Playwright George Bernard Shaw first became a vegetarian at age twenty-five. Shaw's doctors warned that the diet would kill him. When he was an old man, he was asked why he didn't go back and show them what good it had done him. He replied, "I would, but they all passed away years ago."

Once someone asked him how it was that he looked so youthful. "I don't," Shaw retorted. "I look my age. It is the other people who look older than they are. What can you expect from people who eat corpses?"

On the connection between flesh-eating and violence in human society, Shaw wrote:

We pray on Sundays that we may have light
To guide our footsteps on the path we tread;
We are sick of war, we don't want to fight,
And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead. ☠️