21 Quotes by Tom Regan

If you were aboard a lifeboat with a baby and a dog, and the boat capsized, would you rescue the baby or the dog?" Regan, "If it were a retarded baby and a bright dog, I'd save the dog.

Even granting that we [humans] face greater harm than laboratory animals presently endure if ... research on these animals is stopped, the animal rights view will not be satisfied with anything less than total abolition.

I would encourage them never to forget that they were not always vegans. The self-righteousness of the recently converted hurts, it does not help, other animals.

In a perfect world, we would not keep animals for our benefit, including pets,

What could be the basis of our having more inherent value than animals? Their lack of reason, or autonomy, or intellect? Only if we are willing to make the same judgment in the case of humans who are similarly deficient.

It is not larger, cleaner cages that justice demands...but empty cages; not traditional animal agriculture but a complete end to all commerce in the flesh of dead animals; not more humane hunting and trapping, but the total eradication of these barbarous practices.

All great movements, it is written, go through three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption. It is the realisation of this third stage, adoption, that requires our passion and our discipline, our hearts and our heads. The fate of animals is in our hands.

If abandoning animal research means that there are some things we cannot learn, then so be it ... We have no basic right ... not to be harmed by those natural diseases we are heir to.

It is not an act of kindness to treat animals respectfully. It is an act of justice.