Gary L. Francione Quotes

We do not need to eat animals, wear animals, or use animals for entertainment purposes, and our only defense of these uses is our pleasure, amusement, and convenience.

I maintain that we ought to abolish the institution and stop causing or facilitating the existence of more 'companion' animals.

Veganism is not a "sacrifice." It is a joy.

Veganism is not a limitation in any way; it's an expansion of your love, your commitment to nonviolence, and your belief in justice for all.

All sentient beings should have at least one right—the right not to be treated as property

You cannot live a nonviolent life as long as you are consuming violence. Please consider going vegan.

If you love animals but think that veganism is extreme, then you are confused about the meaning of love.

Because animals are property, we consider as "humane treatment" that we would regard as torture if it were inflicted on humans.

If you think that being vegan is difficult, imagine how difficult it is for animals that you are not vegan.

Every time you drink a glass of milk or eat a piece of cheese, you harm a mother. Please go vegan.

If you care about animals, there is one and only one choice: go vegan. Can you choose not to be vegan? Sure. You can choose not to care.

Every sentient being values her/his life even if no one else does. That is what is meant by saying that the lives of all have inherent value.

Ethical veganism represents a commitment to nonviolence.

There is nothing more 'elitist' than thinking our palate pleasure can ever justify a second of suffering or a single death. Please go vegan.

Being vegan provides us with the peace of knowing that we are no longer participants in the hideous violence that is animal exploitation.

We cannot justify treating any sentient nonhuman as our property, as a resource, as a thing that we an use and kill for our purposes.

Welfare reforms and the whole “happy” exploitation movement are not “baby steps.” They are big steps–in a seriously backward direction.

People need to be educated so that they can make intelligent moral choices

If we can live and prosper without killing, why would we not do so? I do not see veganism as 'extreme' in any way. I see killing for no reason as extreme in every way.

We should take good care of the domestic animals we have brought into existence until they die. We should stop bringing more domestic animals into existence.

They are nonhuman persons. They are not food. If animals matter morally at all, there is one and only one rational response: go vegan. Everything else is just participation in animal exploitation.

Any serious social, political, and economic change must include veganism.

The proposition that humans have mental characteristics wholly absent in non-humans is inconsistent with the theory of evolution.

Does veganism require a “sacrifice”? Yes. It requires that you give up that which you never had any right to in the first place.

If you claim to 'love' animals but you eat animal products, you need to think critically about how you understand love.

In order to be a teacher you've got to be a student first

We should stop bringing more domestic animals into existence.

Who I've been is not as important as who I'm becoming.

We cannot talk simultaneously about animal rights and the 'humane' slaughter of animals.

Animal rights without veganism is like human rights with slavery. It makes no sense. None whatsoever.

There is no moral distinction between fur and other materials made from animals, such as leather, which also is the result of the suffering and death of sentient beings.

Veganism is about nonviolence: nonviolence to other sentient beings; nonviolence to yourself; nonviolence to the earth.

We do not think clearly about our moral obligations to animals.

If an animal has any rights at all, it's got the right not to be eaten.

...eating animals involves an intentional decision to participate in the suffering and death of nonhumans where there is no plausible moral justification.

There is no 'need' for us to eat meat, dairy or eggs. Indeed, these foods are increasingly linked to various human diseases and animal agriculture is an environmental disaster for the planet.

Veganism must be the baseline if we are to have any hope of shifting the paradigm away from animals as things and toward animals as nonhuman persons.

Being vegan is not just a matter of being 'kind' to animals. First and foremost, it is a matter of being just and observing our moral obligation to not treat other sentient beings as things.

Even if plants were sentient, veganism would still be a moral imperative given that it takes many pounds of plants to produce one pound of flesh.

An aim of an argument should be progress, but progress ultimately means little without victory.

We eat animals because they taste good. And if that's O.K., what's wrong with wearing fur? We need as a society to think seriously about our institutionalized animal use.

It costs us so little to go vegan. It costs animals so much if we don't.

There is no morally coherent difference between fur and other animal clothing, such as leather, wool, etc., just as there is no morally coherent distinction between meat and milk or eggs.

Vegetarianism as a moral position is no more coherent than saying that you think it morally wrong to eat meat from a spotted cow but not morally wrong to eat meat from a non-spotted cow.