“Meat is a cultural construct made to seem natural and inevitable. By the time the argument from analogy with carnivorous animals is made, the individual making such an argument has probably consumed animals since before the time she or he could talk. Rationalizations for consuming animals were probably offered when this individual at age four or five was discomforted upon discovering that meat came from dead animals. The taste of dead flesh preceded the rationalizations, and offered a strong foundation for believing the rationalizations to be true.”

“Ecofeminism and the Eating of Animals”, in Ecological Feminist Philosophies, edited by Karen J. Warren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 124.

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author, animal rights activist 1951

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“I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Quoted allegedly "From da Vinci`s Notes" in Jon Wynne-Tyson: The Extended Circle. A Dictionary of Humane Thought. Centaur Press 1985, p. 65 books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=1mMbAQAAIAAJ&q=murder.
Actually the quote is not authentic but made up from a novel by Dmitri Merejkowski (w:Dmitry Merezhkovsky) entitled "The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci" (La Résurrecton de Dieux 1901), translated from Russian into English by Herbert Trench. G.P. Putnam's Sons New York and London, The Knickerbocker Press. There, in Book (i.e. chapter) VI, entitled The Diary of Giovanni Boltraffio, one finds the following:
The master [Leonardo da Vinci] permits harm to no living creatures, not even to plants. Zoroastro http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommaso_Masini tells me that from an early age he has abjured meat, and says that the time shall come when all men such as he will be content with a vegetable diet, and will think on the murder of animals as now they think on the murder of men ( p. 226 books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=g_pa0OaYX64C&pg=PA226).
However, despite the quote's false attribution, da Vinci was in fact a vegetarian.
Misattributed

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“Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.”

Source: Tunnel in the Sky (1955), Chapter 2, “The Fifth Way” (p. 42)

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“I am amazed when I see young people eating meat. It seems to me so much thing from other times! The carnivore youth is not with the times, it has a stomach of the nineteenth century, who carnivorized Europe… Eating pieces of slaughtered animals is an anomaly, out of a vegetarian diet there is no real youth. Meat is mostly an anguished habit of old people. Requiring meat dishes, talking about it, remembering it, it's a thing of old people, old and unable to rejuvenate with a decidedly alternative diet.”

Mi stupisco, quando vedo gente giovane mangiare carne. Mi sembra talmente cosa d'altre epoche! La gioventù carnivora non è coi tempi, ha uno stomaco da secolo XIX, che carnivorizzò l'Europa... Cibarsi di pezzi di animali macellati è un'anomalia, fuori della dieta vegetariana non c'è giovinezza vera. La carne è per lo più un'angosciata abitudine dei vecchi. Richiedere piatti di carne, parlarne, ricordarli è cosa da vecchi, e da vecchi incapaci di svecchiarsi con una dieta decisamente alternativa.
Insects without Borders: Thoughts of the Unknown Philosopher (Insetti senza frontiere: Pensieri del filosofo ignoto), Milan: Adelphi, 2009, § 34.

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“To state the obvious: vegetarians live longer than meat eaters simply and solely because we do not consume the filthy, fatty, disease-ridden, decaying flesh of animals.”

Howard F. Lyman (1938) American activist

Source: No More Bull! (2005), Ch. 5: Message for My Meat-Eating Friends, p. 61

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