Any celebration meal to which guests are invited, be they family or friends, should be an occasion for generous hospitality.

The simplest and clearest motivation for taking animal welfare seriously is the recognition that pain is in and of itself a bad thing, and that to inflict significant amounts of it unnecessarily is wrong.

Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren't that bad and are bound to get better anyway.

Untested assumptions and lazy habits of thought can be shown up, once put in a spotlight of a different hue.

I don't think there is ever a direct connection between the philosophical community and the wider populus. I'm very aware of this because I've been working on a book on ideas in global philosophy and you always find some kind of relation between the dominant philosophies in a culture and the folk philosophy but it's not a straight-down dissemination. It's partly bottom-up. Thinkers are the products of the cultures they grew-up in. They aspire to thinking purely objectively and universally, but they are often reflecting ways of thought that are embedded in a culture.

Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality.

Love is indeed at root the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones.