Melanie Joy Quotes

#1. As with any violent ideology, the populace must be shielded from direct exposure to the victims of the system, lest they begin questioning the system or their participation in it. This truth speaks for itself: why else would the meat industry go to such lengths to keep its practices invisible?

Melanie Joy

#2. We love dogs and eat cows not because dogs and cows are fundamentally different
cows, like dogs, have feelings, preferences, and consciousness
but because our perception of them is different.

Melanie Joy

#3. To identify with others is to see something of yourself in them and to see something of them in yourself
even if the only thing you identify with is the desire to be free from suffering.

Melanie Joy

#4. Carnism is the belief system in which eating certain animals is considered ethical and appropriate.

Melanie Joy

#5. Often, vegan advocates assume that a person's defensiveness is the result of selfishness or apathy, when in fact it is much more likely the result of systematic and intensive social conditioning.

Melanie Joy

#6. Educating yourself does not mean that you were stupid in the first place; it means that you are intelligent enough to know that there is plenty left to learn.

Melanie Joy

#7. Violent ideologies follow their own logic, the logic that sustains the system - a convoluted logic that unravels when it, itself, is labeled.

Melanie Joy

#8. The most effective way to distort reality is to deny it; if we tell ourselves there isn't a problem, then we never have to worry about what to do about it. And the most effective way to deny a reality is to make it invisible.

Melanie Joy

#9. Have you ever noticed that, though we breed, raise, and kill ten billion animals per year, most of us never see even a single part of the process of meat production?

Melanie Joy

#10. We are the collateral damage of carnism; we pay for it with our health, our environment, and our taxes - $7.64 billion a year, to be exact.

Melanie Joy