John Robbins > Quotes

“Your life does matter. It always matters whether you reach out in friendship or lash out in anger. It always matters whether you live with compassion and awareness or whether you succumb to distractions and trivia. It always matters how you treat other people, how you treat animals, and how you treat yourself. It always matters what you do. It always matters what you say. And it always matters what you eat.”
― John Robbins, The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World

“Animals do not ‘give’ their life to us, as the sugar-coated lie would have it. No, we take their lives. They struggle and fight to the last breath, just as we would do if we were in their place.”
― John Robbins

“There is a great loneliness of spirit today. We’re trying to live, we’re trying to cope in the face of what seems to be overwhelming evidence that who we are doesn’t matter, that there is no real hope for enough change, that the environment and human experience is deteriorating so rapidly and increasingly and massively. This is the context, psychically and spiritually, in which we are working today. This is how our lives are reflected to us. Meanwhile, we’re yearning for connection with each other, with ourselves, with the powers of nature, the possibilities of being alive.

When that tension arises, we feel pain, we feel anguish at the very root of ourselves, and then we cover that over, that grief, that horror, with all kinds of distraction – with consumerism, with addictions, with anything that we can use to disconnect and to go away.

We’ve been opening ourselves to the grief, to the knowing of what’s taking place, the loss of species, the destruction of the natural world, the unimaginable levels of social injustice and economic injustice that deprive so many human beings of basic opportunities. And as we open to the pain of that, there’s a possibility of embracing that pain and that grief in a way that it becomes a strength, a power to respond. There is the possibility that the energy that has been bound in the repression of it can now flow through us and energize us, make us clearer, more alive, more passionate, committed, courageous, determined people.”
― John Robbins

“The joy is that we can take back our bodies, reclaim our health, and restore ourselves to balance. We can take power over what and how we eat. We can rejuvenate and recharge ourselves, bringing healing to the wounds we carry inside us, and bringing to fuller life the wonderful person that each of us can be.”
― John Robbins

“In the never-ending battle between order and chaos, clutter sides with chaos every time. Anything that you possess that does not add to your life or your happiness eventually becomes a burden.”
― John Robbins, The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less

“Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product. attr to Buthan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck”
― John Robbins, Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the Worlds Healthiest & Longest-Lived Peoples

“...The real cause of hunger is a scarcity of justice, not a scarcity of food. Enough grain is squandered every day in raising American livestock for meat to provide every human being on earth with two loaves of bread.”
― John Robbins, Diet for a New America: How Your Food Choices Affect Your Health, Happiness and the Future of Life on Earth

“We have a sickness in our society. If you say that somebody is a 'success', isn't it that usually what you mean is that they've made a lot of money, or have a lot of money?... Whrereas I would define a successful human being - - if you think twice about it, and question that assumption, you know, wouldn't that actually be somebody who brings out the best in other people? Someone who gives - - adds beauty to the lives of others, in some way?" John Robbins - author of 'The Good Life”
― John Robbins

“Few of us are aware that the act of eating can be a powerful statement of commitment to our own well-being, and at the same time the creation of a healthier habitat. Your health, happiness, and the future of life on earth are rarely so much in your own hands as when you sit down to eat.”
― John Robbins

“My problem was not with comfort or monetary wealth. My problem was with a way of life in which those who have more than they need are envied or extolled, while those who are materially poor are scorned or forgotten.”
― John Robbins, The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less

“Awareness is bad for the meat business. Conscience is bad for the meat business. Sensitivity to life is bad for the meat business. DENIAL, however, the meat business finds indispensable.”
― John Robbins

“The GDP rises whenever money changes hands....The whole thing is reminiscent of Edward Abbey's reflection that "growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell.”
― John Robbins, The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less

“Our food chain is in crisis. Big agribusiness has made profits more important than your health—more important than the environment—more important than your right to know how your food is produced. But beneath the surface, a revolution is growing.”
― John Robbins, Voices of the Food Revolution: You Can Heal Your Body and Your World with Food!

“The ancient Greeks told of a philosopher eating bread and lentils for dinner. He was approached by another man, who lived sumptuously by flattering the king. Said the flatterer, "If you would learn to be subservient to the king, you would not have to live on lentils." The philosopher replied, "If you would learn to live on lentils, you would not have to give up your independence in order to be docile and acquiescent to the king.”
― John Robbins, The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less

“The Pygmies and the Bushmen, these oldest of all peoples, remind us that our capacities for mutuality, cooperation, and empathy are every bit as real and every bit as much a part of our humanity as our capacities for greed, competition, and exclusiveness. Raising their children with unlimited respect and treating each person as having infinite worth, they have survived longer than any other culture known to science.”
― John Robbins, Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the Worlds Healthiest & Longest-Lived Peoples

“You know that a majority of the medical costs that are bankrupting families, companies, and nations could be eliminated with better nutrition.”
― John Robbins, Voices of the Food Revolution: You Can Heal Your Body and Your World with Food!

“You may have noticed that you sometimes feel more full about twenty minutes after you stop eating than you did while you were still eating. This is because it takes the stretch receptors in your stomach about twenty minutes to tell your brain (via the hormone cholecystokinin) how full you really are. If you eat until you experience yourself to be 100 percent full, you actually go about 20 percent over capacity with every meal. And if you do that regularly, your stomach will stretch a little bit each time to accommodate the extra food. Then you have to eat more next time to get the same feeling of fullness.”
― John Robbins, Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World's Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples

“If you are going to buy, a prudent rule of thumb is not to carry a mortgage greater than two years' income.”
― John Robbins, The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less

“I believe the houses of the future will be...designed to welcome rather than to impress. People...will want homes in which every room is used every day and in which there are no wasted spaces--homes less like furniture stores or warehouses and more like nests.”
― John Robbins, The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less

“Eating as if the Earth Mattered (Which It Most Certainly Does!) We face some big challenges on planet Earth. Hunger is now taking the lives of 17,000 children daily.”
― John Robbins, Voices of the Food Revolution: You Can Heal Your Body and Your World with Food!

“Jeffrey's book, Seeds of Deception, is the world's bestseller on GMOs, and his film, Genetic Roulette, exposes serious health risks of the Genetically Modified (GM) foods Americans eat every day.”
― John Robbins, Voices of the Food Revolution: You Can Heal Your Body and Your World with Food!

“It is not only Frances Moore Lappé whose mind is changing as new evidence comes in from protein research; the most rigorous scientific journals are likewise convinced. An editorial in the medical journal Lancet reports: Formerly, vegetable proteins were classified as second-class, and regarded as inferior to first-class proteins of animal origin, but this distinction has now been generally discarded.”
― John Robbins, Diet for a New America: How Your Food Choices Affect Your Health, Happiness and the Future of Life on Earth, 25th Anniversary Edition

“By the age of seventy, most of us have lost 60 percent of our maximal breathing capacity, 40 percent of our kidney and liver functions, 15 to 30 percent of our bone mass, and 30 percent of our strength.”
― John Robbins, Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World's Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples

“The movements for healthy food are growing fast, and starting to become a political force.”
― John Robbins, Voices of the Food Revolution: You Can Heal Your Body and Your World with Food!

“We can with an order of probability bordering on certainty extend maximum human life span by means of a calorically restricted optimal nutrition diet.…There is now abundant hard evidence—not testimonial evidence, not clinical anecdote, not based on plausibility arguments, and not even correlational evidence, although all these exist in plenitude—but hard, well-controlled and steadfastly confirmed experimental evidence that a low calorie diet that provides optimum nutrition will greatly extend average and maximum life spans, postpone the onset and decrease the frequencies of most or all of the “diseases of aging,” maintain biomarkers at levels younger than chronological age, maintain sexual potency, general vitality, and ability to engage in sports into advanced age, and delay deterioration of the brain.28 It is true”
― John Robbins, Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World's Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples

“Never ask a barber whether you need a haircut.”
― John Robbins, The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World, 10th Anniversary Edition

“If, as a society, we ate meat less, the world would indeed be a brighter and more beautiful place. Consider, for example, the impact on global warming. Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, Assistant Professor of Geophysics at the University of Chicago, have calculated the benefits that would occur if Americans were to reduce beef consumption by 20 percent. Such a change would decrease our greenhouse gas emissions as substantially as if we exchanged all our cars and trucks for Priuses.”
― John Robbins, No Happy Cows: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Food Revolution

“the chairman of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, was saying that his company was spending more money on insurance for its employees than it was spending on coffee.”
― John Robbins, The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World, 10th Anniversary Edition

“that meat production is the second or third largest contributor to environmental problems at every level and at every scale, from global to local. It is a primary culprit in land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, species extinction, loss of biodiversity, and climate change.”
― John Robbins, The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World, 10th Anniversary Edition

“When diet and lifestyle—often the underlying causes of poor health—are adjusted, the body has a remarkable capacity to begin healing itself, much more quickly than we had once thought possible.”
― John Robbins, The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World, 10th Anniversary Edition