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Food Quotes

The page leans toward the ethics of eating more than cooking. The Buddha, Gandhi and two writers on vegetarian and vegan diets, Victoria Moran and Joanne Stepaniak, head the list. Shelley’s A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813) is the oldest sourced piece, and Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) adds the remark that all wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap.

For a lighter line, Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903) holds that there is no love sincerer than the love of food. None of the entries on this page is flagged as misattributed.

Random quote on Food

Most quoted on food:

I like animals, all animals. I wouldn’t hurt a cat or a dog—or a chicken or a cow. And I wouldn’t ask someone else to hurt them for me. That’s why I’m a vegetarian.

Peter Dinklage

True and constant vigour of body is the effect of health, which is much better preserved with watery, herbaceous, frugal, and tender food, than with vinous, abundant, hard, and gross flesh.

Antonio Cocchi

Like my friend, the doctor, 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

Everyone has a goal, and mine right now is to become vegan – I think of them as modern saints, as they make sacrifices for a better, collective good.

Elio Fiorucci

Dicæarchus in his book of Antiquities, describing Greece, relates that under Saturn, that is in the Golden Age, when the ground brought forth all things abundantly, no one ate flesh, but every one lived on field produce and fruits which the earth bore of itself.

Jerome

It is interesting to note that scientific men all over the world are awakening to the fact that the flesh of animals as food is not a pure nutriment, but is mixed with poisonous substances, excrementitious in character, which are the natural results of animal life.

John Harvey Kellogg

Vegetarianism, rather than being confining, is liberating as it frees us from the exploitation of animals, the domination of nature, and the oppression of one another, and frees us to discover ourselves in more positive, life-affirming ways.

Michael Allen Fox Deep Vegetarianism (1999)

The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are.

Plato

When I see bacon, I see a pig, I see a little friend, and that's why I can't eat it. Simple as that. But I'll eat Linda's veggie bacon. All her food was so good.

Paul McCartney

There's no vegan who is the greatest
Because all you vegans are great,
Just like the peace dove
You symbolise love,
And there is no death on your plate.

Benjamin Zephaniah The Little Book Of Vegan Poems (2001)

It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab (1813)

Today it is generally accepted that although the earliest humans probably ate some meat, it was unlikely to have played a major role in their diet. Plants would have been a much more important source of food.

Jane Goodall Harvest for Hope (2006)

Though I think that man has from nature the capacity of living, either by prey, or upon the fruits of the earth; it appears to me, that by nature, and in his original state, he is a frugivorous animal, and that he only becomes an animal of prey by acquired habit.

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo

As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

We all wanna feel great. We all wanna look great, have more energy. The most important thing is about having the right fuel in your body. I can't remember feeling this great in my whole life.

Lewis Hamilton

Thousands of people who say they "love" animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that could make their lives worth living and who endured the awful suffering and the terror of the abattoirs— and the journey to get there— before finally leaving their miserable world, only too often after a painful death.

Jane Goodall The Ten Trusts (2003)

I'm in better condition [after going vegan]. My endurance has gone up, and I haven't gotten tired at all during the whole season. … I don't think you should eat something that had a mother.

Salim Stoudamire

O impudence of power and might,
Thus to condemn a hawk or kite,
When thou, perhaps, carniv'rous sinner,
Hadst pullets yesterday for dinner!

John Gay

(Of the mouth of man which is a tomb) there shall come forth loud noises out of the tombs of those who have died by an evil and violent death.

Leonardo da Vinci

A considerable number of people opposed it because it did not assert or impose on all mankind, some particular fad. Vegetarians, for example, wanted clauses to establish the legal rights of animals (pigs, etc).

H. G. Wells

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