The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond.
MAE WEST
A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out as good for nothing.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
On the subject of spinach: divide into little piles. Rearrange again into new piles. After five of six manoeuvers, sit back and say you are full.
DELIA EPHRON
Lettuce is divine, although I’m not sure it’s really a food.
DIANA VREELAND
I have no truck with lettuce, cabbage, and similar chlorophyll. Any dietitian will tell you that a running foot of apple strudel contains four times the vitamins of a bushel of beans.
S. J. PERELMAN Key writer on the New Yorker during the golden age, Perelman is regarded by many as America’s best comic writer, the US equivalent to P. G. Wodehouse. His two screenplays for the Marx brothers (Horse Feathers and Monkey Business) are classics and his short pieces, or feuilletons, were admired by T. S. Eliot and Somerset Maugham. Their style had a huge influence on the writing and stand-up routines of Woody Allen.
An onion can make people cry, but there has never been a vegetable invented to make them laugh.
WILL ROGERS
A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.
LAURIE COLWIN
If there is one vegetable which is God-given, it is the haricot bean.
JEAN HENRI FABRE
I confess that nothing frightens me more than the appearance of mushrooms on the table, especially in a small provincial town.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
I won’t eat anything that has intelligent life, but I’d gladly eat a network executive or a politician.
MARTY FELDMAN
A vegetarian is a person who won’t eat anything that can have children.
DAVID BRENNER
You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I’ll buy you a new car.
HARVEY DIAMOND
Caesar’s armies marched on vegetarian foods.
WILL DURANT
I was a vegetarian until I started leaning toward the sunlight.
RITA RUDNER
I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.
A. WHITNEY BROWN
Vegetarians have wicked, shifty eyes, and laugh in a cold calculating manner. They pinch little children, steal stamps, drink water, favour beards.
J. B. MORTON Better known as ‘Beachcomber’, he was the Clarkson of his day, fulminating amusingly in his daily column about modern art, socialism, schools, new inventions and playing practical jokes on friends. From 1924, he wrote one piece a day for the Daily Express for the next fifty-one years. He spent his final years alone, living on bread and jam.
If we aren’t supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat?
JO BRAND
My situation is a solemn one. Life is offered to me on condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism. My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small travelling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honour of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
I’m a student of violence because I’m a student of the human heart.
SAM PECKINPAH
Anyone who clings to the historically untrue – and thoroughly immoral – doctrine that violence never solves anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler would referee. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor; and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.
FRANCIS BACON
Always do right. That will gratify some of the people and astonish the rest.
MARK TWAIN
He that does good for good’s sake seeks neither paradise nor reward, but he is sure of both in the end.
WILLIAM PENN
Virtue has its own reward, but no box-office.
MAE WEST
Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
I have found that the best way to get another to acquire a virtue, is to impute it to him.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
A healthy appetite for righteousness, kept in due control by good manners, is an excellent thing; but to ‘hunger and thirst’ after it is often merely a symptom of spiritual diabetes.
C.D. BROAD
Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.
WALTER BAGEHOT
He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
To be able under all circumstances to practise five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five things are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness.
CONFUCIUS