Peter Singer Quotes

To forestall misunderstandings: there is value in creating and enjoying art. To many people, drawing, painting, sculpting, singing, and playing a musical instrument are vital forms of self-expression,...

Whaling should stop because it brings needless suffering to social, intelligent animals capable of enjoying their own lives. But against the Japanese charge of cultural bias, Western nations will have...

What she really wants is a place with more tolerance for differences, less emphasis on materialism, where people value creativity and are interested in working on issues relating to peace and justice.

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...

When we eat plants, food takes on a different quality. We take from the earth food that is ready for us and does not fight against us as we take it.

In a democracy, citizens pass judgment on their government, and if they are kept in the dark about what their government is doing, they cannot be in a position to make well-grounded decisions.

It is in the rightness of our cause, and not the fear of our bombs, that our prospects of victory lie.

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 Li...

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...

I’m hoping that you will look at the larger picture and think about what it takes to live ethically in a world in which 18 million people are dying unnecessarily each year. That’s a higher annual deat...

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 d...

Target groups you care about that other people mostly don’t, and take advantage of strategies other people are biased against using.

The Western principle of the sanctity of human life—a principle which is unique in the sharpness with which it separates the wrongness of taking the life of any human being, no matter how severely def...

There is no sense of loss in this transcendence of the quest to satisfy desires that previously seemed so important or of the pleasures that came from their satisfaction, for enlightenment involves de...

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...

We do not have to make self-sacrifice a necessary element of altruism. We can regard people as altruists because of the kind of interests they have rather than because they are sacrificing their inter...

We have still not answered the question of when an experiment might be justifiable. It will not do to say Never! Putting morality in such black-and-white terms is appealing, because it eliminates the...

What is it to make a moral judgement, or to argue about an ethical issue, or to live according to ethical standards? How do moral judgements differ from other practical judgements? Why do we regard a...

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.

When we use animals to convert crops into meat, eggs, or milk, the animals use most of the food value to keep warm and develop bones and other parts we can’t eat. Most of the food value of the crops w...