Never would it occur to a child that a sheep, a pig, a cow or a chicken was good to eat, while, like Milton's Adam, he would eagerly make a meal off fruits, nuts, thyme, mint, peas and broad beans which penetrate further and stimulate not only the appetite but other vague and deep nostalgias. We are closer to the Vegetable Kingdom than we know; is it not for man alone that mint, thyme, sage, and rosemary exhale ''crush me and eat me!'' -- for us that opium poppy, coffee-berry, tea-plant and vine perfect themselves? Their aim is to be absorbed by us, even if it can only be achieved by attaching themselves to roast mutton.
~ Cyril Connolly

Most vegetarians I ever see looked enough like their food to be classed as cannibals.
~ Finley Peter Dunne

Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet
~ Albert Einstein

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
~ George Bernard Shaw

It is impossible that had Buonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the Bourbons.
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

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 when they came in contact with the more civilized.
~ Henry David Thoreau

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