Kenan Malik > Quotes

“As universities have turned into businesses, so students have turned into consumers.”
― Kenan Malik

“Jesus reveals salvation, as the Marxist critic and occasional atheist Terry Eagleton observes, to be a matter not ‘of cult, law and ritual’, but of ‘feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants, visiting the sick, and protecting the poor, orphaned and widowed from the violence of the rich’.”
― Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

“Even the most minor inconvenience, Chrysippus suggested, had been carefully designed by God for our benefit.”
― Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

“Perhaps the most important Stoic legacy to the history of moral thought was the concept of universal humanity. In his famous Elements of Ethics, the second-century Stoic philosopher Hierocles imagines every individual as standing at the centre of a series of concentric circles. The first circle is the individual, next comes the immediate family, followed by the extended family, the local community, the country, and finally the entire human race. To be virtuous, Hierocles suggested, is to draw these circles together, constantly to transfer people from the outer circles to the inner circles, to treat strangers as cousins and cousins as brothers and sisters, making all human beings part of our concern. The Stoics called this process of drawing the circles together oikeiosis, a word that is almost untranslatable but means something like the process by which everything is made into your home.”
― Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

“This, for Homer, is the tragedy of being human: to desire freedom, and be tortured by a sense of autonomy, and yet be imprisoned by forces beyond our control.”
― Kenan Malik

“There is more to the human mind than its evolutionary heritage.”
― Kenan Malik

“Even the most minor inconvenience, Chrysippus suggested, had been carefully designed by God for our benefit. God had created bedbugs to ‘awaken us out of our sleep’ and mice to encourage humans to be tidy.”
― Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

“Most people, he suggested, are not capable of exercising reason. God created scripture for the unreasoning masses. He intended the Qur’an to be read in one of two ways. The learned, the falsafah, read it allegorically. ‘Anyone who is not a man of learning’, however, ‘is obliged to take these passages in their apparent meaning.’ ‘Allegorical interpretation’ of the Qur’an is, for the masses, Ibn Rushd suggested, the same as ‘unbelief because it leads to unbelief’.”
― Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

“Moral questions may not have objective answers—whether revealed by God or by science—but they do have rational ones, answers rooted in a rationality that emerges out of social need. That rationality can only be discovered through exercising the human potential for rational dialogue, the potential for thinking about the world, and for discussing, debating and persuading others. Values can never be entirely wrenched apart from facts; but neither can they be collapsed into facts. It is the existence of humans as moral agents that allows us to act as the bridge between facts and values.”
― Kenan Malik

“Through me the way into the city of woe: Through me the way into eternal pain: Through me the way among the lost. Justice moved my maker on high Divine power made me, Wisdom supreme, and primeval Love. Before me nothing was but things eternal And eternal I endure. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
― Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

“Faith, wrote Origen (185–245), perhaps the first great Christian theologian, is ‘useful for the multitude’, a means of teaching ‘those who cannot abandon everything and pursue a study of rational argument to believe without thinking out their reasons’.”
― Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

“To talk of humans as 'transcendent' is not to ascribe to them spiritual properties. It is, rather, to recognize that as subjects we have the ability to transform our selves, our natures, our world—an ability denied to any other physical being.”
― Kenan Malik

“The first was that culture, not biology, was the principal force that shaped human affairs; the second, that humanity comprised a multitude of cultures that could not be ranked on an evolutionary scale, but each of which had to be understood in its own terms.”
― Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

“Insofar as it is true, the idea that our actions or beliefs are merely one link in a causal link that runs back to the beginning of the universe is making a trivial claim. Insofar as it is saying something profound, the claim is untrue.”
― Kenan Malik

“What is Empire but the predominance of race?’ the English liberal imperialist and prime minister Lord Rosebery observed.”
― Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

“To talk of humans as 'transcendent' is not to ascribe to them spiritual properties. It is, rather, to recognize that as subjects we have the ability to transform our selves, our natures, our world—an ability denied to any other physical being. In the six million years since the human and chimpanzee lines first diverged on either side of Africa's Great Rift Valley, the behaviour and lifestyles of chimpanzees have barely changed. Human behaviour and lifestyles clearly have. Humans have learnt to learn from previous generations, to improve upon their work, and to establish a momentum to human life and culture that has taken us from cave art to quantum physics and the conquest of space. It is this capacity for constant innovation that distinguishes humans from all other animals. All animals have an evolutionary past. Only humans make history.”
― Kenan Malik

“Education is not a product but a relationship and a process; a relationship between student and lecturer, and process by which knowledge transforms the individual.”
― Kenan Malik

“Humans are, as Sartre put it, ‘condemned to be free’. To insist that science, or God, objectively defines moral values is to abandon our responsibility as human beings to make such judgments.”
― Kenan Malik

“(optimisme itself was a word that first entered the French language in the eighteenth century).”
― Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

“Without religious faith, runs the argument, we cannot anchor our moral truths or truly know right from wrong. Without belief in God we will be lost in a miasma of moral nihilism. Yet the transformation in the first four centuries not just in the fortunes of Christianity but also in the ethical ideas that animated it reveals the flexibility of religious precepts. Believers may see religious ethics as absolute. They have to, in order to believe. But God Himself appears to be highly pragmatic. The absoluteness of religious precepts can seem unforgiving, less so the precepts themselves. The success of religious morality derives from its ability to cut its beliefs according to social needs while at the same time insisting that such beliefs are sacred because they are God-given.”
― Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

“Racial ideology was the inevitable product of the persistence of differences of rank, class and peoples in a society that had accepted the concept of equality.”
― Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

“What is called ‘offence to a community’ is more often than not actually a struggle within communities.”
― Kenan Malik