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. GRAYLINGThe 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. GRAYLINGJust 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. GRAYLINGWhen 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?
A.C. GRAYLINGMiddle age has been defined as what happens when a person’s broad mind and narrow waist change places.
A.C. GRAYLINGA human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it.
A.C. GRAYLINGThe wise say that our failure is to form habits: for habit is the mark of a stereotyped world.
A.C. GRAYLINGInculcating the various competing – competing, note – falsehoods of the major faiths into small children is a form of child abuse, and a scandal.
A.C. GRAYLINGIt 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.
A.C. GRAYLINGIf 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. GRAYLINGTo 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. GRAYLINGScience is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends.
A.C. GRAYLINGMisuse 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. GRAYLINGI am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton’s head.
A.C. GRAYLINGTo 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.C. GRAYLINGI despise people who depend on these things [heroin and cocaine]. If you really want a mind-altering experience, look at a tree.
A.C. GRAYLINGReligions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.
A.C. GRAYLING