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" When we talk about protecting our right to have guns, we are talking about protecting our right to shoot bullets. So what is it that's so important to shoot at? "

Jonathan Safran Foer

Talking

Guns

Important

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" Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness? "

" I am an on-and-off vegetarian. Sometimes on, mostly off. I think it is better to be a vegetarian but occasionally, the call of the hot dog overpowers my ethics. "

" The question, I've come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed. "

" Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat. "

" In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly. "

" Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world? "

" In America right now, we use words like 'smart' to talk about bombs. American rhetoric is grounded in ideas of capital-G Good, capital-E Evil, and it's very clear who is on which side. But in a book you can do just the opposite. You can use all lower-case words. "

" When it comes to meat, change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not. "

" You write to please yourself, you write to move yourself, to engage yourself in the asking of questions that are important to you. "

" There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food. "

" As I've grown older, I've grown more convinced there's nothing that shouldn't be talked about. If we think we're protecting each other, we're not. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

Think

Older

" Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

Relationship

Work

" For a long time, I thought I would like to be a doctor. Such a good profession. So explicitly good. Never a waste of time. "

" The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs. "

" I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it's not the choice I'm imposing on anybody else. "

" I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write. "

" Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We've never claimed more, and we've never had less. "

" There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on. "

" Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us. "

" People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it's like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. "

" That's the nice thing about being a vegetarian. You don't have to be neurotic. Selective omnivores have to be neurotic. Personally, I don't have time for all that; I don't want to get into it. "

" Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

Children

Matters

" These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long. "

" We shouldn't be intimidated by someone else's idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take. "

" If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well. "

" It seems entirely possible to me that horrible things can be going on without us becoming horrible people. "

Jonathan Safran Foer

People

Possible

" All really great artists, Jackson Pollack, John Cage, Beckett or Joyce - you are never indifferent to them. "

" I see bad stuff on the street all the time that I don't do anything about. I do bad stuff myself all the time. The goal is not to somehow be perfect - that's silly, that's naive. The goal is to just recognize there are choices in front of us, and to try to make better ones. "

" I'm less worried about accomplishment - as younger people always can't help but be - and more concerned with spending my time well, spending time with my family, and reading, learning things. "

" Look, taste is clearly the crudest of our senses: this is scientifically, objectively factual. It is less nuanced. Eyesight is extraordinary - hearing, touch. I find people who devote their whole lives to taste a little strange. "