It would be excusable to keep eating meat if it was necessary and could be justified in some way. But this is not so. It is simply a bad thing to do, for which there is absolutely no justification in our time.
What struggle for survival or irresistible madness compelled us to stain our hands with blood so that we could feed on animal meat? You, who enjoy all the necessities and comforts of existence, why are you doing this? Why do you slander the earth, as if it is incapable of feeding you without animal meat?
— Plutarch
If we were not so blindly subordinate to the custom that has enslaved us, then not a single person with a modicum of sense would be able to come to terms with the thought that we have to kill so many animals every day in order to feed ourselves, despite the fact that the beneficent earth provides us with the most diverse variety of vegetable treasures.
— Bernard Mandeville
You ask me on what basis did Pythagoras abstain from eating animal meat? For my part, I do not understand what kind of feeling, thought or cause directed the one who first decided to desecrate his mouth with blood and allowed his lips to touch the flesh of a killed creature. I am surprised that anyone should allow the mangled forms of dead bodies on his table and would demand for his daily sustenance that which not so very long ago was a being endowed with movement, sentience and voice.
— Plutarch
The pitiful creatures who first resorted to meat eating may be excused by their having complete absence and lack of sustenance, because they (primitive peoples) acquired their bloodthirsty habits not out of indulgence for their whims or to yield to an abnormal gluttony amid an excess of everything they require, but out of need. But what excuse do we have in our time?
— After Plutarch
As one of the proofs that meat eating is unnatural to a human being we can point to children’s indifference towards it and to their always preferring vegetables, dairy, biscuits, fruits, etc.
— Rousseau
A sheep is much less intended for a human being than a human being for a tiger, since a tiger is a carnivore, but a human being was not made so.
— Ritson
There is a big difference between a person who has no food other than meat or someone who has never heard about the sin of meat eating and naively believes in the Bible, which permits the eating of animals, and any literate person of our time, who lives in a country where there are vegetables and milk, and who knows everything that has been said by the teachers of humankind against meat eating. Such a person commits a great sin by continuing to do that which he can no longer not recognize as bad.
