Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person’s broad mind and narrow waist change places.
A.C. GRAYLINGMiddle age has been defined as what happens when a person’s broad mind and narrow waist change places.
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. 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. GRAYLINGReligions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.
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. GRAYLINGHumanism is the philosophy that you should be a good guest at the dinner table of life.
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. 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. GRAYLINGNothing is truly unnatural, because everything that exists, including human intelligence, is a product of nature. If human intelligence can devise ways for the genes from two men to result in a child, their doing so is an entirely natural event.
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. 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. 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. GRAYLINGIt 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. GRAYLINGReligion and science have a common ancestor – ignorance.
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. 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. GRAYLING