A.C. Grayling > Quotes

“It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.”
― A.C. Grayling, The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century

“To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.”
― A.C. Grayling

“Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person's broad mind and narrow waist change places.”
― A.C. Grayling, The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century

“People should be left to believe what they like, so long as they harm no one else. Apart from normal expectations of politeness, it is not however clear why people should require their personal beliefs to be treated with special sensitivity by others, to the point that if others fail to tip-toe respectfully around them they will start throwing bombs.”
― A. C. Grayling

“If there is a deity of the kind imagined by votaries of the big mail-order religions such as Christianity and Islam, and if this deity is the creator of all things, then it is responsible for cancer, meningitis, millions of spontaneous abortions everyday, mass killings of people in floods and earthquakes-and too great mountain of other natural evils to list besides. It would also,as the putative designer of human nature, ultimately be responsible or the ubiquitous and unbeatable human propensities for hatred, malice, greed, and all other sources of the cruelty and murder people inflict on each other hourly.”
― A.C. Grayling

“Just as modern motorways have no room for ox-carts or wandering pedestrians, so modern society has little place for lives and ways that are too eccentric.”
― A.C. Grayling, The Meaning of Things

“...mastery of the emotions is fundamental to a virtuous life.”
― A.C. Grayling, Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life Without God

“Misuse of reason might yet return the world to pre-technological night; plenty of religious zealots hunger for just such a result, and are happy to use the latest technology to effect it.”
― A.C. Grayling, The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century

“Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history.”
― A.C. Grayling

“The media no longer hesitate to whip up lurid anxieties in order to increase sales, in the process undermining social confidence and multiplying fears.”
― A.C. Grayling, Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life Without God

“Behave in life as at a dinner party. Is anything brought around to you? Put out your hand and take your share with moderation. Does it pass by you?
Do not stop it. Is it not yet come? Do not stretch your desire towards it, but wait till it reaches you. Do this with regard to children, to a spouse, to public post, to riches, and you will eventually be a worthy guest at the feast of life.”
― A.C. Grayling

“. . .the most important philosophical question we can each ask ourselves is, ‘Do I or do I not wish to commit suicide?’ If we say, ‘No I do not,’ as most of us would, it is because we have reasons for living, or at the very least real hope that we can find such reasons. Then the next question is: what are the reasons I personally have for saying ‘No’ to that question? The answer contains the meaning of my life.”
― A.C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism

“A fault denied is twice committed.”
― A.C. Grayling

“The wise say that our failure is to form habits: for habit is the mark of a stereotyped world,”
― A.C. Grayling, The Good Book: A Humanist Bible

“If the world is to have a future, it lies in the hands of women. At time of this writing nearly half of all women in the Middle East are illiterate; millions in poor countries are shackled to the most basic daily urgencies of finding water and feeding children; the majority of the world's women exist in various forms of bondage to necessity, to poverty, and to men. (2007)”
― A.C. Grayling, Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggles for Freedom and Rights That Made the Modern Western World

“Dripping water wears the stone which could not be hammered.”
― A.C. Grayling, The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life

“Eagleton has spent his life inside two mental boxes, Catholicism and Marxism, of both of which he is a severe internal critic—that is, he frequently kicks and scratches at the inside of the boxes, but does not leave them. Neither are ideologies that loosen their grip easily, and people who need the security of adherence to a big dominating ideology, however much they kick and scratch but without daring to leave go, hold on to it every bit as tightly as it holds onto them. The result is of course strangulation, but alas not mutual strangulation: the ideology always wins.”
― A.C. Grayling

“A mature society is one that reserves its moral outrage for what really matters: poverty and preventable diseases in the third world, arms sales, oppression, injustice. Bad language and sex might offend some, who certainly have a right to complain; but they do not have a right to censor. They do not have to watch or listen if they are offended: they have an 'off' button on their television sets and radios. After all, it is morally outrageous that moral outrage should be used as an excuse to perpetrate the outrage of censorship on others.”
― A.C. Grayling, The Form of Things: Essays on Life, Ideas and Liberty in the 21st Century

“Those who think that modern times are wickeder than previous times are apt to identify the cause as the weakening of a sense of moral law, associated with the departure of religious traditions of morality as a social influence... Such views give comfort to apologists for religion, who fasten on the implication that to revive a culture of moral concern people must be encouraged back into churches. But this reprises the usual muddle that getting people to accept as true... such propositions as that at a certain historical point a virgin gave birth, that the laws of nature were arbitrarily suspended so that, for example, water turned into wine, that several corpses came to life (and so forth), will somehow give them a logical reason for living morally (according to the attached view of what is moral - e.g. not marrying if you can help it, not divorcing if you do, and so forth again). It is scarcely needful to repeat that the morality and the metaphysics here separately at stake do not justify or even need one another, and that the moral questions require to be grounded and justified on their own merits in application to what they concern, namely, the life of human beings in the social setting.”
― A.C. Grayling, What is Good?

“For we live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; and our time should be counted in the throbs of our hearts as we love and help, learn and strive, and make from our own talents whatever can increase the stock of the world’s good.”
― A.C. Grayling, The Good Book: A Secular Bible

“It is always a mistake to underestimate how long it takes for mankind to understand the traumas it has suffered, especially the self-inflicted ones.”
― A.C. Grayling, The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life

“If there is anything worth fearing in the world, it is living in such a way that gives one cause for regret in the end.”
― A. C. Grayling

“1. Those who first set themselves to discover nature’s secrets and designs, fearlessly opposing mankind’s early ignorance, deserve our praise;   2. For they began the quest to measure what once was unmeasurable, to discern its laws, and conquer time itself by understanding.   3. New eyes were needed to see what lay hidden in ignorance, new language to express the unknown,   4. New hope that the world would reveal itself to inquiry and investigation.   5. They sought to unfold the world’s primordial sources, asking how nature yields its abundance and fosters it,   6. And where in its course everything goes when it ends, either to change or cease.   7. The first inquirers named nature’s elements atoms, matter, seeds, primal bodies, and understood that they are coeval with the world;   8. They saw that nothing comes from nothing, so that discovering the elements reveals how the things of nature exist and evolve.   9. Fear holds dominion over people when they understand little, and need simple stories and legends to comfort and explain; 10. But legends and the ignorance that give them birth are a house of limitations and darkness. 11. Knowledge is freedom, freedom from ignorance and its offspring fear; knowledge is light and liberation, 12. Knowledge that the world contains itself, and its origins, and the mind of man, 13. From which comes more know­ledge, and hope of knowledge again. 14. Dare to know: that is the motto of enlightenment.  ”
― Anthony C. Grayling, The Good Book: A Secular Bible

“there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?”
― A.C. Grayling, The Art of Always Being Right: The 38 Subtle Ways of Persuation

“Perhaps worse still is what liberal societies might do to themselves in the face of this new and different threat [of terrorism]. They begin, by small but dangerous increments, to cease to be as liberal as they once were. They begin to restrict their own hard-won rights and freedoms as a protection against the crminial minority who attempt (and as we thus see, by forcing liberty to commit suidcide, succed in doing) to terrorise society.”
― A.C. Grayling, Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggles for Freedom and Rights That Made the Modern Western World

“Just as modern motorways have no room for ox-carts or wandering pedestrians, so modern society has little place for lives and ways that are too eccentric”
― A.C. Grayling, The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life

“I once had a published written debate with a religious apologist who, after I had argued the standard line that the idea of a loving and merciful deity is inconsistent with the fact of natural evil, said this meant his god was not all-powerful, and therefore was not to blame because it could not stop natural evil from occuring. This is a different tack from the more robust one that says natural evil is a response to humanity's moral evil. What this latter view in effect argues is that because of (say) Hitler's wrongdoings, thousands of babies deserve to be drowned in tsunamis.”
― A.C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism

“Whereas the consolations of religion are mainly personal, the burdens are social and political as well as personal.”
― A.C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism

“That is one of the reasons why religion has survived into the modern world: it tells people what to think and do, gratifying their reluctance to make the effort, or to take the risk, of achieving self-understanding and on that basis choosing a course that would be a fulfilling expression of their individual talents for living well. In wanting a quick answer to ‘what should I do, how should I live?’ people grab a one-size-fits-all model from a shelf in the ideas supermarket, and leave it at that.”
― Anthony C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism

“Look at the blogosphere - the biggest lavatory wall in the universe, a palimpsest of graffiti and execration.”
― A.C. Grayling, Ideas That Matter a Personal Guide for the 21st Century