A.C. Grayling Quotes
To believe something in the face of evidence and against reason - to believe something by faith - is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect.
A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it.
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.
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.
Humanism is the philosophy that you should be a good guest at the dinner table of life.
Look at the blogosphere - the biggest lavatory wall in the universe, a palimpsest of graffiti and execration.
And I say, the meaning of life is what you make it. There will be as many different meaningful lives as there are people to live them.
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.
Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person's broad mind and narrow waist change places.
Inculcating the various competing - competing, note - falsehoods of the major faiths into small children is a form of child abuse, and a scandal.
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.
I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton's head.
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.
These internet trolls are cowards who are poisoning our national life. No-one would permit such venom in person, so there should be no place for it on social media.
It doesn't have to be the Grand Canyon, it could be a city street, it could be the face of another human being - Everything is full of wonder.
Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends.
The media no longer hesitate to whip up lurid anxieties in order to increase sales, in the process undermining social confidence and multiplying fears.
The wise say that our failure is to form habits: for habit is the mark of a stereotyped world.
As somebody who campaigned to leave the EU, I believe we have a bright future ahead of us- but we have to get it right.
When I was 14 a chaplain at school gave me a reading list. I read everything and I went back to him with a question: how can you really believe in this stuff?
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.
For the grace of bearing life's inevitable evils is itself agood, and makes goodness arise even from evils byopposing them or enduring them with courage.
The best of what we are lies in what we hope to be
