There was a time when people ate human flesh, finding nothing wrong with it. And even now such savage people still exist. People stopped eating human flesh gradually. Likewise, people are now gradually stopping the consumption of animal flesh, and very soon a time will come when people will feel the same revulsion towards animal flesh as they do now towards human flesh.
— After Lamartine
Just as it is now considered shameful and disgraceful to abandon babies, organize gladiator fights, torture prisoners and commit other barbarities, which in the past no one thought criminal or repulsive to one’s sense of justice, so too we are nearing a time when it will be considered immoral and impermissible to kill animals and use their corpses for food.
— Dr. Zimmermann
If you see children torturing a little cat or a bird for their amusement, you would stop them and teach them to feel compassion for living creatures, yet you yourself go hunting, you shoot pigeons, you go to the horse races, you sit down to a lunch that was prepared by killing several living creatures, i.e. you are doing the same thing that you are stopping children from doing.
Is this blatant contradiction really not going to become obvious to people and make them stop?
Abstention from meat is becoming ever more widespread. There is hardly a city of any significance in which there is not one to a dozen or more vegetarian restaurants where food is cooked without meat.
— Lucy Mallory
“We cannot declare rights over animals, which exist on land and consume the same food, breathe the same air and drink the same water as us; as we slaughter them we are distressed by their terrible cries, which make us feel ashamed of our deed.”
Such were the thoughts of Plutarch who, for some reason, excluded aquatic animals. We, however, with respect to terrestrial animals, have fallen far behind him.
Do not raise your hand against your brother and do not spill the blood of any living creature than inhabits the earth—neither that of humans, nor domestic animals, nor beasts, nor birds; in the depth of your soul, a prophetic voice forbids you to spill blood, for there is life in it, and life is something that you cannot bring back.
— Lamartine
In our time, when we can clearly see that it is wrong to kill animals for pleasure or for food, hunting and meat eating are deeds that are no longer indifferent but downright bad, which, like every bad deed that is deliberately committed, results in many more bad deeds.
