Top 180 Peter Singer Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans.”

— Peter Singer

102. “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 what we are supposed to do then, yes, it is a human product.”

— Peter Singer

103. “I believe that nationalism is a very strong force, but there are other forces operating; there are tendencies pushing towards a larger picture, especially in Europe, I think; but I still think nationalism is real.”

— Peter Singer

104. “To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.”

— Peter Singer

105. “If our life has no meaning other than our own happiness, we are likely to find that when we have obtained what we think we need to be happy, happiness itself still eludes us.”

— Peter Singer

106. “Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture.”

— Peter Singer

107. “I don’t think there’s anything in the compromise that means that there’s a clash of ethics.”

— Peter Singer

108. “We should aim for our children to be good people, and to live ethical lives that manifest concern for others as well as for themselves.”

— Peter Singer

109. “Ethics is inescapable.”

— Peter Singer

110. “The goal of maximizing the welfare of all may be better achieved by an ethic that accepts our inclinations and harnesses them so that, taken as a whole, the system works to everyone’s advantage.”

— Peter Singer

111. “If you go back in time you’ll find tribes that were essentially only concerned with their own tribal members. If you were a member of another tribe, you could be killed with impunity.”

— Peter Singer

112. “Torturing a human being is almost always wrong, but it is not absolutely wrong.”

— Peter Singer

113. “Marx portrays religion as a response to the oppression and heartlessness of the world; but an inadequate response because instead of challenging the oppression itself, it merely numbs the pain.”

— Peter Singer

114. “If we have learned anything from the liberation movements, we should have learned how difficult it is to be aware of the ways in which we discriminate until they are forcefully pointed out to us. A liberation movement demands an expansion of our moral horizons, so that practices that were previously regarded as natural and inevitable are now seen as intolerable.”

— Peter Singer

115. “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.”

— Peter Singer

116. “Christian magazine Sojourners, likes to point out that the Bible contains more than three thousand references to alleviating poverty – enough reason, he thinks, for making this a central moral issue for Christians.”

— Peter Singer

117. “Will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible?”

— Peter Singer

118. “There is no humane slaughter requirement for wild fish caught and killed at sea, nor, in most places, for farmed fish.”

— Peter Singer

119. “Grain that is used to feed animals that end up on our tables as turkeys and hams could have gone to feed starving people.”

— Peter Singer

120. “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.”

— Peter Singer

121. “The Pentagon said that these prisoners were kept in accordance with the Geneva Convention, and of course I was not reassured by that, but I couldn’t prove that that was wrong; so we’re clearer about that.”

— Peter Singer

122. “We may feel the pain of falling back from a level of affluence to which we have grown accustomed, but most people in developed countries are still, by historical standards, extraordinarily well off.”

— Peter Singer

123. “I don’t understand the notion that modern farming is anything do to with nature. It’s a pretty gross interference with nature.”

— Peter Singer

124. “Every profession will have its rogues, of course, no matter what oaths are sworn, but many health care professionals have a real commitment to serving the best interests of their clients.”

— Peter Singer

125. “If you’re buying animal products and can go to the farm and actually see how the animals are looked after, yes, that’s an important point. That’s definitely the best way of assuring yourself that the animals are being well treated.”

— Peter Singer

126. “We have no obligation to assist countries whose governments have policies that will undermine the effectiveness of our aid.”

— Peter Singer

127. “I don’t think nationalism is alone holding the field; it’s in contention with a lot of different things.”

— Peter Singer

128. “Voluntary euthanasia occurs only when, to the best of medical knowledge, a person is suffering from an incurable and painful or extremely distressing condition. In these circumstances one cannot say that to choose to die quickly is obviously irrational.”

— Peter Singer

129. “The point of this, as Marx explains, is to show that according to classical economics the worker becomes a commodity, the production of which is subject to the ordinary laws of supply and demand. If the supply of workers exceeds the demand for labour, wages fall and some workers starve. Wages therefore tend to the lowest possible level compatible with keeping an adequate supply of workers alive.”

— Peter Singer

130. “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 by those who helped runaway slaves in the American South, to mention only one possible parallel.”

— Peter Singer

131. “It’s also much clearer how much damage the occupation of Iraq is doing to America’s reputation and prestige around the world; and that’s just starting now to hit home in the United States.”

— Peter Singer

132. “An animal experiment cannot be justifiable unless the experiment is so important that the use of a brain-damaged human would be justifiable.”

— Peter Singer

133. “Many people who think nothing of buying factory-farmed ham or chicken from a supermarket are quick to condemn hunting; yet hunting is more defensible than factory farming.”

— Peter Singer

134. “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?”

— Peter Singer

135. “Laws and a settled decision procedure to generate them are a good thing. This gives us one important reason for obeying the law. By obeying the law, I can contribute to the respect in which the established decision procedure and the laws are held. By disobeying, I set an example to others that may lead them to disobey too.”

— Peter Singer

136. “Since ancient times, philosophers have maintained that to strive too hard for one’s own happiness is self-defeating.”

— Peter Singer

137. “People may hope that the meat they buy came from an animal who died without pain, but they do not really want to know about it. Yet those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed do not deserve to be shielded from this or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy.”

— Peter Singer

138. “The new freedom of expression brought by the Internet goes far beyond politics. People relate to each other in new ways, posing questions about how we should respond to people when all that we know about them is what we have learned through a medium that permits all kinds of anonymity and deception.”

— Peter Singer

139. “Helping is not, as conventionally thought, a charitable act that is praiseworthy to do but not wrong to omit. It is something that everyone ought to do.”

— Peter Singer

140. “Everyone has boundaries. If you find yourself doing something that makes you bitter, it is time to reconsider.”

— Peter Singer

141. “The big corporations and those who must compete with them are not concerned with a sense of harmony among plants, animals, and nature.”

— Peter Singer

142. “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 it, and be more open about the fact that something is an ethical issues and think what we ought to do about it.”

— Peter Singer

143. “A majority of people in these surveys also said that America gives too much aid – but when they were asked how much America should give, the median answers ranged from 5 percent to 10 percent of government spending. In other words, people wanted foreign aid ‘cut’ to an amount five to ten times greater than the United States actually gives!”

— Peter Singer

144. “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.”

— Peter Singer

145. “Cutting out meat would do more to help combat climate change than any other action we could feasibly take in the next 20 years.”

— Peter Singer

146. “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.”

— Peter Singer

147. “The hope of Internet anarchists was that repressive governments would have only two options: accept the Internet with its limitless possibilities of spreading information, or restrict Internet access to the ruling elite and turn your back on the 21st century, as North Korea has done.”

— Peter Singer

148. “In some parts of the world, what you are doing is already apparent. According to the World Health Organization, the warming of the planet caused an additional 140,000 deaths in 2004, as compared with the number of deaths there would have been had average global temperatures remained as they were during the period 1961 to 1990. This means that climate change is already causing, every week, as many deaths as occurred in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.”

— Peter Singer

149. “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.”

— Peter Singer

150. “At present scientists do not look for alternatives simply because they do not care enough about the animals they are using.”

— Peter Singer