- Stories establish narratives, and stories establish rules.
- Facts are important, but they don't, on their own, provide meaning—especially when they are so bound to linguistic choices.
- We are made of choices.
- We are not only the tellers of our stories, we are the stories themselves.
- A simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focusing.
- 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?
- Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories.
- Shame is what we feel when we almost entirely — yet not entirely—forget social expectations and obligations to others in favor of our immediate gratification.
- What we forget about animals we begin to forget about ourselves.
- To do nothing is to do something.
- Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don't we do that? — and often there isn't a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn't true.
- We live in a world which it's conventional to treat an animal like a hunk of wood and extreme to treat an animal like an animal.
- Look at what we actually do in the name of "animal welfare" and "humaneness," then decide if you still believe in eating meat.
- It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.
sep 1 2013 ∞
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