A Vindication of Natural Diet.

“It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen.””

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation. It is only the wealthy that can, to any great degree, even now, indulge the unnatural craving for dead flesh, and they pay for the greater licence of privilege, by subjection to supernumerary diseases.””

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The change which would be produced by simpler habits on political economy is sufficiently remarkable. The monopolising eater of animal flesh would no longer destroy his constitution by devouring an acre at a meal … The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter consumed in fattening the carcase of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance, undepraving indeed, and incapable of generating disease, if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth.””

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“He will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by instinct; it will be a contemplation full of horror and disappointment to his mind, that beings capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathies should take delight in the death-pangs and last convulsions of dying animals.””

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The proselyte to a simple and natural diet, who desires health, must from the moment of his conversion attend to these rules:NEVER TAKE ANY SUBSTANCE INTOT HE STOMACH THAT ONCE HAD LIFE.DRINK NO LIQUID BUT WATER RESTORED TO ITS ORIGINAL PURITY BY DISTILLATION.””

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“He will embrace a pure system, from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide-extended benefit; unless custom has turned poison into food, he will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by instinct; it will be a contemplation full of horror and disappointment to his mind, that beings capable of the gentlest and most admirable sympathies should take delight in the death-pangs and last convulsions of dying animals.””

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“He will find, moreover, a system of simple diet to be a system of perfect epicurism.””

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Every man forms, as it were, his god from his own character; to the divinity of one of simple habits, no offering would be more acceptable than the happiness of his creatures. He would be incapable of hating or persecuting others for the love of God.””

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The proselyte to a pure diet must be warend to expect a temporary dimunition of muscular strength. The subtraction of a powerful stimulus will suffice to account for this event. But it is only temporary, and is succeeded by an equable capability for exertion far surpassing his former various and fluctuating strength. Above all, he will acquire an easiness of breathing, by which the same exertion is performed with a remarkable exemption from that painful and difficult panting now felt by almost every one after hastily climbing an ordinary mountain. He will b e equally capable of bodily exertion of mental application after as before his simple meal. He will feel none of the narcotic effects of ordinary diet.””

— Percy Bysshe Shelley