"Could you look an animal in the eyes and say to it, 'My appetite is more important than your suffering'?"
Moby
"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being."
Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President
"If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth -- beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals -- would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals?"
George Bernard Shaw, playwright, Nobel Prize 1925
"In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought."
Isaac Bashevis Singer, author, Nobel Prize 1978
"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist
"As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields."
"What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty."
Leo Tolstoy author
"I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished."
Henry David Thoreau, author
"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, mathematician
"The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men."
Leonardo da Vinci, artist and scientist
"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
"To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being."
Mahatma Gandhi, statesman and philosopher
"I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further."
Mark Twain, author
"If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals."
Albert Einstein
"There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties... The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery."
Charles Darwin
"We all love animals. Why do we call some 'pets' and others 'dinner'?"
K.D. Lang
"I won't eat anything that has intelligent life, but I'd gladly eat a network executive or a politician."
Marty Feldman
"As soon as I realized that I didn't need meat to survive or to be in good health, I began to see how forlorn it all is. If only we had a different mentality about the drama of the cowboy and the range and all the rest of it. It's a very romantic notion, an entrenched part of American culture, but I've seen, for example, pigs waiting to be slaughtered, and their hysteria and panic was something I shall never forget."
Cloris Leachman
"What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
Jeremy Bentham, philosopher
"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, inventor
Please respect these thoughts and the accompanying actions.
It's not like religion, where it's some faith or belief in something that can't be proven, that doesn't "exist". One can argue endlessly about different religions, none of them are based on anything scientific or proven.
When you eat, exploit torture or kill for sport, an animal feels pain, it suffers, it dies. That is real.
You subject a living creature to your whim for what? It's not a need, it's petty and completely unnecessary.
Whether you believe something has a soul is of no concern. That's a belief, a hope, and nothing more. It has no bearing on whether YOU decide if something should live or die.
Don't tell me that you're a animal lover and then you eat meat. It doesn't work like that. It's like saying that you love people, but would gladly kill the Austrians.
How can we love one another and be not at war, when we can't even do that to other creatures. Creatures that don't have differing ideologies, views, power issues?
Live by example.
You don't have to eat meat to live well.
There is nothing humane about slaughterhouses, factory farms, and butcher shops.
More people can be feed with grain than meat. Too much land and other resources are wasted on meat production.
I've killed before, I don't need to anymore for sport or food. I'm beyond that. Don't want to be any part of that.
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
To say you love animals one moment and then exploit them the next is a bit hypocritical don't you think?
To be concerned and outraged at the abuse of one type of animal and not another is misguided and hypocritical. Why don't we extend that to race or sex or some caste structure too? Oh right, we have, kind of, how nice.
I'm almost certain that the creature doesn't wants to die, so I won't kill him.
I'm doing what I can though I'm not perfect.