Grumpy Vegan

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

Gustave Flaubert, 1821 – 1880, French novelist.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

Albert Einstein, 1879 – 1955, US (German-born) physicist

That the use of animal food disposes man to cruel and ferocious action is a fact to which the experience of ages gives ample testimony . . . The barbarous and unfeeling “sports” (as they are called) of the English – their horse-racing, hunting, shooting, bull and bear baiting, cock-fighting, prize fighting, and the like, all proceed from their immoderate addiction to animal food. Their natural temper is thereby corrupted, and they are in the habitual and hourly commision of crimes against nature, justice, and humanity, from which a feeling and reflective mind, unaccustomed to such a diet, would revolt, but in which they profess to take delight.

Joseph Ritson, 1761 – 1803, Essay upon Abstinence

The basis of all animal rights should be the Golden Rule: we should treat them as we would wish them to treat us, were any other species in our dominant position.

Christine Stevens, 1918 – 2002, founding president, Animal Welfare Institute.

I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it’s such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.

Ellen DeGeneres, American entertainer

I just could not stand the idea of eating meat – I really do think that it has made me calmer…. People’s general awareness is getting much better, even down to buying a pint of milk: the fact that the calves are actually killed so that the milk doesn’t go to them but to us cannot really be right, and if you have seen a cow in a state of extreme distress because it cannot understand why its calf isn’t by, it can make you think a lot.

Kate Bush, English musician