Top 180 Peter Singer Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Human beings are social animals. We were social before we were human.”

— Peter Singer

2. “There is a growing movement called effective altruism. It’s important because it combines both the heart and the head.”

— Peter Singer

3. “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 our own species.”

— Peter Singer

4. “We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet- for the sake of hamburgers.”

— Peter Singer

5. “To be a utilitarian means that you judge actions as right or wrong in accordance with whether they have good consequences. So you try to do what will have the best consequences for all of those affected.”

— Peter Singer

6. “Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian religious tradition.”

— Peter Singer

7. “We wait until Pandora’s box is opened before we say, “Wow, maybe we should understand what’s in that box.” This is the story of humans on every problem.”

— Peter Singer

8. “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”

— Peter Singer

9. “If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?”

— Peter Singer

10. “What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.”

— Peter Singer

11. “Hebrew word for “charity” tzedakah, simply means “justice” and as this suggests, for Jews, giving to the poor is no optional extra but an essential part of living a just life.”

— Peter Singer

12. “We have to speak up on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves.”

— Peter Singer

13. “What is faith? If you believe something because you have evidence for it, or rational argument, that is not faith. So faith seems to be believing something despite the absence of evidence or rational argument for it.”

— Peter Singer

14. “Do business managers have a commitment to anything more than the success of their company and to making money? It would be hard to say that they do. Indeed, many business leaders deny that there is any conflict between self-interest and the interests of all.”

— Peter Singer

15. “I am not saying that factory farming is the same as the Holocaust or the slave trade, but it’s clear that there is an immense amount of suffering in it, and just as we think that the Nazis were wrong to ignore the suffering of their victims, so we are wrong to ignore the sufferings of our victims.”

— Peter Singer

16. “The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.”

— Peter Singer

17. “The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings.”

— Peter Singer

18. “To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.”

— Peter Singer

19. “Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse – and persuading others not to support it – is.”

— Peter Singer

20. “Scholars have long dreamed of a universal library containing everything that has ever been written.”

— Peter Singer

21. “All the arguments to prove man’s superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.”

— Peter Singer

22. “More often there’s a compromise between ethics and expediency.”

— Peter Singer

23. “Forests and meat animals compete for the same land. The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers.”

— Peter Singer

24. “By ceasing to rear and kill animals for food, we can make so much extra food available for humans that, properly distributed, it would eliminate starvation and malnutrition from this planet. Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too.”

— Peter Singer

25. “Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the slippery slope: once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will not be able to limit the killing to those who want to die.”

— Peter Singer

26. “Remember that not everyone is as strong as you are. Be mindful of human weakness, and of the fact that it may be more important, in the long run, to get many people taking steps in the right direction than to have fewer achieving the ideal.”

— Peter Singer

27. “Becoming a vegan is a sure way of completely avoiding participation in the abuse of farmed animals. Vegans are a living demonstration of the fact that we do not need to exploit animals for food.”

— Peter Singer

28. “Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.”

— Peter Singer

29. “Philosophy is not politics, and we do our best, within our all-too-human limitations, to seek the truth, not to score points against opponents. There is little satisfaction in gaining an easy triumph over a weak opponent while ignoring better arguments against your views.”

— Peter Singer

30. “Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.”

— Peter Singer

31. “So why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required – we could party our way into extinction!”

— Peter Singer

32. “Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.”

— Peter Singer

33. “Dolphins are social mammals, capable of enjoying their lives. They form close bonds with other members of their group.”

— Peter Singer

34. “Human decision-making is complex. On our own, our tendency to yield to short-term temptations, and even to addictions, may be too strong for our rational, long-term planning.”

— Peter Singer

35. “What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have.”

— Peter Singer

36. “Can we really believe that we are living a good life, an ethically decent life if we don’t do anything serious to help reduce poverty around the world and help save the lives of children or adults who are likely to die if we don’t increase the amount of aid we are giving.”

— Peter Singer

37. “Cheats prosper until there are enough who bear grudges against them to make sure they do not prosper.”

— Peter Singer

38. “That’s a central part of philosophy, of ethics. What do I owe to strangers? What do I owe to my family? What is it to live a good life? Those are questions which we face as individuals.”

— Peter Singer

39. “Those who purchase meat, fur, and leather have no right to be shielded from the sights and sounds of the slaughterhouses from which these products were produced.”

— Peter Singer

40. “My work is based on the assumption that clarity and consistency in our moral thinking is likely, in the long run, to lead us to hold better views on ethical issues.”

— Peter Singer

41. “Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.”

— Peter Singer

42. “If you earn a lot of money, you can give away a lot of money.”

— Peter Singer

43. “Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system which controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and equal society is a more difficult task than Marx realized.”

— Peter Singer

44. “If penicillin had been judged by its toxicity to guinea pigs, it might never have been used by man.”

— Peter Singer

45. “It is a mistake to assume that the law should always enforce morality.”

— Peter Singer

46. “Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.”

— Peter Singer

47. “Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.”

— Peter Singer

48. “When fish experience something that would cause other animals physical pain, they behave in ways suggestive of pain, and the change in behaviour may last several hours.”

— Peter Singer

49. “Ethics seems a morass which we have to cross, but get hopelessly bogged in when we make the attempt.”

— Peter Singer

50. “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.”

— Peter Singer