Life's Pleasures Quote by Mary Tyler Moore

Moore’s line carries the plainspoken moral confidence of a celebrity who knows exactly what kind of pushback is coming. She doesn’t hide behind wellness talk or trend-chasing. She goes straight for the uncomfortable center: if you have options, choosing meat stops being “just food” and starts looking like a decision with a victim.

The key move is how she frames “intellect.” It’s not IQ-as-bragging-rights; it’s conscience with a job description. By calling choice the defining human trait, she preempts the usual excuses (nature, tradition, taste) and relocates the argument from biology to responsibility. The phrasing “we know” is doing social pressure, too. She’s recruiting the listener into a shared, modern awareness: supermarkets and global supply chains make ignorance harder to claim than it used to be.

Then comes the sentence’s emotional lever: “a creature that would protest being killed.” Moore doesn’t say “animal” or “livestock,” words that let us file living beings into categories that feel safely economic. “Creature” is intimate and slightly childlike, a term that refuses the emotional distance built into meat culture. “Would protest” is devastatingly simple. It forces the reader to imagine agency, fear, refusal - the exact things slaughterhouses and euphemisms are designed to keep offstage.

Context matters: as an actress and animal-rights advocate, Moore is translating activism into mass-cultural language. It’s not a manifesto; it’s a moral nudge delivered in the cadence of common sense. The intent isn’t to win a debate on nutrition. It’s to make the listener feel that continuing to eat animals, in a world of alternatives, is less a preference than a choice they now have to own.