Molly Ivins Quotes

I grew up in cattle country-that's why I became a vegetarian. Meat stinks, for the animals, the environment, and your health.

I know that as a vegan, I'm in a minority. People love their meat. It's up there with sugar and TV and maybe even coffee on the list of inalienable American rights.

I don't go around lecturing people and telling them they shouldn't eat meat. I just don't think that's terribly effective. I just try to tell people how I have personally benefitted from the vegan lifestyle.

Not eating meat is a decision, eating meat is an instinct.

I am an on-and-off vegetarian. Sometimes on, mostly off. I think it is better to be a vegetarian but occasionally, the call of the hot dog overpowers my ethics.

In vast parts of the world, people don't eat meat.

Vegetarians have been around for a very long time - Pythagoreans forbade eating animals more than 2,500 years ago - but even as the environmental evidence mounted, they didn't appear to be winning the argument.

It is all very well for 2% of the population to live in a monastic state of meatlessness while everyone else gorges their way towards environmental meltdown or the nearest heart clinic. Vegetarianism is good for the willing minority, but not much use as a campaign tool.

I became a vegetarian at 15. I was always an animal lover and, as a teenager, became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of eating meat. It was then that I started to research vegetarianism.

Meat-fetishiser that I was, I used to find willed vegetarianism inexplicable. It was one thing to be a vegetarian because of religious and caste reasons - something I was familiar with because of my Indian upbringing - but to choose to be a vegetarian when you could eat meat for every meal every day? That seemed madness to me.

The people of the future will say, meat-eaters in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism.

Only fools argue whether to eat meat or not. They don't understand truth, nor do they meditate on it. Who can define what is meat and what is plant? Who knows where the sin lies, being a vegetarian or a non-vegetarian?

I grew up in a little town in east Texas where it was really not on the table to question certain things like whether you should eat meat or not.

I try to be vegan... I really, really try. I don't eat any red meat, and the whole animal thing really upsets me, so I've tried.

I wasn't raised in any way where I was forced to be a vegetarian, too. I always had the choice. My mom would say, 'I don't eat the stuff, so I won't cook it, but if you want to eat it, you can. Let me tell you why I don't eat it.' So she was open about it.

If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat.

The distinction between meat and other animal products is total nonsense. Vegetarianism is a morally incoherent position. If you regard animals as members of the moral community, you really don’t have a choice but to go vegan.

I often pass a farm with cows grazing in the field and I think to myself how terrible it is that human beings grow other animals just to kill them and eat them. Most of us think of vegetarians as nuts and I'm not a vegetarian but I wouldn't be surprised if we came to a time in 50 or 100 years when civilized people everywhere refused to eat animals.

If a kid ever realized what was involved in factory farming, they would never touch meat again.

I do not see any reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. After all, man can live without meat.

If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.

I say peace begins on your plate.

As long as man eats animals how can cruelty to animals be removed.

You can't really call yourself an environmentalist if you're still consuming animals. You just can't.

I won't eat veal, and my mum won't eat lamb, because she thinks it's a bit harsh to eat cute things.