Peter SingerWhat one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.
About This Quote
What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.” The adage comes from an ancient Roman saying about how people's views of society change over time. It was first attributed to Pliny the Elder, and later to Publius Syrus and Lactantius.
Some Similar Quotes
- The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
- Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We...
- The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.
- He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
- It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters,
More Quotes By Peter Singer
- Were we incapable of empathy — of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own — then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.
- In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150...
- What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.
- Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.
- 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...