EA-relatable quotes

“[W]hen I reflect, I see that I am an inconsistent mess of a brain born of a long and blind evolutionary process, full of desires and feelings and fears that capture everything I hold dear, and also a bunch of arbitrary junk that was kind of tacked on there. In making me, Time coughed up a reflectively unstable mind: the causal process of my past constructed me to value everything I value, and something that I (upon reflection) don’t.”

— Nate Soares on overcoming default settings and caring about all humans or sentient beings, Caring about something larger than yourself
“The most common misconception about morality: That it’s a human invention.”

— Paul Bloom
“Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family – that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.”

— Paul Bloom, The Baby in the Well (The New Yorker, May 20, 2013)
“[I]t is impossible to empathize with seven billion strangers, or to feel toward someone you’ve never met the degree of concern you feel for a child, a friend, or a lover. Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family – that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.”

— Paul Bloom, The Baby in the Well (The New Yorker, May 20, 2013)
“[W]e can make a surprisingly large life-changing difference to those in disadvantaged parts of the world – provided that our altruistic impulses are intelligently channelled.”

— Sir Martin Rees, Doing Good Better by William MacAskill (source)
“*To live a life which you got by [by saying] “Well, I didn’t do any harm.”, is not terribly satisfactory.”

— Richard Hamming, You and Your Research (June 6, 1995)
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”
— Bertrand Russell
“My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.”

— Bertrand Russell, Childhood Diary (1985)
“Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”

— Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Chapter V (1792)
“[T]he fact that I consider charity to be above and beyond the call of duty does not mean that I am unwilling to give. I go above and beyond the call of duty every day. I aspire to moral excellence. Millions of people around the world suffer through no fault of their own. I have plenty of resources to help them, so I am glad to help. As an economist, of course, I don’t just want to express good intentions; I want my donation to do as much good as possible.”

— Bryan Caplan, A Supererogatory Provision
“This firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, which is already a powerful principle in human nature, and happily one of those which tend to become stronger, even without express inculcation, from the influences of advancing civilisation.”

— John Stuart Mill
“I feel spiritually satisfied knowing I’m doing a decent job at helping to relieve suffering in the world (in expectation). This is the most important goal in life, to which everything else has value only instrumentally. Even love – as magical as it is – can’t compare in intensity to the horrors of extreme suffering that we need to work against. [L]ove is a gift that life gives us as we pursue our real purpose in this world: reducing and preventing agony by the least fortunate sentient beings.”

— Brian Tomasik, Personal Thoughts on Romance: Universal Love
“We’re both highly motivated by the desire to make the world a better place. We find it exciting and energizing – and intellectually interesting – to be in a position where we’re trying to do as much good as possible.”

— Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky
“Trying to maximize the good I accomplish with both my hours and my dollars is an intellectually engaging challenge. It makes my life feel more meaningful and more important. It’s a way of trying to have an impact and significance beyond my daily experience.”

— Holden Karnofsky, Excited Altruism (2013)
“I guess basically no one wants to feel that one’s life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage. One likes to look back and think that one’s done the best one can to make this a better place for others… It’s not a sense of duty, but rather this is what I want to do. I feel best when I’m doing it well.”

— Henry Spira
“All this fancy ethics and decision science stuff is actually about the unexpected possibility of all of us to become superheroes. Think about it, who would have thought that it’s within the power of all of us to actually save hundreds or even thousands of lives just by making better, more rational everyday decisions?”

— Adriano Mannino, Our daily life and death decisions (TEDxGundeldingen, 2014)
“A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create: the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope informed and fortified by thought.”

— Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism (1918), p. 111
“Overcoming poverty is an act of justice… poverty is not natural. It can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. You can be that great generation.”

— Nelson Mandela
“Until this century, most of mankind lived in small communities. What each did could affect only a few others. But conditions have now changed. Each of us can now, in countless ways, affect countless other people. We can have real though small effects on thousands or millions of people. When these effects are widely dispersed, they may be either trivial, or imperceptible. It now makes a great difference whether we continue to believe that we cannot have greatly harmed or benefited others unless there are people with obvious grounds for resentment or gratitude.”

— Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 86
“[J]ust realize that by dint of sheer good luck you get to do tremendous good in this world whenever you want. Today you could rescue a child from a burning building. You really can. This isn’t merely a metaphor. You can save a life today or over the course of the next year. A life that would otherwise not be saved, but for your action.”

— Sam Harris, Being Good and Doing Good: A Conversation with William MacAskill (Waking Up with Sam Harris, August 29, 2016)
“[W]e live at a time in which we have the technology easily to gather information about people thousands of miles away, the ability to significantly influence their lives, and the scientific knowledge to work out what the most effective ways of helping are. For these reasons, few people who have ever existed have had so much power to help others as we have today.”

— William MacAskill
“People are given the information resources to realize that a lot of us are metaphorically in that position that the Rockefeller Foundation was in a while ago. [T]oday there’s a lot of people that may be considered by others just normal middle class people. [W]hen you start comparing your life situation and living standards to the past or to the rest of the world, you realize that you actually have a huge amount of resources, power and information, [that] there’s people who have much less of these things, and that you can find them, you can understand things about them and you can find ways of how to help them – that’s all within your power. The combination of wealth, inequality and interconnectedness is increasing, so I believe we’ll see a world where more people will come up with this realization: “Wow, I’m really fortunate, I’m really powerful and I’m informed enough to do something with that power and make a positive difference.””

— Holden Karnofsky, Effective Altruism Summit 2013 speech
“Write about the things that truly inspire you, and do it for the benefit of others – to reduce their suffering and to increase their happiness. That’s my advice. If you do that you will achieve real ‘success’, real passion, enthusiasm and fulfilment, with or without money and status.”

— David Edwards, Outside the Machine: How to be an Ethical Writer
“The secret to happiness: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.”

— Daniel Dennett
“If you light a lamp for someone else, it will brighten your path.”

— Gautama Buddha (566-480 BC)
“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”

— Gautama Buddha (566-480 BC)
“May all that have life be delivered from suffering.”

— Gautama Buddha (566-480 BC)
“The universe is not indifferent. How do I know this? I know because I am part of the universe, and I am far from indifferent.”

— Scott Derrickson (h/t Preposterous Universe; fallacy of composition)
“”I have a dream,” said Harry’s voice, “that one day sentient beings will be judged by the patterns of their minds, and not their color or their shape or the stuff they’re made of, or who their parents were. Because if we can get along with crystal things someday, how silly would it be not to get along with Muggleborns, who are shaped like us, and think like us, as alike to us as peas in a pod? The crystal things wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference. How impossible is it to imagine that the hatred poisoning Slytherin House would be worth taking with us to the stars? Every life is precious, everything that thinks and knows itself and doesn’t want to die. Lily Potter’s life was precious, and Narcissa Malfoy’s life was precious, even though it’s too late for them now, it was sad when they died. But there are other lives that are still alive to be fought for. Your life, and my life, and Hermione Granger’s life, all the lives of Earth, and all the lives beyond, to be defended and protected, EXPECTO PATRONUM!

And there was light.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 47: Personhood Theory
“Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.”

— Timothy Snyder
“However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”

— Stanley Kubrick
“There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don’t care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don’t have to! WE care! There is light in the world, and it is us!”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
“Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.”

— Fred Rogers
“In a world full of people who couldn’t care less, be someone who couldn’t care more.”

— unknown
“We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naïve to work toward a better one.”

— Steven Pinker
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

— Anne Frank
Altruism, empathy and opportunities and audacity to give:

“I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything; but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”

— Edwin Osgood Grover, variation on a quote by Edward Everett Hale, The Book of Good Cheer (1909)
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

— Frederick Douglass, The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies (August 3, 1857)
“Aim at something great; aim at things which are difficult; and there is no great thing which is not difficult. Do not pare down your undertaking to what you can hope to see successful in the next few years, or in the years of your own life. Fear not the reproach of Quixotism and impracticability, or to be pointed at as the knight-errants of an idea. After you have well weighed what you undertake, if you see your way clearly, and are convinced that you are right, go forward, even though you [d]o it at the risk of being torn to pieces by the very men through whose changed hearts your purpose will one day be accomplished. Fight on with all your strength against whatever odds, and with however small a band of supporters. If you are right, the time will come when that small band will swell into a multitude: you will at least lay the foundations of something memorable, and you may [–] though you ought not to need or expect so great a reward – be spared to see that work completed which, when you began it, you only hoped it might be given to you to help forward a few stages on its way.”

— John Stuart Mill
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

— Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
“I haven’t lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

— Martin Luther King Jr, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (1967)
“[T]he arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

— Martin Luther King Jr, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (1967)
“The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

— William Gibson
“Be the change you want to see in the world.”

— commonly misattributed to Mahatma Gandhi
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

— Margaret Mead
Growing movements:
“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”

— George Bernard Shaw
“I know how it feels to think that pure motives and actions must somehow translate into good for the world. It’s a natural way for humans to think, and the pathology of it only really becomes clear when someone takes moral behavior very seriously, which is tragic because caring about morality is a good thing.

It’s a hard thing to learn, but we have to learn to see moral actions mechanistically the way we see less charged issues. We have to demand to know how an action will affect the good outcome we want, and we have to be open-minded about weighing the various harms and goods that the various available options entail. We have to see moral problems as problems to be solved instead of just evils to oppose. This is why the Effective Altruism movement is so important to me.”

— Holly Elmore, We have to think mechanistically about morality
“The implication is that goodness can only come from selfless feelings, that goodness itself is nothing more than externalized character traits. Many, many people hold this view. I grew up getting this message indirectly in church and school. It’s a common objection to effective altruism: we’re “cold and calculating,” we aren’t “giving from the heart.” And it makes me crazy, because I think viewing good acts merely as evidence of character is unbelievably narcissistic. This is what makes giving about the giver and not the receiver.”

— Holly Elmore, More on narcissism (July 30, 2016)
“Most criticism of effective altruism is character assassination. We lack empathy, we’re cold and calculating, we have no sense of personal virtue and see people as data points rather than as human beings. It’s much less often that I hear our critics say that we’re doing a poor job of improving or saving people’s lives.

Essentially, the more good we do, the worse we are as human beings. At some point, I’m tired of trying to convince these critics that they’re mistaken about us.

I simply want to respond, ‘Fine, keep looking down on us from your moral high ground. I’d rather be a bad person who does a tremendous amount of good than a good person who hasn’t given a single thought to the magnitude of his life’s impact on others.’”

— Dillon Bowen
“One may think that I have harped excessively on the fact that the philosophical critics of effective altruism tend to express their objections in a mocking and disdainful manner. But this seems significant to me, as it is suggestive of bad faith. The issues that the effective altruists are addressing are of the utmost seriousness. They should not be occasions for the scoring of debating points or for displays of cleverness, rhetorical prowess, or moral exhibitionism (as when critics, while presenting their objections, pause to reveal parenthetically how much they have donated to charity despite their theoretical misgivings).”

— Jeff McMahan, Philosophical Critiques of Effective Altruism
“The primary goal of most of those who identify themselves as effective altruists is the prevention or alleviation of suffering and premature death resulting from poverty and disease in the areas of the world in which these problems are worst, or affect the greatest number of people. To the best of my knowledge, none of the philosophical critics of effective altruism reject this goal. It is therefore dispiriting to read their criticisms, which often ridicule people who are devoting their lives, often at considerable personal sacrifice, to the achievement of this shared goal, and are often gleeful rather than constructive in their attempts to expose the effective altruists’ mistakes in their choices among means.”

— Jeff McMahan, Philosophical Critiques of Effective Altruism
“Working on issues that affect us, that our friends work on, or that captivate our attention form good starting points for realizing the importance of working to create social change. It is to effective activism what recycling is to an environmentally sustainable lifestyle: it’s the place that pretty much everyone starts out at. But it shouldn’t be an end- point. Once we’ve developed the spirit of social concern, once we’ve seen the value in working to create a better world, we need to move forward in becoming more thoughtful about how we spend the limited amount of time and energy we have. We need to begin choosing our activist work from a utilitarian perspective: How can I do the most good? How can I reduce the most suffering and destruction of life? Slogans like “practice random acts of kindness” feel good and are easy to put into practice. But if we don’t take our activism more seriously than that, our motive is probably a desire to feel good about ourselves, to help ourselves or those close to us, or to act out our self-identity. The endpoint of authentic compassion is a desire to do the most good that one can, to be as effective as possible in creating a world with less suffering and destruction and more joy. Figuring out how we can do the most good takes careful thought over a long period of time, and it means moving into new and possibly uncomfortable areas of advocacy. But the importance of taking our activism seriously and approaching it from this utilitarian perspective cannot be overstated. It will mean a difference between life and death, between happiness and suffering, for thousands of people, for thousands of acres of the ecosystem, and for tens of thousands of animals.”

— Nick Cooney, Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us about Creating Social Change (2011), pp. 22-23
“The Roman historian Sallust said of Cato “He preferred to be good, rather than to seem so”. The lawyer who quits a high-powered law firm to work at a nonprofit organization certainly seems like a good person. But if we define “good” as helping people, then the lawyer who stays at his law firm but donates the profit to charity is taking Cato’s path of maximizing how much good he does, rather than how good he looks.”

— Scott Alexander, Efficient charity: do unto others…
“One need not be a consequentialist to find something odd in a Kantian’s proposal to donate $100 to a famine relief organization she happens to know is especially inefficient when there is a more efficient organization that will save more people standing by.”

— Dan Moller, Should We Let People Starve: For Now? (2006), p. 244
“Any intelligent person will ask themselves a simple question: should I pay up to 80p more for my bananas when only 5p will end up with the grower; or should I just buy the regular ones and give the difference to a decent development charity?”

— Philip Oppenheim, Fairtrade Fat Cats (The Spectator, November 5, 2005), pp. 17-18
“Charity is a way to relieve guilt, a way to advertise one’s willingness and ability to make sacrifices, and a way to make other people better off. For those of us who want to maximize the last of these when we give, GiveWell is a godsend.”

— Steven Pinker on GiveWell
“We should reward the charities that we believe do the most good, not those that have the best marketing strategy, otherwise the most successful charities will be those that are best at soliciting funds, not those that are best at making the world a better place.”

— William MacAskill, This week, let’s dump a few ice buckets to wipe out malaria too (Quartz, August 18, 2014)
“For most people, the goal of any altruistic act is simply to do something helpful. Very few of us choose where to donate, where to volunteer, and how to live our lives based on the answer to the question, “How can I do the most possible good in the world?” And yet it is that calculating attitude that is crucial to helping as many animals (or people) as possible.”

— Nick Cooney, Veganomics: The Surprising Science on What Motivates Vegetarians, from the Breakfast Table to the Bedroom (2014)
“While the ideas of effective altruism may seem calculating and abstract, we should never forget that the suffering of millions of sentient beings is real. In order to alleviate as much suffering as possible, it is crucial that we combine our empathy with rational thinking.”

— Sentience Politics, The Benefits of Cause-Neutrality
“There is a tremendous amount of suffering in the world. Unfortunately, our resources are limited. Time and money spent on one project is time and money that is missing elsewhere. If all lives count for the same, then it follows directly that numbers and cost-effectiveness matter. It pays to invest time and money into figuring out where resources can do the most.”

— Lukas Gloor, Rationality: The science of winning, Part III (Raising for Effective Giving)
“[O]ur moral obligation is not to live out a set of values that we like to see — it’s to improve life for others as much as we possibly can. This is what Effective Altruism has to offer — a rigorous, tough minded approach to doing good that isn’t content with aspiration.”

— Scott T. Weathers, Effective Altruism: The Biggest Impact We Can Make (Medium, December 22, 2015)
“At once pious and rational, comforting and selfless, effective altruism promises a life free from all the hokeyness involved in the business of finding ourselves and our deepest impulses. It promises to shield our do-gooding from the temptations of faddish causes and poignant advertising. It promises an unsoppy, no-bullshit morality. The fact that it seems to require an astonishing degree of self-abnegation, foresight and mathematical ability does not faze the effective altruist any more than it did the Victorian utilitarian. On the contrary, it poses just the sort of technical challenge likely to galvanize a movement spearheaded by graduates in philosophy, math and computer science, who are already disposed to want to do only what they ought, rationally, to do.”

— Nakul Krishna, Add Your Own Egg (The Point Mag, 2016)
“[The effective altruism philosophy is] sort of a set of ideas including consequentialist framework for maximizing well being, a focus on individual decision making, sophisticated decision theory, interdisciplinary open-mindedness, belief in scientific analysis and a realist worldview. That’s how I see it, not an official definition.”

— Kyle Bogosian
“[Effective altruism is] the application of cost-effectiveness to charity and other altruistic pursuits. Just as some engineering approaches can be thousands of times more effective at solving problems than others, some charities are thousands of time more effective than others, and some altruistic career paths are thousands of times more effective than others. And increased efficiency translates into many more lives saved, many more people given better outcomes and opportunities throughout the world. It is argued that when charity can be made more effective in this way, it is a moral duty to do so: inefficiency is akin to letting people die.”

— Stuart Armstrong (Gizmodo, March 29, 2016)
“Effective altruism is a growing social and intellectual movement at the intersection of academia and the public domain. It seeks to use insights from philosophy, economics, and related disciplines to identify the best means to improve the world. The ethical considerations that serve as a foundation for effective altruists typically involve a sensitivity to the different kinds of impacts our decisions about giving and spending can have, reflection on the values we place on helping others and spending on ourselves, and willingness to worry about the impacts of different kinds of career choices.”

— William MacAskill, Jeff Johnson, Essays in Philosophy: Effective Altruism (Volume 18, Number 1, January 2017)
“Effective altruists are here to help change the world for the better! And we’re open to whatever lets us do that most effectively, be it hard evidence or new ways of thinking.”

— Effective Altruism Wikia
“Effective altruism is using evidence and analysis to take actions that help others as much as possible.”

— various authors, What is Effective Altruism? The Effective Altruism FAQ
“Effective altruism is all about combining empathy, reason and evidence. By carefully considering what we value, and by working together to find the best ways of achieving that, we can each do an amazing amount of good.”

— EA UNSW
“Effective Altruism is what I call the part of my life where I take the demandingness of ethics seriously.”

— Haseeb Qureshi‘s variation on Ryan Carey paraphrasing Daniel Dewey
“[W]e are aiming to help people be more clear-thinking, long-term oriented, empathetic, and utilitarian. This not only increases their own flourishing, but also expands their circles of caring beyond biases based on geographical location (drowning child problem), species (non-human animals), and temporal distance (existential risk).”

— Gleb Tsipursky, Intentional Insights and the EA Movement – Q & A (Effective Altruism Forum, January 2, 2016)
“The mathematical challenge of finding the greatest good can expand the heart. Empathy opens the mind to suffering, and math keeps it open.”

— Derek Thompson, The Greatest Good (The Atlantic, June 15, 2015)
“We live in a complex age where many of the problems we face can, whatever their origins, only have solutions that involve a deep understanding of science and technology. Modern society desperately needs the finest minds available to devise solutions to these problems.”

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), p. 350
“Humanity faces some big challenges in the 21st century, and I’m glad the effective altruism movement exists to tackle them.”

— Eric Drexler, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill (source)
“Effective altruism drives a stake through common but ill-conceived notions about what ‘doing good’ means, and offers a real alternative in its place. The importance of this movement cannot be underestimated: it’s going to be huge.”

— Aubrey de Grey, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill (source)
“Humanity currently spends more money on cigarette ads than on making sure that we as a species survive this century. We’ve got our priorities all wrong, and we need effective altruism to right them.”

— Jaan Tallinn, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill (source)
“You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky
“The moral unity to be expected in different ages is not a unity of standard, or of acts, but a unity of tendency… At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world.”

— W.E.H. Lecky, The History of European Morals (1869)
“Summoned or not, the god will come.”

— Carl Jung
“How can we help nonhuman animals as much as possible? A good answer to this question could spare billions from suffering and death, while a bad one could condemn as many to that fate. So it’s worth taking our time to find good answers.”

— Magnus Vinding (2016), Animal advocates should focus on antispeciesism, not veganism
“A right to emigrate from a country without a correlative right to immigrate to a country is a facile right.”

— Kok-Chor Tan, Liberal Toleration in Rawls’s Law of Peoples (1998)
“Imagine what seven billion humans could accomplish if we all loved and respected each other.”

— Anthony Douglas Williams
“Fill the god-shaped hole in your soul with molten metal, then shatter your soul, leaving only a metal god.”

— Gap of Gods
“Malaria is not merely the greatest killer of children in the world, but also it is the greatest killer of pregnant women. The disease plunders motherhood from both sides of the equation. The loss of a mother must be quantifiable by some measure of creative accounting, but in my experience it is immeasurable.”

— Robert Mather, quoted on The Greatest Good (The Atlantic, June 15, 2015)
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.

— P. C. Hodgell, Seeker’s Mask (1994)
“Effective altruism is a growing social movement founded on the desire to make the world as good a place as it can be, the use of evidence and reason to find out how to do so, and the audacity to actually try.”

— Centre for Effective Altruism
“Saving the world is not something that you do with minimum effort or maximum elegance or any of the other things that make plans clever and intrinsically awesome. The plan to save the world has instrumental value based only on cost-effectiveness.”

— Daniel Powell
“Effective altruism is about asking “How can I make the biggest difference I can?” and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. It takes a scientific approach to doing good. Just as science consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what’s true, and a commitment to believe the truth whatever that turns out to be. As the phrase suggests, effective altruism consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what’s best for the world, and a commitment to do what’s best, whatever that turns out to be.”

— William MacAskill, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
“Effective altruism – efforts that actually help people rather than making you feel good or helping you show off – is one of the great new ideas of the twenty-first century.”

― Steven Pinker, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill (source)
“There is a growing movement called effective altruism. It’s important because it combines both the heart and the head.”

— Peter Singer, The why and how of effective altruism (TED Conference, 2013)