THE TIMELSSS VOICES OF HUMAN PEACE: AHIMSA & VEGETARIANISM!
“Whatever our noble ancestors’ reasons were for the act of slaughter for feeding, we have arrived at a space in time when human evolution demands a more sentient response to the conscience of protection for all animals, and nature as a whole.”
–Maya Tiwari, (author of Living Ahimsa Diet: Nourishing Love & Life)
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“I do feel that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants.”
–Mahatma Gandhi
“All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill or cause another to kill.”
–Lord Buddha
“It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.”
–William Ralph Inge, (Outspoken Essays -1919)
“One should treat animals such as deer, camels, asses, monkeys, mice, snakes, birds and flies exactly like one’s own son. How little difference there actually is between children and these innocent animals.”
–Srimad Bhagavatam 7.14.9
“Man did not weave the web of life: he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. To harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.”
–Native American Chief (1854)
“Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”
–Genesis 1:29
“If you say that God resides in all, why do you kill a hen?”
–Kabir
“There is not an animal on the earth, or a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are peoples like unto you.”
–Quran, (Surah Vs. 6:38)
“Vegetarian food leaves a deep impression on our nature. If the whole world adopts vegetarianism, it can change the destiny of humankind.”
–Albert Einstein
“The salvation of birds and beasts, oneself included – this is the object of Shakyamuni’s religious austerities.”
–Zen Master, Ikkyu
“Flesh eating is unprovoked murder.”
–Benjamin Franklin
“Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. He shall eat butter and honey, so that he may know the evil from the good.”
–Isaiah 7:14-15
“The eating of meat extinguishes the seed of great compassion.”
–Mahaparinirvana (Mahayana Version)
“The 13th Century Zen Master Doyen, while visiting China, asked this question: “What must the mental attitude and daily activities of a student be when he is engaged in Buddhist meditation and practice?” Ju-Ching answered that one of the things he should avoid is eating meat.”
–Zen Master, Doyen (13th Century)
“You kill life and call it an act of religion. Then what is irreligion?”
–Kabir
“If man wants freedom why keep birds and animals in cages? Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places! I have since an early age abjured the use of meat.”
–Leonardo da Vinci
“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
“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
“It is foolish to kill animals by cruelty and call it sanctified food.”
–Kabir
“One who, while seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other living beings who also desire happiness, will not find happiness hereafter.”
–Lord Buddha
“Thou shalt not kill” does not apply to murder of one’s own kind only, but to all living beings; and this Commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai.”
–Leo Tolstoy
“He who has renounced all violence towards all living beings, weak or strong, who neither kills nor causes others to kill – him I do call a holy man.”
–Lord Buddha
“You keep fasts in order to become acceptable to God, but kill a living animal for your relish.”
–Kabir
“We pray on Sundays that we may have light to guide our footsteps on the path we tread. We are sick of war, we don’t want to fight. And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead.”
–George Bernard Shaw
“We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing that we do. Cruelty… is a fundamental sin, and admits of no arguments or nice distinctions. If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, it protests against cruelty, is always clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us – in fact, anyone who does not join in is dubbed a crank.”
–Rabindranath Tagore, (Nobel Prize 1913)
“Every act of irreverence for life, every act which neglects life, which is indifferent to and wastes life, is a step towards the love of death. This choice man must make at every minute. Never were the consequences of the wrong choice as total and as irreversible as they are today. Never was the warning of the Bible so urgent: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that you and your children may live.”
-(Deuteronomy 30:19) Erich Fromm
“Cruelty to animals is as if man did not love God.”
–Cardinal John H. Newman
“We humans cherish our animal pets, but think naught of eating our animal friends!”
–Maya Tiwari
“Plant life instead of animal food is the keystone of regeneration. Jesus used bread instead of flesh and wine in place of blood at the Lord’s Supper.”
-German Composer, Richard Wagner (1813)
“If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.”
–St. Francis of Assisi
“I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.”
–Isaac Bashevis Singer
“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.”
–Leo Tolstoy
“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.”
–Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
“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 Singer
“Killing is a denial of love. To kill or to eat what another has killed is to rejoice in cruelty. And cruelty hardens our hearts and blinds our vision, and we are unable to see that they whom we kill are our fellow brothers and sisters in the One Family of Creation.”
–G.L. Rudd, (author of Why Kill For Food?)
“Vegetarianism is a way of life that we should all move toward for economic survival, physical well-being and spiritual integrity.”
–Father Thomas Berry, Fordham University, New York
“Each and every day, Mother Nature gives the humans trillions of dollars of gifts for free- her bountiful trees laden with fruits, the herbs, their seeds, the plants and vegetation, the minerals below her seas and rocks, the prana of her sky and space, her solar and lunar feast from her wondrous bosom comes the complete regimen of sustenance and nourishment –all of which is continually refining and divinizing its way back to the Mother source of human sentiency and intelligence.”
–Maya Tiwari, (author of Living Ahimsa –A Book of Daily Contemplations)
“The earth affords a lavish supply of riches, of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter; only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass. As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seeds of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.”
–Pythagoras
“I have enforced the laws against killing certain animals and many others. But the greatest progress of Righteousness among men comes from the exhortation in favor of non-injury to life and abstention from killing living things.”
-Pillar Edict of King Ashoka (268-233 BC)
“Anyone familiar with the numerous accounts of the Buddha’s extraordinary compassion and reverence for living beings – for example his insistence that his monks strain the water they drink lest they inadvertently cause the death of any micro- organisms – could never believe that he would be indifferent to the sufferings of domestic animals caused by their slaughter of food.”
–Roshi Philip Kapleau, (author of To Cherish All Life)
“Ethics has not only to do with mankind but with the animal creation as well. This is witnessed in the purpose of St. Francis of Assisi. Thus we shall arrive that ethics is reverence for all life. This is the ethic of love widened universally. It is the ethic of Jesus now recognized as a necessity of thought…Only a universal ethic which embraces every living creature can put us in touch with the universe and the will which is there manifest…”
–Albert Schweitzer
“It is certainly not lions or wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us. For the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being.”
–Plutarch, (in his essay, On Eating Flesh)
“We cannot separate ourselves from those whom we call the ‘lower’ animals. They are lower in the scale of evolution, but they, like us, are members of the One Family. We must not take away the life of any creature. Indeed, we must never take away that which we cannot give. And as we cannot restore a dead creature to life, we have no right to take away its’ life.”
–Baba J.P. Vaswani
“Cow protection to me is one of the most wonderful phenomena in human evolution. It takes the human being beyond this species. The cow means the entire sub-human world. ……She was the giver of plenty. Not only did she give milk, but she also made agriculture possible.”
–Mahatma Gandhi
“Maim not the brute beasts…Whoever is kind to the lesser creatures is kind to himself…He who takes pity (even) on a sparrow and spares its life. Allah will be merciful on him on the Day of Judgment.”
–Prophet Mohammed
“Once someone asked how it was that he looked so youthful. “I don’t,” Shaw retorted. “I look my age. It is the other people who look older than they are. What can you expect from people who eat corpses?”
–George Bernard Shaw
“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”
–Paul McCartney
“Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.”
–George Bernard Shaw
“Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.”
–Robert Louis Stevenson
“One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with”. And so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”
–Henry David Thoreau
“No matter how scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed, no matter how many miles away, if you eat the flesh of the animals from it there is complicity.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”
–Samuel Butler
“If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you want to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources, unaided by cleaver or cudgel or any kind of ax.”
–Plutarch
“The steam of meat darkens the light of the spirit…One hardly can have virtue when one enjoys meat meals and feasts…”
–St. Basil (AD 320 – 79)
“I am full of the burnt offering of rams and the fat of fed beasts. I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of goats…Bring no more vain offerings… When you spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes though you make many prayers, and I will not hear you. For your hands are full of blood…”
–Isaiah 1:11-15
“Flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to moral feeling: killing. By killing, man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity, that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself, and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel.”
–Leo Tolstoy
“Cow protection is the gift of Hinduism to the world. And Hinduism will live so long as there are Hindus to protect the cow.”
–Mahatma Gandhi
“The cows are our friends, they give food, they give strength, and they likewise give a good complexion and happiness.”
–Lord Buddha
“Annam, the Sanskrit word for “food” defined as “that which grows on the earth”, is the appropriate sustenance and nourishment for the human species. From this Vedic dictum, we learn that food is not that which flies above the earth, swims below her or moves upon the earth.”
–Maya Tiwari, (author of Ayurveda: A Life of Balance)