"You're thinking I'm one of those wise-ass California vegetarians who is going to tell you that eating a few strips of bacon is bad for your health. I'm not. I say its a free country and you should be able to kill yourself at any rate you choose, as long as your cold dead body is not blocking my driveway."
— Scott Adams

"Look, PETA! If God hadn't wanted us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them so darn tasty!"
— Stephen Colbert (I Am America: And So Can You!)

"Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit."
— Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential)

"The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but "Can they suffer?""
— Jeremy Bentham

"One farmer says to me, 'You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;' and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system 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 (Walden: Or, Life in the Woods)

"For as long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For 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

"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

"How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?"
— Larry Niven (The Ringworld Engineers)

""We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals)

"Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends. "
— George Bernard Shaw

"Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn't motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn't enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals)

"Vegetarians are cool. All I eat are vegetarians — except for the occasional mountain lion steak."
— Ted Nugent (Kill It and Grill It: Ted and Shemane Nugent's Guide to Preparing & Cooking Wild Game and Fish)