Peter Singer Quotes

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.

We're trying to create a better world, not a perfect one. It cannot ever be perfect.

We have to show people we are willing to adapt to their world.

Interactions - whether personal or business, teacher-student, friend to friend, or family member - all call for balance, respect, and compassion.

I really want as many people as possible to relate to something, without compromising or dumbing down.

You have to live with the necessities of other people.

If you have to change some laws, get that done. If it's getting schools, the next generation, to understand love and understanding, let's get that done.

I hope that I can find the common thread that connects us all and say: We can build a better Canada together.

When you're devoted to a greater freedom in the world, you're willing to compromise something you love.

We do not find happiness by being assertive. We don't find happiness by running over people because we see what we want and they are in the way of that happiness so we either abandon them or we smash them. The Scriptures don't teach us to be assertive. The Scriptures teach us — and this is remarkable — the Scriptures teach us to be submissive. This is not a popular idea.

That has been my entire life story. Running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. The acceptance of certain realities doesn’t preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs.

I love all men and women. I am a lover of humanity, not a hater. … I have been immoral, drunk, high. I ran with the wicked people for 28 years and I have run with the Jesus people since and the contrast is astounding.

The condition of truth, is to allow suffering to speak. Which means attend to suffering of the least of these, of the orphan, the widow, the poor, the working people, the gay brother, the lesbian sister, the transgender, the black people.

A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

Instead of harboring fear and suspicion we need to think of other people not as ‘them’ but ‘us’.

When people cared about each other, they always found a way to make it work.

We’re long on high principles and short on simple human understanding.

There's no emotion more revolutionary than empathy.

We have to start thinking of America as a family. We have to stop screeching screeching at each other, stop hurting each other, and instead start caring for, sacrificing for and sharing with each other ... We cannot move forward if cynics and critics swoop down and pick apart anything that goes wrong, to a point where we lose sight of what is right, decent and uniquely good about America.

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.

Women will always put persons above ideas ... and so they'll always be defeated. Persons die, and ideas rule the world.

Ultimately, being open and respectful towards each other is much more powerful as a way to diffuse hatred and anger than, you know, layering on, you know, big walls and oppressive policies.

Experience having long taught me the reasonableness of mutual sacrifices of opinion among those who are to act together for any common object, and the expediency of doing what good we can; when we cannot do all we would wish.