3 Quotes & Sayings By David Livingstone Smith

David Livingstone Smith is a Canadian psychologist who has been a visiting professor at the University of British Columbia and the University of California, Berkeley. He is a research fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. He has written several books, including The World's Last Chance to Save Our Environment, and The Science of Good and Evil. In 2007 he founded Project Reason, an organization devoted to disseminating scientific information about the nature of morality.

1
Rather than looking for explanations for why all people deserve to be treated with compassion and respect, we ought to be working at creating a world in which people are treated with compassion and respect. Human rights aren’t lying around waiting to be discovered. They’re made, not found. David Livingstone Smith
2
Dehumanization isn’t a way of talking. It’s a way of thinking–a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable. David Livingstone Smith