Top 180 Peter Singer Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “To turn the other cheek is to teach would-be cheats that cheating pays.”

— Peter Singer

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

— Peter Singer

53. “Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.”

— Peter Singer

54. “Probability is the guide of life, and of death, too.”

— Peter Singer

55. “If we can prevent something bad, without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it.”

— Peter Singer

56. “History is not going to look kindly on us if we just keep our head in the sand on armed autonomous robotics issue because it sounds too science fiction.”

— Peter Singer

57. “The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world.”

— Peter Singer

58. “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.”

— Peter Singer

59. “There are a lot of weapons that we’ve developed which we’ve pulled back from – biological weapons, chemical weapons, etc. This may be the case with armed autonomous robotics, where we ultimately pull back from them.”

— Peter Singer

60. “The traditional view of the sanctity of human life will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological and demographic developments.”

— Peter Singer

61. “But pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being.”

— Peter Singer

62. “At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn’t mean that you can’t think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places.”

— Peter Singer

63. “I’m a Utilitarian, so I don’t see the rule against lying as absolute; it’s always subject to some overriding utility which may prevent its exercise.”

— Peter Singer

64. “We need to recognise that what really matters isn’t buying more and more consumer goods, but family, friends, and knowing that we are doing something worthwhile with our lives. Helping to reduce the appalling consequences of world poverty should be part of that reassessment.”

— Peter Singer

65. “So the researcher’s central dilemma exists in an especially acute form in psychology: either the animal is not like us, in which case there is no reason for performing the experiment; or else the animal is like us, in which case we ought not to perform on the animal an experiment that would be considered outrageous if performed on one of us. Another.”

— Peter Singer

66. “It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to distance ourselves from our own views, so that we can dispassionately search for prejudices among the beliefs and values we hold.”

— Peter Singer

67. “According to the Dominant Western tradition, the natural world exists for the benefit of human beings...”

— Peter Singer

68. “The prescription of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a prescription of how we should treat human beings.”

— Peter Singer

69. “If you are paying for something to drink when safe drinking water comes out of the tap, you have money to spend on things you don’t really need. Around the world, a billion people struggle to live each day on less than you paid for that drink.”

— Peter Singer

70. “Sci-fi is often a metaphor. I think it’s more the themes and questions that science fiction raises rather than the exact predictions that should guide us.”

— Peter Singer

71. “The basic principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment; it requires equal consideration. Equal consideration for different beings may lead to different treatment and different rights.”

— Peter Singer

72. “Business ethics has always had problems that are distinct from those of other professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, dentistry, or nursing.”

— Peter Singer

73. “If we are concerned about the exploitation of human workers in countries with low standards of worker protection, we should also be concerned about the treatment of even more defenceless non-human animals.”

— Peter Singer

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

— Peter Singer

75. “If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.”

— Peter Singer

76. “We think of lions and wolves as savage because they kill; but they must kill, or starve. Humans kill other animals for sport, to satisfy their curiosity, to beautify their bodies, and to please their palates.”

— Peter Singer

77. “Knowing that we can control our own behaviour makes it more likely that we will.”

— Peter Singer

78. “We should give the same respect to the lives of animals as we do to the lives of humans.”

— Peter Singer

79. “Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.”

— Peter Singer

80. “Words do have consequences, and what one generation says but does not really believe, the next generation may believe, and even act upon.”

— Peter Singer

81. “What is there about the notion of a person, at law, that makes every living member of the species Homo sapiens a person, irrespective of their mental capacities, but excludes every nonhuman animal – again, irrespective of their mental capacities?”

— Peter Singer

82. “Putting the AR movement directly in opposition to the environmental movement, which should be our natural allies in fighting human arrogance and domination of the planet.”

— Peter Singer

83. “We have a new generation of very rich people who want to do more with their money than buy a lot of expensive toys. They want to live meaningful lives.”

— Peter Singer

84. “We think of dogs as being more like people than pigs; but pigs are highly intelligent animals and if we kept pigs as pets and reared dogs for food, we would probably reverse our order of preference. Are we turning persons into bacon?”

— Peter Singer

85. “The future of the world depends on how well we meet it.”

— Peter Singer

86. “I believe that in this new world that we live in, we often have a responsibility, you know, to actually go beyond the thou shalt nots – that is, the not harming others – and say we can help others and we should be helping others.”

— Peter Singer

87. “The world would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument.”

— Peter Singer

88. “Unless you can refute the central argument of this book, you should now recognize that speciesism is wrong, and this means that, if you take morality seriously, you should try to eliminate speciesist practices from your own life, and oppose them elsewhere. Otherwise no basis remains from which you can, without hypocrisy, criticize racism or sexism.”

— Peter Singer

89. “If we are prepared to take the life of another being merely in order to satisfy our taste for a particular type of food, then that being is no more than a means to our end.”

— Peter Singer

90. “I don’t think there’s much point in bemoaning the state of the world unless there’s some way you can think of to improve it. Otherwise, don’t bother writing a book; go and find a tropical island and lie in the sun.”

— Peter Singer

91. “If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, we are not the left.”

— Peter Singer

92. “We are not especially ‘interested in’ animals. Neither of us had ever been inordinately fond of dogs, cats, or horses in the way that many people are. We didn’t ‘love’ animals.”

— Peter Singer

93. “To say that life is meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact.”

— Peter Singer

94. “As we realize that more and more things have global impact, I think we’re going to get people increasingly wanting to get away from a purely national interest.”

— Peter Singer

95. “Since 1988, Iran has had a government-funded, regulated system for purchasing kidneys.”

— Peter Singer

96. “There can be no brotherhood when some nations indulge in previously unheard of luxuries, while others struggle to stave off famine.”

— Peter Singer

97. “Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles.”

— Peter Singer

98. “I think ethics is always there; it’s not always a very thoughtful or reflective ethics.”

— Peter Singer

99. “There are some things that, once lost, no amount of money can regain. Thus to justify the destruction of an ancient forest on the grounds that it will earn us substantial export income is problematic, even if we could invest that income and increase its value from year to year; for no matter how much we increase its value, its could never buy back the link with the past represented by the forest.”

— Peter Singer

100. “Being a bystander to suffering is not an option.”

— Peter Singer