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If we really understand what it means for a being to have moral status, it's something that animals have a right to; they have a right not to be killed and eaten for food and used in a variety of other ways to satisfy human desires.

I'm very extreme about this. Animals have just as much right not to be killed and eaten for food, or to be enslaved, as you or I have. That's what I mean when I say that humans and animals are morally equivalent.

Veganism is a moral imperative; in my book I call it the vegan imperative.

Veganism, however, is a principle — that man has no right to exploit the creatures for his own ends — and no variation occurs. Vegan diet is therefore derived entirely from "fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains and other wholesome non-animal products," and excludes "flesh, fish, fowl, eggs, honey and animal milk and its derivatives."

In a vegan world the creatures would be reintegrated within the balance and sanity of nature as she is in herself. A great and historic wrong, whose effect upon the course of evolution must have been stupendous, would be righted. The idea that his fellow creatures might be used by man for self-interested purposes would be so alien to human thought as to be almost unthinkable. In this light, veganism is not so much welfare as liberation, for the creatures and for the mind and heart of man; not so much an effort to snake the present relationship bearable, as an uncompromising recognition that because it is in the main one of master and slave, it has to be abolished before something better and finer can be built. Veganism is in truth an affirmation that where love is, exploitation vanishes.

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. - New York Post, 28 November 1972

"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from that of their social environment. "

"It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man."