“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.”

“What the meat industry figured out is that you don't need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable...Factory farms calculate how close to death they can keep animals without killing them. That's the business model. How quickly they can be made to grow, how tightly they can be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick they can get without dying...We live in a world in which it's conventional to treat an animal like a block of wood.”

“The factory farm industry (in alliance with the pharmaceutical industry) currently has more power than public-health professionals... We give it to them. We have chosen, unwittingly, to fund this industry on a massive scale by eating factory-farmed animal products (and water sold as animal products) - and we do so daily.”

“Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.”

“Not responding is a response--we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.”

“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?”

“She said, "Do you have more things that you need, or more that you don't need?" I said, "It depends on what it means to need.”