Daily Inspiration Quote by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Singer’s move here is to take a cozy, overused defense of meat-eating - “we’ve always done it” - and expose it as moral laziness masquerading as common sense. The quote works because it doesn’t argue about nutrition, tradition, or individual choice; it attacks the rhetorical structure people reach for when they want the comfort of inevitability. History, Singer suggests, is being smuggled in as permission.

The sharpness comes from the analogy: he yokes animal slaughter to human murder, not because he thinks they are socially identical acts, but because he wants to detonate the underlying claim that longevity equals legitimacy. It’s a novelist’s tactic: escalate the stakes so the reader can’t keep hiding behind “normal.” Once you accept “it’s ancient” as a moral shield, you’ve basically surrendered the idea of progress. Civilization becomes a museum of bad habits.

There’s subtext, too, about how moral circles expand. Singer, a Jewish writer marked by the violence of the 20th century, knew what it meant for cruelty to be normalized, bureaucratized, and defended as routine. His comparison presses on a disturbing continuity: the ability to convert a living being into an object, then call the process necessary.

Culturally, the line anticipates a modern argument against “nature” and “tradition” as ethical trump cards. Singer isn’t begging for sympathy; he’s demanding intellectual honesty. If we pride ourselves on outgrowing barbarism, we don’t get to cite barbarism as evidence we should keep it.