"Do but examine your own compassionate heart, and tell me
  do you not think it a breach of natural justice to wantonly
  and without necessity to torment, much more to take away the
  life of any creature?"

                          --John Hildrop (18th century ARA)


  "In answer to this, many people will think it sufficient to say
  that all things being allow'd to be made for the service of man,
  there can be no cruelty in putting creatures to the use they were
  designed for; how I have heard men make this reply, while their
  nature within them has reproach'd them with the falsehood of the
  assertion."

                          --Bernard de Mandeville, 1714

  "See that no brute of any kind, whether entrusted to thy care,
  or roaming in thy way, suffer through thy neglect and abuse.  Let
  no views of profit, no compliance with custom, and no fear of the
  ridicule of the world, ever tempt thee to the least act of cruelty
  or injustice to any creature whatsoever.  But let this be your
  invariable rule, everywhere, and at all times, to *do unto others
  as, in their condition, you would be done unto*."

                          --Humphry Primatt (18th century ARA)

  "Can there be one justice for man, and another for brutes?  Or
  is feeling in them a different thing to what it is in ourselves?
  Is not a beast produced by the same rule, in the same order of
  generation with ourselves?  Is not his body nourished by the same
  food, hurt by the same injuries? ... Is this spark, or soul, to
  perish because it chanced to belong to a beast?  Tell me, learned
  philosophers, how that may possibly happen."

                          --John Lawrence (18th C animal rights activist)

  "It is a pleasure to foster the idea of a golden age regained,
  when the thought of the butcher shall not mingle with our flocks
  and herds.  May the benevolent system spread to every corner of
  the globe!  May we learn to recognize and to repect, in other 
  animals, the feelings which vibrate in *ourselves!*"
  
                          --George Nicholson (18th C ARA and printer)

  "Many very intelligent men have, at different times in their
  lives, abstained wholly from flesh, and this, too, with very
  considerable advantage to their health.  All these facts, taken
  collectively, point to a period in the progress of civilization
  when men will cease to slay their fellow-mortals in the animal
  world for food."
                  
                           --T. Forster, _Moral Reflections on the Animal
                                                          Kingdom_ (1839)

  
  "How many animals in a million have even relative freedom in any 
  moment of their lives?  No choice is every permitted them; and all
  their most natural instincts are denied or made subject to authority."

                           --Louise de la Ramee (animal rights activist
                             and novelist) 1892

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. Quoted in:
Hesketh Pearson, Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality, ch. 9 (1942).
Shaw, Pearson reported, believed vegetarians had radically different
experiences from meat-eaters: "The odd thing about being a vegetarian is,
not that the things that happen to other people don't happen to me-they all
do-but that they happen differently: pain is different, pleasure different,
fever different, cold different, even love different."


Vegetarianism

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 (1817-62), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist.
Walden, "Economy" (1854).

Pacifism

It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism,
while the wolf remains of a different opinion.
W. R. Inge (1860-1954), Dean of St. Paul's, London. Outspoken Essays,
"Patriotism" (First Series, 1919; first published 1915).


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 (1817-62), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist.
Walden, "Higher Laws" (1854). Thoreau believed that "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, and
from much food of any kind" (same source).

"Great spirits have always met violent opposition from mediocre minds" -Albert Einstein

"While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how 
can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?" GBS