Quote

Human beings are social animals. We were social before we were human.

Peter Singer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Peter Singer
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: July 6
Philosopher
Politician
Professor
Writer
Melbourne
Australia
Peter Albert David Singer
Peter A. D. Singer
Animals
Beings
Animal
Social
Human
Humans

More quotes by Peter Singer

Image
Nineteen thousand children [are] dying every day. Does it really matter that we're not walking past them in the street? Does it really matter that they're far away? I don't think it does make a morally relevant difference.
Peter Singer
Image
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
Image
Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.
Peter Singer
Image
Sometimes we know the best thing to do, but fail to do it. New year's resolutions are often like that. We make resolutions because we know it would be better for us to lose weight, or get fit, or spend more time with our children. The problem is that a resolution is generally easier to break than it is to keep.
Peter Singer
Image
Today, if you have an Internet connection, you have at your fingertips an amount of information previously available only to those with access to the world's greatest libraries - indeed, in most respects what is available through the Internet dwarfs those libraries, and it is incomparably easier to find what you need.
Peter Singer
Image
According to classical utilitarianism, the only intrinsic good is happiness the only intrinsic bad is pain. That implies no intrinsic value in preserving nature, that preserving an endangered plant is valuable only if it benefits humans or other animals. Intuitively, that seems wrong but perhaps I shouldn't trust my intuition here.
Peter Singer
Image
Knowing that we can control our own behaviour makes it more likely that we will.
Peter Singer
Image
It is a mistake to assume that the law should always enforce morality.
Peter Singer
Image
We should give the same respect to the lives of animals as we do to the lives of humans.
Peter Singer
Image
I suppose what's happened recently has confirmed suspicions I voiced in the book, and I think made clearer some of those things that I point out. For instance I have a section of the book where I talk about the possibility of torture.
Peter Singer
Image
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
Image
We don't usually think of what we eat as a matter of ethics. Stealing, lying, hurting people - these acts are obviously relevant to our moral character. In ancient Greece and Rome, ethical choices about food were considered at least as significant as ethical choices about sex.
Peter Singer
Image
Of those who die from avoidable, poverty-related causes, nearly 10 million, according to UNICEF, are children under five. They die from diseases such as measles, diarrhoea, and malaria that are easy and inexpensive to treat or prevent.
Peter Singer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Business ethics has always had problems that are distinct from those of other professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, dentistry, or nursing.
Peter Singer
Image
Had Rumsfeld said at any time 'get me a report on what's going on', he could have had it. You're right, it depends on choices that we make, which parts of the world we want to be in immediate contact with.
Peter Singer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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