411 Quotes by Peter Singer

If we all think only of our own interests, we are headed for collective disaster – just look at what we are doing to our planet’s climate.

The unchallenged assumption is that humans may use animals for their own purposes, and they may raise and kill them to satisfy their preference for a diet containing animal flesh.

If it is so easy to help people in real need through no fault of their own, and yet we fail to do so, aren’t we doing something wrong? At a minimum, I hope this book will persuade you that there is something deeply askew with our widely accepted views about what it is to live a good life.

Putting yourself in the place of others... is what thinking ethically is all about.

In my world of the people who study war and defense issues, we simply did not talk about robotics. We do not talk about it because it’s seen as mere science fiction. It’s cold, hard, metallic reality.

Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval scholar whose ideas became the semi-official philosophy of the Roman Catholic church, wrote that whatever we have in “superabundance” – that is, above and beyond what will reasonably satisfy our own needs and those of our family, for the present and the foreseeable future – “is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance.

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 de France. Maybe we should just turn off the television and get on our own bikes.

For nomadic societies, there was no point in owning anything that one could not carry, but once humans settled down and developed a system of money, that limit to acquisition disappeared.

Whatever the theoretical possibilities of rearing animals without suffering may be, the fact is that the meat available from butchers and supermarkets comes from animals who were not treated with any real consideration at all while being reared. So we must ask ourselves, not: Is it ever right to eat meat? but: Is it right to eat this meat?