Helen and Scott Nearing Quotes

I became a vegetarian because I was persuaded that life is as valid for other creatures as it is for humans. I do not need dead animal bodies to keep me alive, strong and healthy. Therefore, I will not kill for food.

We believed it was better to pay as you go than it was to pay your bills by borrowing and laying up debts for another day. To pay as you go, that policy is a safer business policy and a saner business policy, and we thought it was a saner national policy.

Flesh-eating by humans is unnecessary, irrational, anatomically unsound, unhealthy, unhygienic, uneconomic, unaesthetic, unkind and unethical. May I elaborate?

Life is enriched by aspiration and effort, rather than by acquisition and accumulation.

War is an attempt of one group to impose its will upon another group by armed violence.

Vegetarians, dropping meat, tend to fill up with too much starch. This leaves them no more healthy than meat-eaters, with constipation, indigestion, colds, catarrhs, coughs and chest complaints to plague them. Eating sparingly of breads, cakes, crackers, cookies, macaroni, spaghetti, anything largely starch, is a far step on the road to good health.

War drags human beings from their tasks of building and improving, and pushes them en masse into the category of destroyers and killers.