Not to Eat it ~ Helen Nearing

"When you are faced with food that has been sterilized, fumigated, hydrogenated, hydrolyzed, homogenized, colored, bleached, puffed, exploded, defatted, degermed, texturized, or if you don’t know what has been done to it, the safest rule is not to eat it.......The preparation of food has become a form of mass production where it was once an individual craft. Hundreds of homesteaders we know are raising their food and saying, “Don’t buy it; grow it. Use what you have instead of buying what you don’t need.” But the ads blare out: Buy our easy foods. Here it is: all cleaned and cut up, sanitized, colored, flavored, fortified, dehydrated, treated to last: “breakfast foods, milled, grilled, baked-up, dried-up, puffed-up, roughed-up, packed in cardboard, kept for months, and sold at the pistol point of publicity campaigns.”

~ Helen Nearing

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Nearing

Artwork by Mike Jaroszko http://www.pbase.com/sarrana/mike_jaroszkos_art_gallery&page=all

A Mindful Step ~ Elizabeth Bathurst

"Being vegetarian isn't a huge part of my identity, or even my daily life. It doesn't take up a lot of my thoughts. I think about food often, but I rarely think about not-eating-meat. It's certainly not a large part of my faith. My food choices are often a bigger deal to other people than they are to me.

But being a vegetarian is a mindful step that I made towards God. Each change that I make in the way I live my daily life is a change I make in order to be closer to the person He wants me to be. I've got far too low a self-esteem to fully buy into the Quaker idea of perfection, but I am always striving to be a little bit better. And right now, for me, that means not eating meat and not passing judgement on those who do."

~ Elizabeth Bathurst

More at  http://quakingharlot.blogspot.co.uk/

Artwork by Celia Hart http://celiahart.co.uk/index.html

Tenderness Toward All Creatures ~ John Woolman

"Where the love of God is verily perfected and the true spirit of government watchfully attended to, a tenderness toward all creatures made subject to us will be experienced, and a care felt in us that we do not lessen that sweetness of life in the animal creation which the great Creator intends for them."

"Be careful that the love of gain draw us not into any business which may weaken our love of our Heavenly Father, or bring unnecessary trouble to any of His creatures."

John Woolman

Free e-book kindle edition copy of John Woolman's Journal at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37311

Artwork ~ "The Peaceable Kingdom" by Quaker artist Fritz Eichenberg, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Eichenberg
The illustration suggested by Friend Michelle Everett Wilbert http://closetotheroot.blogspot.co.uk/

Sit Down to Eat ~ John Robbins

“Few of us are aware that the act of eating can be a powerful statement of commitment to our own well-being, and at the same time the creation of a healthier habitat. Your health, happiness, and the future of life on earth are rarely so much in your own hands as when you sit down to eat.”

~ John Robbins

More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Robbins_(author)

Not Made For Humans ~ Alice Walker

“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.”

― Alice Walker

More at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Walker

Vegetarianism is my Statement ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

“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

More at  http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1978/singer-bio.html

Voices We Shall Never Hear ~ Henry Beston

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” 

― Henry Beston

More at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Beston

No Meat ~ H G Wells

"In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be, but now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And it is impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig.I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse."

-- H G Wells - A Modern Utopia

More at   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells

Pythagoras on Vegetarianism

"As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings he will never know health or peace. 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."

"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


More at    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism

Too Much like Us ~ Carl Sagan

"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 unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behaviour of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us."

More at    http://www.carlsagan.com/

Err on the Side of Less - Mahatma Gandhi

"We easily fall a prey to the temptations of the palate, and therefore when a thing tastes delicious we do not mind taking a morsel or two more. But you cannot keep health under those circumstances. Therefore I discovered that in order to keep health, no matter what you ate, it was necessary to cut down the quantity of your food, and reduce the number of meals. Become moderate; err on the side of less, rather than on the side of more. When I invite friends to share their meals with me I never press them to take a thing if they do not want it."

More at   http://www.ivu.org/history/gandhi/

Not Eating Meat ~ Leo Tolstoy

"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."

More at 

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Article_on_Leo_Tolstoy_in_London's_Vegetarian_newsletter

Heartbeat of God ~ Francis of Assisi

"All creatures are created from the same paternal heartbeat of God. Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop here is a complete misapprehension of the intentions of providence. We have a higher mission. God wishes that we should succour them when they require it."

More at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_Assisi

Artwork from Stanley Spencer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Spencer

Vegetarianism ~ Romain Rolland

"To a man whose mind is free there is something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the sufferings of man. For with the latter it is at least admitted that suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought ridiculous. And that is the unpardonable crime."

More at     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romain_Rolland

Being Vegetarian ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

"Even in the worm that crawls in the earth there glows a divine spark. When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter God."


"As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together."

More at http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ibsinger.htm

Vegetarianism - Mahatma Gandhi

“It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practice elementary compassion towards our fellow creatures.” 

Vegetarianism ~ Henry David Thoreau

 "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...."  

"The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth"

Vegetarianism - Benjamin Franklin

"Quite rightly, we do not normally take the behaviour of animals as a model for how we may treat them. We would not, for example, justify tearing a cat to pieces because we had observed the cat tearing a mouse to pieces. Carnivorous fishes don’t have a choice about whether to kill other fish or not. They kill as a matter of instinct. Meanwhile, humans can choose to abstain from killing or eating fish and other animals. Alternatively, the argument could be made that is part of natural order that there are predators and prey, and so it cannot be wrong for us to play our part in this order. But this “argument from nature” can justify all kinds of inequities, including the rule of men over women and leaving the weak and the sick to fall by the wayside. "

Vegetarianism - Leonardo da Vinci

"Truely man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs.  We live by the death of others:  we are burial places!  I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men."

On Being Vegetarian - Leo Tolstoy

"If he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because ...its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling - killing."