Buddhism Jains Sikhs Albert Einstein The Dalai Lama Leonardo-da-Vinci Mahatma Gandhi Benjamin Franklin Isaiah Mahaparinirvana Ju-Ching Zen Master Ikkyu Genesis Vaslav Nijinsky Percy Bysshe Shelley Srimad Bhagavatam Rabindranath Tagore Erich Fromm Cardinal John H. Newman Richard Wagner

Native American Chief (1854) Leo Tolstoy George Bernard Shaw St. Francis of Assisi Isaac Bashevis Singer Henry David Thoreau G.L. Rudd Father Thomas Berry Pythagoras Lord Buddha Roshi Philip Kapleauo Pillar Edict of King Ashoka His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada Plutarch St. Basil Albert Schweitzer Quran, surah 6 verse 38 Paul McCartney Robert Louis Stevenson

Buddhism
It means respecting all beings – humans and animals – as having feelings, as being sentient, and not deserving deliberately to be hurt. So a Buddhist would never swat a fly or purposefully step on an ant or spider. "Non- harming" also means that one should not work in a profession that involves harming others, for example, a butcher or soldier. The main point to remember is to try and show kindness to all creatures, including of course humans. But animals are part of it too. After all, the Buddha took birth many times as an animal – sometimes a deer, or a monkey, or a fish, or a dog etc. He knew what it was like to be an animal. He also taught that we have been animals in our past lives and in fact all the animals are related to us, quite literally. At some point in the past they have been our mothers, fathers, sisters, cousins. So if we harm animals, we are actually harming members of our own family. All tremble at Violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill or cause another to kill." Dhammapada 130

• "One who, while seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other living beings who also desire happiness, will not find happiness hereafter." Lord Buddha, Dhammapada, 131

• "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, Dhammapada, 405

• "For the sake of love of purity, let the Bodhisattva refrain from eating flesh, which is born of semen, blood etc. To avoid causing terror to living beings, let the disciple, who is disciplining himself to attain compassion, refrain from eating meat...It is not true that meat is proper food and permissible when the animal was not killed by himself, when he did not order to kill it, when it was not especially meant for him. There may be some people in the future who, being under the influence of taste for meat will string together in various ways sophisticated arguments to defend meat eating. But meat eating in any form, in any manner and in any place is unconditionally and once and for all prohibited. "Meat eating I have not permitted to anyone, I do not permit and will not permit..."After my paranirvana in the last kalpa different ghosts will be encountered everywhere deceiving people and teaching them that they can eat meat and still attain enlightenment...How can a bhikshu, who hopes to become a deliverer of others, himself be living on the flesh of other sentient beings?" Lord Buddha (Surangama Sutra)

 "The cows are our friends, they give food, they give strength, they likewise give a good complexion and happiness."— Lord Buddha (Lanka vatara Sutra)       

Jain Scriptures:

• For our survival, the survival of our ascetics, and the survival of our scriptures, temples, libraries, and upasrayas; limited violence to one sensed (Ekendriya) souls such as vegetables, water, fire, earth, and air are allowed only by the Jain lay people (sravaks and sravikas).

• Under no circumstances violence to two to five sensed (Tras) living beings such as animals, birds, and humans are allowed even by the lay people.

• Ascetics should be totally nonviolent to all souls including vegetables, water, fire, air, and earth.

• A cow is a five-sensed (Panchendriya) animal and cruelty to a five-sensed animal is considered the highest sin and is totally prohibited even by the Jain lay people.

Sikhs

• Guru Granth Sahib
“ Those who take dirty food increase their filth;such filth causes sorrow to the egocentric person.“ (Guru Amardas p.121)

"Avarice is a dog, falsehood the sweeper and cheating the eating of meat." (Guru Nanak Dev Ji. Sri Raag ang.15)

" One who does not Steal, Commit adultery , Slander anyone , Gamble , Eat meat or drink wine will be liberated in this very life." (Sahib Sri Guru Gobind Singh ji Sudharam Marag Granth)

"If you say that God resides in all, why do you kill a hen?“ (Kabir - A.G., p.1375) )

"It is foolish to kill animals by cruelty and call it sanctified food." (Kabir - Adi Granth p. 1375)

"You kill life and call it an act of religion. Then what is irreligion?" (Kabir p. 1103).

"You keep fasts in order to become acceptable to God, but kill a living animal for your relish." (Kabir - p.483).

“Whosoever eats flesh, fish, etc. and takes wine and hemp, all his religious acts will go to waste.”(Kabir – p1374)

• Mahatma Gandhi:

"The central fact of Hinduism is cow protection. 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. Man through the cow is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives. Why the cow was selected for apotheosis is obvious to me. The cow was in India the best companion. She was the giver of plenty. Not only did she give milk, but she also made agriculture possible

• "Cow protection is the gift of Hinduism to the world. And Hinduism will live so long as there are Hindus to protect the cow. Hindus will be judged not by their tilaks , not by the correct chanting of mantras, not by their pilgrimages, not by their most punctilious observances of caste rules, but their ability to protect the cow.

• I worship it and I shall defend its worship against the whole world. (YI, 1-1-1925, p. 8)

• I would not kill a human being for protection a cow, as I will not kill a cow for saving a human life, be it ever so precious. (YI, 18-5-1921, p. 156)

• Cow slaughter can never be stopped by law. Knowledge, education, and the spirit of kindliness towards her alone can put and end to it. It will not be possible to save those animals that are a burden on the land or, perhaps, even man if he is a burden. (H, 15-9-1946, p. 310)

• The cow is the purest type of sub-human life. She pleads before us on behalf of the whole of the sub-human species for justice to it at the hands of man, the first among all that lives. She seems to speak to us through her eyes: 'you are not appointed over us to kill us and eat our flesh or otherwise ill-treat us, but to be our friend and guardian'. (YI, 26-6-1924, p. 214)

• THE COW is a poem of pity. One reads pity in the gentle animal. She is the mother to millions of Indian mankind. Protection of the cow means protection of the whole dumb creation of God. The ancient seer, whoever he was, began with the cow. The appeal of the lower order of creation is all the more forcible because it is speechless. (YI, 6-10-1921, p. 36) Excerpts from The Mind Of Mahatma Gandhi , compiled by R. K. Prabhu & U. R. Rao.

• 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.

• "The salvation of birds and beasts, oneself included - this is the object of Shakyamuni's religious austerities." Zen Master Ikkyu

• "...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

• 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

• "Thou shalt not kill."
Exodus 20:13

• 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 , Queen Mab Notes.

• "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

• 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

• "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)

• "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)

• "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

• "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

• 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 , (quoted in You Said a Mouthful )

• 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

• "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

• "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, 'To Cherish All Life'

• "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)

• "...Therefore the Lord will give you meat and you shall eat. You shall not eat one day or two days, or ten days or twenty days, but till it comes out at your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you, because you have rejected the Lord..." Numbers 11:18-20

• "...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

• "Devotees of the Lord are released from all kinds of sins because they eat food which is offered first. Others, who prepare food for personal sense enjoyment, verily eat only sin."
Bhagavad Gita 3:13

• "One who loves Krishna will give Him whatever He wants, and he avoids offering anything which is undesirable or unasked for. Thus, meat, fish and eggs should not be offered to Krishna...Vegetables, grains, fruits, milk and water are the proper foods for human beings and are prescribed by Lord Krishna Himself. Whatever else you eat, can not be offered to Him, since He will not accept it."
His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

• "To be non-violent to human beings and to be a killer or enemy of poor animals is Satan's philosophy. In this age there is always enmity against animals, and therefore the poor creatures are always anxious. The reaction of the poor animals is being forced on human society, and therefore there is always the strain of cold or hot war between men, individually, collectively or nationally..."
His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

• "For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of mind the first man touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, set forth tables of dead, stale bodies, and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? 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'

• "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

• 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 6 verse 38

• "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 

• 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, Note-Books, 1912

• "It is said about Lord Buddha sadaya-hrdaya darsita-pasu-ghatam. He saw the whole human race going to hell by this animal killing. So he appeared to teach ahimsa, nonviolence, being compassionate on the animals and human beings. In the Christian religion also, it is clearly stated, 'Thou shall not kill'. So everywhere animal killing is restricted. In no religion the unnecessary killing of animals is allowed. But nobody is caring. The killing process is increasing, and so are the reactions. Every ten years you will find a war. These are the reactions."
His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

• "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."
J.P. Vaswani , Why Kill For Food?

"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 George Bernard Shaw 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?"