We need to recognise that what really matters isn't buying more and more consumer goods, but family, friends, and knowing that we are doing something worthwhile with our lives. Helping to reduce the appalling consequences of world poverty should be part of that reassessment.

If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?

There is an obvious evolutionary explanation for the scarcity of altruistic saints: Without a strong predilection for their own interests, our ancestors would have been unlikely to survive, reproduce, and give their own offspring a chance of doing the same. Now conditions have changed and for most of us, surviving and reproducing isn't such a struggle but we still carry the genes of our ancestors and they influence - not determine, but influence - our behavior.

The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world.

It is a mistake to assume that the law should always enforce morality.

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada, while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apertheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.

If they [animals] were really to get the equal consideration that I believe they should, we wouldn't have commercial animal production in this country.