This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity—that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself—and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!
Leo Tolstoy, The First Step: An Essay on the Morals of Diet, to Which Are Added Two Stories
eating, morals, vegetarianism