Quotes

The principle of natural selection is not obviously a humanitarian principle; the predator-prey relation does not depend on moral empathy. Nature ruthlessly limits animal populations by doing violence to virtually every individual before it reaches maturity[.]

Mark Sagoff, Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, vol. 22, no. 2, 1984, pp. 297–307, p. 299

If there is one salient fact we have learned talking with thousands of people about farm animal welfare, it is this: people do not know much about the way farm animals are raised.

F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk, Compassion, by the pound: the economics of farm animal welfare, New York, 2011, p. 327

There are phonograph records purporting to contain “the wit and wisdom of Ronald Reagan” which, when played, are entirely silent. It might be suggested that a book on the Reagan administration’s foreign policy should similarly consist only of blank pages.

Jeff McMahan, Reagan and the world: imperial policy and the new cold war, New York, 1985, p. 9

Suffering, by its nature, is awful, and so one needs an excellent reason to cause it. Occasionally, one will have such a reason. Surgery may cause a human being severe postoperatory pain, but the surgeon may be right to operate if that’s the only way to save the patient.

And what if the sufferer is not a human, but an animal? This doesn’t matter. The underlying principle is that suffering is bad because of what it’s like for the sufferer. Whether the sufferer is a person or a pig or a chicken is irrelevant, just as it’s irrelevant whether the sufferer is white or black or brown. The question is merely how awful the suffering is to the individual.

Stuart Rachels, Vegetarianism, Oxford, 2012, pp. 883-884

If most urban meat-eaters were to visit an industrial broiler house, to see how the birds are raised, and could see the birds being ‘harvested’ and then being ‘processes’ in a poultry processing plant, some, perhaps many of them, would swear off eating chicken and perhaps all meat.

Peter R. Cheeke, Contemporary issues in animal agriculture, Upper Saddle River, N.J, 1990, p. 50

With machine intelligence and other technologies such as advanced nanotechnology, space colonization should become economical. Such technology would enable us to construct “von Neumann probes” – machines with the capability of traveling to a planet, building a manufacturing base there, and launching multiple new probes to colonize other stars and planets. A space colonization race could ensue. Over time, the resources of the entire accessible universe might be turned into some kind of infrastructure, perhaps an optimal computing substrate (“computronium”). Viewed from the outside, this process might take a very simple and predictable form – a sphere of technological structure, centered on its Earthly origin, expanding uniformly in all directions at some significant fraction of the speed of light. What happens on the “inside” of this structure – what kinds of lives and experiences (if any) it would sustain – would depend on initial conditions and the dynamics shaping its temporal evolution. It is conceivable, therefore, that the choices we make in this century could have extensive consequences.

Nick Bostrom, The future of humanity, in Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen, Stig Andur Pedersen, and Vincent F. Hendricks (eds.) A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, Malden, MA, 2009, pp. 551–557, pp. 555-556

[E]ven though there may be components of well-being that go beyond one’s experiences—and thus can plausibly be thought to come in imperceptible amounts—it seems undeniable that one important component of well-being is indeed the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain.

Shelly Kagan, Do I make a difference?, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 39, no. 2, 2011, pp. 105–141, p. 115

[I]t is when we turn to their treatment of the non-human races that we find the surest evidences of barbarism; yet their savagery, even here, is not wholly “naked and unashamed,” for, strange to say, these curious people delight to mask their rudeness in a cloak of fallacies and sophisms, and to represent themselves as “lovers” of those very creatures whom they habitually torture for “sport,” science,” and the “table.” They actually have a law for the prevention of cruelty to animals, under which certain privileged species, classed as “domestic,” are protected from some specified wrongs, though all the time they may, under certain conditions, be subjected with impunity to other and worse injuries at the hands of the slaughterman or the vivisector; while the wild species, though presumably not less sensitive to pain, are regarded as almost entirely outside the pale of protection, and as legitimate subjects for those brutalities of “fashion” and “sport” which are characteristic of the savage mind.

Henry S. Salt, Seventy years among savages, London, 1921, p. 12

Las mujeres no dan pena cuando lloran sino cuando empiezan a humedecérseles los ojos.

Enrique Cadícamo, El desconocido Juan Carlos Cobian, Buenos Aires, 1972, p. 114

With respect to immortality, nothing shows me how strong and almost instinctive a belief is, as the consideration of the view now held by most physicists, namely that the sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life, unless indeed some great body dashes into the sun and thus gives it fresh life.–Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.

Charles Darwin, The autobiography of Charles Darwin, Collins, 1958, p. 92

I went through twenty-one years of American schools and can’t recall anyone in all that time ever asking me how I felt.

Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent communication: A language of life, Encinitas, 2003, p. 37

To understand the mystery of French intellectuality, one must begin with the École Normale. Founded in 1794 to train secondary school teachers, it became the forcing house of the republican elite. Between 1850 and 1970, virtually every Frenchman of intellectual distinction (women were not admitted until recently) graduated from it: from Pasteur to Sartre, from Émile Durkheim to Georges Pompidou, from Charles Péguy to Jacques Derrida (who managed to flunk the exam not once but twice before getting in), from Léon Blum to Henri Bergson, Romain Rolland, Marc Bloch, Louis Althusser, Régis Debray, Michel Foucault, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and all eight French winners of the Fields Medal for mathematics.

When I arrived there in 1970, as a pensionnaire étranger, the École Normale still reigned supreme. […] The young men I met at the École seemed to me far less mature than my Cambridge contemporaries. Gaining admission to Cambridge was no easy matter, but it did not prelude the normal life of a busy youth. However, no one got into the École Normal without sacrificing his teenage years to that goal, and it showed. I was unfailingly astonished by the sheer volume of rote learning on which my French contemporaries could call, suggesting an impacted richness that was at times almost indigestible. Pâté de foi gras indeed.

But what these budding French intellectuals gained in culture, they often lacked in imagination. My first breakfast at the École was instructive in this regard. Seated opposite o group of unshaven, pajama-clad freshmen, I burdied myself in my coffee bowl. Suddenly an earnest young man resembling the young Trotsky leaned across and asked me (in French): “Where did you do khâgne?”—the high-intensity post-lycée preparatory classes. I explained that I had not done khâgne: I came from Cambridge. “Ah, so you did khâgne in England.” “No,” I tried again: “We don’t do /khâgne/—I came here directly from an English university.”

The young man looked at me with withering scorn. It is not possible, he explained, to enter the École Normale without first undergoing preparation in khâgne. Since you are here, you must have done khâgne. And with that conclusive Cartesian flourish he turned away, directing his conversation to worthier targets. This radical disjunction between the uninteresting evidence of your own eyes and ears and the incontrovertible conclusions to be derived from first principles introduced me to a cardinal axiom of French intellectual life.

Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet, London, 2010, pp. 114-116

One should keep one’s distance not only from the obviously unappealing “-isms”–fascism, jingoism, chauvinism–but also from the more seductive variety: communism, to be sure, but nationalism and Zionism too.

Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet, London, 2010, pp. 205-206

[T]he more interesting x is, the less interesting the philosophy of x tends to be, and conversely. (Art is interesting, but the philosophy of art is mostly boring; law is boring, the philosophy of law is pretty interesting.)

Jim Holt, Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, New York, 2008, pp. 67-68

Los desastrosos resultados obtenidos por un país gobernado durante ocho décadas por dos grupos políticos fuertemente nacionalistas deberían hacer sospechosa la idea primitiva de que, cuanto más nacionalista es un país, más prometedor es su futuro.

Fernando Iglesias, La cuestión Malvinas: crítica del nacionalismo argentino, Buenos Aires, 2012, p. 21

A meaningul relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.

Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, New York, 2011, p. 74

As an industry, it may not yet be as big as oil, but it is older, will last longer, and is vastly more profitable. To profit from oil you have to find it, transport it, refine it and sell it. To profit from psychic readings, you just talk to people and they give you money. And whereas the world will one day run out of oil, it will never run out of people wanting a psychic reading.

Ian Rowland, The full facts book of cold reading, 2019, p. 9

Aquella noche en Salón Canning, mientras el DJ insistía con Fresedo y no pasaba ni un tema de Pugliese, don Samuel, ochenta años cumplidos, no perdonaba un solo tango. Con su traje marrón y el inamovible, informe sombrero del mismo color, invitaba a cuanta rubia lo superase ampliamente en altura. En otra ocasión yo lo había invitado a una copa y, sin aludir a su escasa estatura, le pregunté por esa predilección; creo que observé algo así como que no les tenía miedo a las escandinavas. Me respondió con la sonrisa generosa de quien transmite su experiencia de la vida a la generación siguiente.

–Pibe, no hay nada como tener la cabeza empotrada entre un par de buenas tetas.

Edgardo Cozarinsky, Milongas, Buenos Aires, 2007, p. 16

What /must /be done, Sir, /will /be done.

Samuel Johnson, Life of Mr Richard Savage, London, 1744, p. 108

The opinion that a belief in immortality is logically indefensible gains strength, paradoxical as it may seem, from the very fact that most of the western world desire that the belief may be true.

J. Ellis McTaggart, Some considerations relating to human immortality, The international journal of ethics, vol. 13, no. 2, 1903, pp. 152–171, p. 170