It is an indication of the extent to which people are now isolated from the animals they eat that children brought up on storybooks that lead them to think of a farm as a place where animals wander around freely in idyllic conditions might be able to live out their entire lives without ever being forced to revise this rosy image.

Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system which controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and equal society is a more difficult task than Marx realized.

I do not believe that it could never be justifiable to experiment on a brain-damaged human.

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

My major concern about leaving enhancement to the marketplace is that then the rich will be able to buy themselves genetically superior children and the poor will not - sharpening the class divisions we have now. That problem could be overcome if, genetic enhancement were available to all, subsidized by the state - and that would, over time, have benefits for society as well.

For most humans, especially for those in modern urban and suburban communities, the most direct form of contact with nonhuman animals is at meal time: we eat them.... The use and abuse of animals raised for food far exceeds, in sheer numbers of animals affected, any other kind of mistreatment.

In some parts of the world, what you are doing is already apparent.According to the World Health Organization, the warming of the planet caused an additional 140,000 deaths in 2004, as compared with the number of deaths there would have been had average global temperatures remained as they were during the period 1961 to 1990. This means that climate change is already causing, every week, as many deaths as occured in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.