In case I ever decide to make the switch.

"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 D. Barnard, M.D.

"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

"I went snorkeling and noticed how gently the fish welcomed us into their world...as compared to the violence with which we welcomed them into ours. I became a vegetarian."

• Syndee Brinkman

"Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them."

• Samuel Butler

"Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, should we know better?"

• Peter Cheeke

"Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no claim to be serious moralists."

• Stephen Clark

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The most violent weapon on earth is the table fork."

• Mahatma Gandhi

"I brainwashed youngsters into doing wrong. I want to say sorry to children everywhere for selling out to concerns that make millions by murdering animals."

• Geoffrey Guiliano, Ronald McDonald actor in the 1980's

"I do not see any reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. After all, man can live without meat."

• Tenzin Gyatso

"Suppose that tomorrow 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 they have the right to treat you as you treat the animals you breed, keep and kill for food?"

• John Harris

"How good it is to be well-fed, healthy, and kind all at the same time."

• Henry J. Heimlich

"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

"To become a vegetarian, it is not necessary to make an oath of allegiance to the Great Turnip over a sack of soybeans. All one needs to do is to make the decision and alter their diet. This can be done gradually or all at once, depending on the strength and urgency of one's beliefs."

• Blanche Leonardo, Ph.D.

"Compassion is the foundation of everything positive, everything good. If you carry the power of compassion to the marketplace and the dinner table, you can make your life really count."

• Rue McClanahan

"I do not like eating meat because I have seen lambs and pigs killed. I saw and felt their pain. They felt the approaching death. I could not bear it. I cried like a child. I ran up a hill and could not breathe. I felt that I was choking. I felt the death of the lamb."

• Vaslav Nijinsky

"While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?"

• George Bernard Shaw

"To be a vegetarian is to disagree -- to disagree with the course of things today. Starvation, world hunger, cruelty, waste, wars -- we must make a statement about these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it is a good one."

• Isaac Bashevis Singer

"A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses."

• George Bernard Shaw

"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."

• Henry David Thoreau

"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

"As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out."

• Alice Walker

"Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food."

• Hippocrates