Top 500 Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “How did her life live itself without her.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

402. “Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

403. “When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

404. “Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore – “I’m easy; I’ll eat anything” – can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

405. “There are a lot of things that we crave, there are a lot of things that would make us perhaps more fulfilled in a sensory way that we just say no to.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

406. “We all choose things, and we also all choose against things. I want to be the kind of person who chooses for more than chooses against...”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

407. “There are more places you haven’t heard of then you’re heard of!′ I loved that.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

408. “Nobody wants to be a caricature. Nobody wants to be a diminished version of herself.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

409. “I believed him. I was not stupid. I was his wife.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

410. “It is better to lose than never to have had.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

411. “I think after you live it’s like before you lived.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

412. “Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they’re nothing.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

413. “The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free, and have fewer children. Of those four actions, only plant-based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

414. “After fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland, Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer compared species bias to the “most extreme racist theories.” Singer argued that animal rights was the purest form of social-justice advocacy, because animals are the most vulnerable of all the downtrodden. He felt that mistreating animals was the epitome of the “might-makes-right” moral paradigm. We trade their most basic and important interests against fleeting human ones only because we can.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

415. “But even if the average life expectancy continued to increase by one year with each passing year, it would take forever for people to live forever, so probably no one would ever see it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

416. “Feeling pain is still better than not feeling, isn’t it?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

417. “According to Project Drawdown, four of the most effective strategies for mitigating global warming are reducing food waste, educating girls, providing family planning and reproductive healthcare, and collectively shifting to a plant-rich diet. The benefits of these advancements extend far beyond the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and their primary cost is our collective effort.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

418. “No one fired a pistol to mark the start of the race to the bottom. The earth just tilted and everyone slid into the hole.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

419. “Golda Meir had told Anwar Sadat: “We can forgive you for killing our children, but we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

420. “He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

421. “The books could be completely worthless, and things we don’t even read now could be considered the most important books.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

422. “To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

423. “Rabbi, I feel no despair anymore. For seventy years I had only nightmares, but I have no nightmares anymore. I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I lived. Not only the good moments. I feel gratitude for every moment of my life. I have seen so many miracles.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

424. “There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn’t happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

425. “Not to have a choice is also a choice.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

426. “In the emptiness of evenings, serious and unequivocal, he would say: “How beautiful is forgetting! what relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents!”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

427. “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.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

428. “You’re incredibly beautiful,′ I told her, because she was fat, so I thought it would be an especially nice compliment, and also make her like me again, even though I was sexist.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

429. “Long before man traveled into space, rabbis debated how one would observe Shabbat there-not because they anticipated space travel but because Buddhists strive to live with questions and Jews would rather die.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

430. “I need an office, so I can have a place where I don’t write.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

431. “Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless – it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement with the problem is.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

432. “Abraham didn’t say, “What do you want?” He didn’t say, “Yes?” He answered with a statement: “Here I am.” Whatever God needs or wants, Abraham is wholly present for Him, without conditions or reservations or need for explanation.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

433. “There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

434. “I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it’s not the choice I’m imposing on anybody else.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

435. “Once upon a time, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with such fecal contamination. But about thirty years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now classified as a “cosmetic blemish.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

436. “Lvov is a city like New York City in America. New York City, in truth, was designed on the model of Lvov.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

437. “Stephen Hawking won’t come to Israel? I’m not one to punch a quadriplegic with glasses, but I’m sure he won’t mind if we ask for his voice back – you know, the one that was created by Israeli engineers.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

438. “What do babies dream of? She must be dreaming of the before-life, just as I dream of the afterlife.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

439. “She asked: “What can you promise?” He promised: “Things are about to be different.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

440. “In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

441. “Regarding US government recommendations that tend to encourage dairy consumption in the name of preventing osteoporosis, Nestle notes that in parts of the world where milk is not a staple of the diet, people often have less osteoporosis and fewer bone fractures than Americans do. The highest rates of osteoporosis are seen in countries where people consume the most dairy foods.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

442. “When you’re a dad, there’s no one above you. If I don’t do something that has to be done, who is going to do it?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

443. “To try to live.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

444. “The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It’s already happening.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

445. “The question, I’ve come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

446. “I put my hand on him. Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeeled together on the bus. I couldnt explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stiching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

447. “Che rimpianto, pensare che serve una vita per imparare a vivere, Oskar.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

448. “In the end, everyone loses everyone.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

449. “But that slip of paper wouldn’t disappear, ever, and neither would the image of his prostrate wife, and neither would the thought that if he could, it might greatly improve his life to end it.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

450. “A powerful wind swept through the shtetl, making it whistle. Those studying obscure texts in dimly lit rooms looked up. Lovers making amends and promises, amendments and excuses, fell silent.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer