Quotes About Morality

If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?

Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.

But I do not do these things because we are family. I do them because they are common decencies. That is an idiom that the hero taught me. I do them because I am not a big fucking asshole. That is another idiom that the hero taught me.

It's much easier to be cruel than one might think.

This isn't animal experimentation, where you an imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our sense, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sense? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person has as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?

You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.

Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do… I am not a hero, it is true… But I am not a bad person, either.

I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.

Everyone performs bad actions... A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.

I am not a bad person. I am a good person who has lived in a bad time. Alex's grandfather..Everything is Illuminated

Whether we're talking about fish species, pigs, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that's not the question. Is it more important that sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That's the question.

However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sense of the word. And we know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless--it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.

I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.

Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don't care if we're lying. I am a bad person. I don't care. I don't care what you are.

Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can't hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection. So why don't they get to curl up by the fire? Why can't they at least be spared being tossed on the fire?

You have to do something bad to do something good.

Everyone performs bad actions. I do. Father does. Even you do. A bad person is someone who does not lament his bad actions.

When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it's corrupting. I'm not speculating. This is our reality. Look at what factory farming is. Look at what we as a society have done to animals as soon as we had the technological power. Look at what we actually do in the name of "animal welfare" and "humaneness," then decide if you still believe in eating meat.

The end of suffering does not justify the suffering

Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.

The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end, and I didn't know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me. He saved your life. I didn't eat it. You didn't eat it? It was pork. I wouldn't eat pork. Why? What do you mean why? What, because it wasn't kosher? Of course. But not even to save your life? If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.

Being reliable is something. Being good.

In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle.