - Scott Adams
16. “Meat isn't murder, it's delicious.” - John Lydon
17. “You can judge a man's true character by the way he treats his fellow animals.” - Paul McCartney
18. “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” - Paul McCartney
19. “Ethically they had arrived at the conclusion that man's supremacy over lower animals meant not that the former should prey upon the latter, but that the higher should protect the lower, and that there should be mutual aid between the two as between man and man. They had also brought out the truth that man eats not for enjoyment but to live.” - Mahatma Gandhi
20. “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, the whole world would be vegetarian.” - Linda McCartney
21. “It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests - and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without pretence at apology, without the homage of a tear.” - Upton Sinclair
22. “[Der] ziellose Blick eines Menschen, der sich ausschließlich von Gemüse ernährt.” - Isabel Allende
23. “To expect life to treat you good is foolish as hoping a bull won't hit you because you are a vegetarian.” - Roseanne Barr
24. “The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled.” - Mary Midgley
25. “Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.” - Jonathan Safran Foer
26. “Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially.” - Douglas Adams
27. “By eating meat we share the responsibility of climate change, the destruction of our forests, and the poisoning of our air and water. The simple act of becoming a vegetarian will make a difference in the health of our planet.” - Thich Nhat Hanh
28. “People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.” - Isaac Bashevis Singer
29. “I was eating a steak at a local restaurant last night, when a random woman said: "Y'know, you'd be much better off being a vegetarian." "Are you crazy?" I said, "The cow was a vegetarian and look what happened to it!” - Quentin R. Bufogle
30. “Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.” - Jonathan Safran Foer
31. “Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) 'meet and exceed requirements' for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers. Despite some persistent confusion, it is clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores. ” - Jonathan Safran Foer
32. “Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms.” - Jonathan Safran Foer
33. “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
34. “What struck me, in reading the reports from Sri Lanka, was the mild disgrace of belonging to our imperfectly evolved species in the first place. People who had just seen their neighbors swept away would tell the reporters that they knew a judgment had been coming, because the Christians had used alcohol and meat at Christmas or because ... well, yet again you can fill in the blanks for yourself. It was interesting, though, to notice that the Buddhists were often the worst. Contentedly patting an image of the chubby lord on her fencepost, a woman told the New York Times that those who were not similarly protected had been erased, while her house was still standing. There were enough such comments, almost identically phrased, to make it seem certain that the Buddhist authorities had been promulgating this consoling and insane and nasty view. That would not surprise me.” - Christopher Hitchens
35. “It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life unnecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of his ethical standard.” - Paul Brunton
36. “He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
37. “I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.” - George Bernard Shaw
38. “Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?” - Jonathan Safran Foer
39. “The lamb misused breeds public strifeAnd yet forgives the butcher's knife.” - William Blake
40. “I have lived temperately, eating little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principal diet.” - Thomas Jefferson
41. “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
42. “Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.” - Jonathan Safran Foer
43. “Thanksgiving dinner's sad and thankless. Christmas dinner's dark and blue. When you stop and try to see it From the turkey's point of view.Sunday dinner isn't sunny. Easter feasts are just bad luck. When you see it from the viewpoint of a chicken or a duck. Oh how I once loved tuna salad Pork and lobsters, lamb chops too Till I stopped and looked at dinner From the dinner's point of view.” - Shel Silverstein
44. “Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria.Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right - how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? - but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. (A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labeled as natural, "ballooned with 10 to 30 percent of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water.” - Jonathan Safran Foer
45. “A human body in no way resembles those that were born for ravenousness; it hath no hawk’s bill, no sharp talon, no roughness of teeth, no such strength of stomach or heat of digestion, as can be sufficient to convert or alter such heavy and fleshy fare. But if you will contend that you were born to an inclination to such food as you have now a mind to eat, do you then yourself kill what you would eat. But do it yourself, without the help of a chopping-knife, mallet or axe, as wolves, bears, and lions do, who kill and eat at once. Rend an ox with thy teeth, worry a hog with thy mouth, tear a lamb or a hare in pieces, and fall on and eat it alive as they do. But if thou had rather stay until what thou eat is to become dead, and if thou art loath to force a soul out of its body, why then dost thou against nature eat an animate thing? There is nobody that is willing to eat even a lifeless and a dead thing even as it is; so they boil it, and roast it, and alter it by fire and medicines, as it were, changing and quenching the slaughtered gore with thousands of sweet sauces, that the palate being thereby deceived may admit of such uncouth fare.” - Plutarch
46. “You can't possibly ask me to go without having some dinner. It's absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.” - Oscar Wilde
47. “Given that eating animals is in absolutely no way necessary for my family — unlike some in the world, we have easy access to a wide variety of other foods — should we ear animals?” - Jonathan Safran Foer
48. “I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love,” - Jonathan Safran Foer
49. “I wouldn't touch a hot dog unless you put a condom on it! You realize that the job of a hot dog is to use parts of the animal that the Chinese can't figure out how to make into a belt? -timecode 1:11:10” - Bill Maher
50. “Being vegetarian here also means that we do not consume dairy and egg products, because they are products of the meat industry. If we stop consuming, they will stop producing. Only collective awakening can create enough determination for action.” - Thich Nhat Hanh
51. “I have a lot of time for vegetarians (though apparently not all of them have a lot of time for me), and that's because I respect anyone with principles about food.” - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
52. “Meat is necessary when there is hard physical work to be done, or in a very cold climate, or when edible plants cannot be found...Animal flesh provides all the substances we need, both for the intensive working of our organism and for maintaining a normal temperature in cold climates.” - G.I. Gurdjieff
53. “The statement by Paul McCartney that, although he was a pacifist, he couldn’t be at this time of war. Which is as daft as being a vegetarian between meals.” - Mark Steel
54. “Well, then, Otter, of course I don’t like Bundt cake. It has eggs in it. Baby chicken eggs. You don’t see chickens standing outside of maternity wards waiting to get our babies to make their Bundt cake, do you?” - T.J. Klune
55. “Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.” - Philip K. Dick
56. “Before you rush off trying to see everything you can, educate yourself.” - Jonathan Safran Foer
57. “This isn't animal experimentation, where you an imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our sense, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sense? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person has as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?” - Jonathan Safran Foer
58. “Mając świadomość, z jakim ogromem cierpienia zwierząt i zniszczeniem środowiska wiąże się jedzenie mięsa, nie potrafiłabym brać w tym udziału.” - Izabela Sowa
59. “I don't believe vegans (or vegetarians) who still get their (packaged, preservative/chemical-ridden) food from industrial food systems have any righteous ground to stand on, nor do I think a deep look at the sentient life of plants or the true environmental impact of agriculture permits them any comfortable distance from cruelty. Everything in this world eats something else to survive, and that something else, whether running on blood or chlorophyll, would always rather continue to live rather than become sustenance for another. No animal wants to be penned up and milked, or caged and harvested, and you've never seen plants growing in regimented lines of their own accord.” - Brian Awehali
60. “The heart of vegetarians is healed sooner than those of flesh-eaters.” - Virchand Raghavji Gandhi
61. “Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places.” - Leonardo da Vinci
62. “This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture.” - Michael Pollan
63. “A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.” - George Bernard Shaw
64. “These folk are hewers of trees and hunters of beasts; therefore we are their unfriends, and if they will not depart we shall afflict them in all ways that we can.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
65. “You’re joining us for dinner, I hope?” asked his mom. She was small and brunette and vaguely mousy.“I guess?” I said. “I have to be home by ten. Also I don’t, um, eat meat?”“No problem. We’ll vegetarianize some,” she said.“Animals are just too cute?” Gus asked.“I want to minimize the number of deaths I am responsible for,” I said.Gus opened his mouth to respond but then stopped himself.” - John Green
