Vegan Forum

A vegan diet takes care of most of what we need to do. But you'll also want to minimize the use of oils generally, because while olive oil and other vegetable oils are better for your heart than chicken fat, they are as fattening as animal fats.

Count Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist & philosopher, (1829-1910):
"If a man earnestly seeks a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from animal food."

Albert Einstein, physicist, 1921 Nobel Prize recipient:
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."

"It is my view that a vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind."

Alice Walker, American author, The Color Purple:
"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than blacks were made for whites, or women for men."

Mahatma Gandhi, Hindu pacifist and spiritual leader, (1869-1948):

"It is very significant that some of the most thoughtful and cultured men are partisans of a pure vegetable diet."

"I do not regard flesh-food as necessary for us at any stage and under any clime in which it is possible for human beings ordinarily to live, I hold flesh-food to be unsuited to our species."

Henry David Thoreau, American author, naturalist (1812-1862):

"Every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food."

George Bernard Shaw, Anglo-Irish author and playwright, 1925 Nobel Prize Recipient, (1856-1950):

"My situation is a solemn one: life is offered to me on the condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism. My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed, not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures. It will be, without the exception of Noah's Ark, the most remarkable thing of its kind ever seen."

"The average age (longevity) of a meat-eater is 63. I am on the verge of 85 and still at work as hard as ever. I have lived quite long enough and am trying to die, but I simply cannot do it. A single beefsteak would finish me, but I cannot bring myself to swallow it. I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism."

Sir Thomas More, Statesman and Author (1478-1535):

"The utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable."

Michael Klaper, M.D., American author and international lecturer:

"People are the only animals that drink the milk of the mother of another species. All other animals stop drinking milk altogether after weaning. It is unnatural for a dog to nurse from a mother giraffe; it is just as unnatural for a human being to drink the milk of a cow."

Sir Thomas More, Statesman and Author (1478-1535):

"The utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable."

Truly 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.

~ Leonardo da Vinci (Renaissance painter, architect, engineer, mathematician and philosopher, 1452 - 1519)

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 .

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley (Romantic poet, 1792 -1827)