Peter Singer Quotes

200 quotes in 3144 categories

• Becoming a vegetarian is not merely a symbolic gesture. Nor is it an attempt to isolate oneself from the ugly realities of the world, to…
• The problem is not with the athletes, but with us. No matter how blatant the drug use may be, we don't stop watching the Tour…
• We see things like reciprocity which are fairly central to our view of ethics. But if you're talking about a set of worked-out rules on…
• I would like us to think about it more explicitly, and not take our intuitions as the given of ethics, but rather to reflect on…
• If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the…
• Pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being that suffers is not a member of…
• People tend to care about dogs because they generally have more experience with dogs as companions; but other animals are as capable of suffering as…
• There has been opposition to experimenting on animals for a long time. This opposition has made little headway because experimenters, backed by commercial firms that…
• It may be thought justifiable to require tests on animals of potentially life-saving drugs, but the same kinds of tests are used for products like…
• As for cages themselves, an ordinary citizen who kept dogs in similar conditions for their entire lives would risk prosecution for cruelty. A pig producer…
• With the eventual acceptance of Darwin's theory we reach a modern understanding of nature, one which has since then changed in detail rather than in…
• ...chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans are thinking, self-aware beings, capable of planning ahead, who form lasting social bonds with others and have a rich social…
• Should one break in and free the animals? That is illegal, but the obligation to obey the law is not absolute. It was justifiably broken…
• Habits of thought lead us to brush aside descriptions of cruelty to animals as emotional, for "animal-lovers only"; or if not that, then anyway the…
• It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road...A stone has no…
• The statement "I am in pain" may be one piece of evidence for the conclusion that the speaker is in pain, but it is not…
• Sometimes animals may suffer more because of their more limited understanding. If, for instance, we are taking prisoners in wartime we can explain to them…
• ...the proposed air force and army experiments were designed so that many animals would suffer and die without any certainty that this suffering and death…
• If animals are no longer quite outside the moral sphere, they are still in a special section near the outer rim. Their interests are allowed…
• It is an indication of the extent to which people are now isolated from the animals they eat that children brought up on storybooks that…

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