Tom Regan Quotes

#1. It is not an act of kindness to treat animals respectfully. It is an act of justice.

Tom Regan

#2. If abandoning animal research means that there are some things we cannot learn, then so be it ... We have no basic right ... not to be harmed by those natural diseases we are heir to.

Tom Regan

#3. Even granting that we [humans] face greater harm than laboratory animals presently endure if ... research on these animals is stopped, the animal rights view will not be satisfied with anything less than total abolition.

Tom Regan

#4. In a perfect world, we would not keep animals for our benefit, including pets,

Tom Regan

#5. All great movements, it is written, go through three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption. It is the realisation of this third stage, adoption, that requires our passion and our discipline, our hearts and our heads. The fate of animals is in our hands.

Tom Regan

#6. If you were aboard a lifeboat with a baby and a dog, and the boat capsized, would you rescue the baby or the dog?" Regan, "If it were a retarded baby and a bright dog, I'd save the dog.

Tom Regan

#7. I would encourage them never to forget that they were not always vegans. The self-righteousness of the recently converted hurts, it does not help, other animals.

Tom Regan

#8. Being kind to animals is not enough. Avoiding cruelty is not enough. Housing animals in more comfortable, larger cages is not enough. Whether we exploit animals to eat, to wear, to entertain us, or to learn, the truth of animal rights requires empty cages, not larger cages.

Tom Regan

#9. How would we fare psychologically if the walls of slaughterhouses were made of glass?

Tom Regan

#10. What could be the basis of our having more inherent value than animals? Their lack of reason, or autonomy, or intellect? Only if we are willing to make the same judgment in the case of humans who are similarly deficient.

Tom Regan

#11. It is not larger, cleaner cages that justice demands ... but empty cages; not traditional animal agriculture but a complete end to all commerce in the flesh of dead animals; not more humane hunting and trapping, but the total eradication of these barbarous practices.

Tom Regan

#12. Because we have viewed other animals through the myopic lens of our self-importance, we have misperceived who and what they are. Because we have repeated our ignorance, one to the other, we have mistaken it for knowledge.

Tom Regan