Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends.
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?
More A.C. Grayling Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Religion and science have a common ancestor – ignorance.
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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.
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Inculcating the various competing – competing, note – falsehoods of the major faiths into small children is a form of child abuse, and a scandal.
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I despise people who depend on these things [heroin and cocaine]. If you really want a mind-altering experience, look at a tree.
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Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person’s broad mind and narrow waist change places.
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I do not believe that there are any such things as gods and goddesses, for exactly the same reasons as I do not believe there are fairies, goblins or sprites, and these reasons should be obvious to anyone over the age of ten.
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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.
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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.
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Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.
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The wise say that our failure is to form habits: for habit is the mark of a stereotyped world.
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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.
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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.
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I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton’s head.
A.C. GRAYLING