Ac Grayling Quotes

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.

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.

Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person's broad mind and narrow waist change places.

...mastery of the emotions is fundamental to a virtuous life.

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.

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.

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 fault denied is twice committed.

The wise say that our failure is to form habits: for habit is the mark of a stereotyped world,

Dripping water wears the stone which could not be hammered.

If there is a deity of the kind imagined by votaries of the big mail-order religions such as Christianity and Islam, and if this deity is the creator of all things, then it is responsible for cancer, meningitis, millions of spontaneous abortions everyday, mass killings of people in floods and earthquakes-and too great mountain of other natural evils to list besides. It would also,as the putative designer of human nature, ultimately be responsible or the ubiquitous and unbeatable human propensities for hatred, malice, greed, and all other sources of the cruelty and murder people inflict on each other hourly.

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.

there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?

Behave in life as at a dinner party. Is anything brought around to you? Put out your hand and take your share with moderation. Does it pass by you? Do not stop it. Is it not yet come? Do not stretch your desire towards it, but wait till it reaches you. Do this with regard to children, to a spouse, to public post, to riches, and you will eventually be a worthy guest at the feast of life.

For we live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; and our time should be counted in the throbs of our hearts as we love and help, learn and strive, and make from our own talents whatever can increase the stock of the world’s good.

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

Whereas the consolations of religion are mainly personal, the burdens are social and political as well as personal.

. . .the most important philosophical question we can each ask ourselves is, ‘Do I or do I not wish to commit suicide?’ If we say, ‘No I do not,’ as most of us would, it is because we have reasons for living, or at the very least real hope that we can find such reasons. Then the next question is: what are the reasons I personally have for saying ‘No’ to that question? The answer contains the meaning of my life.

Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history.

If the world is to have a future, it lies in the hands of women. At time of this writing nearly half of all women in the Middle East are illiterate; millions in poor countries are shackled to the most basic daily urgencies of finding water and feeding children; the majority of the world's women exist in various forms of bondage to necessity, to poverty, and to men. (2007)

One day everything will be well, that is our hope,’ said Voltaire; ‘today everything is fine, that is our illusion.

The best of what we are lies in what we hope to be

Look at the blogosphere - the biggest lavatory wall in the universe, a palimpsest of graffiti and execration.

what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about, we must consign to silence’ (T,

Eagleton has spent his life inside two mental boxes, Catholicism and Marxism, of both of which he is a severe internal critic—that is, he frequently kicks and scratches at the inside of the boxes, but does not leave them. Neither are ideologies that loosen their grip easily, and people who need the security of adherence to a big dominating ideology, however much they kick and scratch but without daring to leave go, hold on to it every bit as tightly as it holds onto them. The result is of course strangulation, but alas not mutual strangulation: the ideology always wins.

Faith is what I die for, dogma is what I kill for,’ as the saying has it; and the trouble is that all faith is based on dogma.

All great truths begin as blasphemies. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

A mature society is one that reserves its moral outrage for what really matters: poverty and preventable diseases in the third world, arms sales, oppression, injustice. Bad language and sex might offend some, who certainly have a right to complain; but they do not have a right to censor. They do not have to watch or listen if they are offended: they have an 'off' button on their television sets and radios. After all, it is morally outrageous that moral outrage should be used as an excuse to perpetrate the outrage of censorship on others.

Perhaps worse still is what liberal societies might do to themselves in the face of this new and different threat [of terrorism]. They begin, by small but dangerous increments, to cease to be as liberal as they once were. They begin to restrict their own hard-won rights and freedoms as a protection against the crminial minority who attempt (and as we thus see, by forcing liberty to commit suidcide, succed in doing) to terrorise society.

Per ardua ad astra.

To lie sleepless with pain at night, or to wake every morning and feel the return of grief, yet to get up and carry on as best one can, is courage itself.

The rich cannot eat money,’ dryly observes a Russian proverb, ‘so it’s just as well that there are poor folk to grow their food.

Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ‘Patriotism’ is its cult. ERICH FROMM

Emotion is bad if it hinders the mind from thinking. An emotion that opens the mind to contemplate several aspects of things at once is better than one that fixes thought to an obsession.

Future generations may or may not judge Wittgenstein to be one of the great philosophers. Even if they do not, however, he is sure always to count as one of the great personalities of philosophy. From our perspective it is easy to mistake one for the other; which he is time will tell.

I once had a published written debate with a religious apologist who, after I had argued the standard line that the idea of a loving and merciful deity is inconsistent with the fact of natural evil, said this meant his god was not all-powerful, and therefore was not to blame because it could not stop natural evil from occuring. This is a different tack from the more robust one that says natural evil is a response to humanity's moral evil. What this latter view in effect argues is that because of (say) Hitler's wrongdoings, thousands of babies deserve to be drowned in tsunamis.

Those who think that modern times are wickeder than previous times are apt to identify the cause as the weakening of a sense of moral law, associated with the departure of religious traditions of morality as a social influence... Such views give comfort to apologists for religion, who fasten on the implication that to revive a culture of moral concern people must be encouraged back into churches. But this reprises the usual muddle that getting people to accept as true... such propositions as that at a certain historical point a virgin gave birth, that the laws of nature were arbitrarily suspended so that, for example, water turned into wine, that several corpses came to life (and so forth), will somehow give them a logical reason for living morally (according to the attached view of what is moral - e.g. not marrying if you can help it, not divorcing if you do, and so forth again). It is scarcely needful to repeat that the morality and the metaphysics here separately at stake do not justify or even need one another, and that the moral questions require to be grounded and justified on their own merits in application to what they concern, namely, the life of human beings in the social setting.

Govern a family as you would cook a small fish. CHINESE PROVERB

As Ruskin said, it is not what we get but what we become by our endeavours that makes them worthwhile.

Without doubt, prudence is a virtue. As the Ashanti say, ‘No one tests the depth of a river with both feet.

Hope is the worst of evils,’ Nietzsche famously said, ‘for it prolongs the torment of man.

Prudence He does well who moors his boat with two anchors. PUBLILIUS SYRUS

Fear If the diver always thought of the shark, he would never lay hands on the pearl. SA’DI

One frankness invites a reciprocal frankness, and draws forth discoveries, like wine and love,’ wrote Montaigne.

The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened with convictions. ALEXANDER CHASE

Art You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The rich man may never get into heaven,’ remarked Alexander Chase, ‘but the poor are already serving their term in hell.

Racism is on its deathbed – the question is, how costly will racists make the funeral? MARTIN LUTHER KING

Goethe had long since remarked that nationalistic feelings ‘are at their strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture’.

Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded That all the Apostles would have done as they did. LORD BYRON

Hatred is a sentiment that leads to the extinction of values. ORTEGA Y GASSET

How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference to what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world’ (T

Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent’ (T

Do not regret having lived, but while yet living live in a way that allows you to think that you were not born in vain. And do not regret that you must die: it is what all who are wise must Wish, to have life end at its proper time. For nature puts a limit to living as to everything else, And we are the sons and daughters of nature, and for us therefore the sleep of nature is nature's final kindness

he says at the end of the Tractatus: ‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them.

The notion that evil is non-rational is a more significant claim for Eagleton than at first appears, because he is (in this book [On Evil] as in others of his recent 'late period' prolific burst) anxious to rewrite theology: God (whom he elsewhere tells us is nonexistent, but this is no barrier to his being lots of other things for Eagleton too, among them Important) is not to be regarded as rational: with reference to the Book of Job Eagleton says, 'To ask after God's reasons for allowing evil, so [some theologians] claim, is to imagine him as some kind of rational or moral being, which is the last thing he is.' This is priceless: with one bound God is free of responsibility for 'natural evil'—childhood cancers, tsunamis that kill tens of thousands—and for moral evil also even though 'he' is CEO of the company that purposely manufactured its perpetrators; and 'he' is incidentally exculpated from blame for the hideous treatment meted out to Job.

Nationalism as a thesis confuses (almost always deliberately) certain legitimate desires with illegitimate ones. People like to run their own affairs, and most people value the culture they were raised in, are proud of its achievements and wish it well; a significant degree of their sense of personal and group identity derives from it. All this is unexceptionable. But nationalists try to persuade their fellows that the existence of other groups and cultures somehow represents a challenge, and sometimes a threat, to what the natives of the home culture value. (From: Toward the Light of Liberty)

I to je zapravo sustina proslavljanja Dana sv. Valentina:san o ljubavi. Zivot bi zaista bio gorak kada se san nikada ne bi ostvario ili kada nasa najvaznija zivotna iskustva ljubavi - storge, pragma, ludus, agape - ne bi bila dovoljno trajna i cvsta da nas spasu kad nas zahvati oluja erosa i manije - donoseci nam blazenstvo i ostavljajuci pustos za sobom.

Hope is a virtue independently of its realisations; it is an intrinsic value, an end in itself, allied to courage and imagination, a positive attitude full of possibility and aspiration. For that reason you discover more about a person when you learn about his hopes than when you count his achievements, for the best of what we are lies in what we hope to be.

Theistic claims that supernatural agency exists in the universe derive from ancient traditions of belief. The word 'atheist' is a theist's term for a person who does not share such beliefs. Theists think that atheists have a belief or set of beliefs, just as theists do but in the opposite sense, about theism-related questions. This is a mistake; atheists certainly have beliefs about many things, but they are not 'theistic-subject-matter-related beliefs' in any but a single negative sense. For atheism is the absence of 'theistic-subject-matter-related belief. Although it is true that 'absence of belief in supernatural agency' is functionally equivalent to 'belief in the absence of supernatural agency', theists concentrate on the latter formulation in order to make atheism a positive as opposed to privative thesis with regard to theistic-subject-matter-related matters. This is what makes theists think they are in a kind of belief football match, with opposing sets of beliefs vying for our allegiance. What is happening is that the theists are rushing about the park kicking the ball, but the atheists are not playing. They are not even on the field; they are in the stands, arguing that this particular game should not be taking place at all.

Such melancholy is fitted to the fact that life offers causes for regret, that happiness is not always the point, and that there is enough hardship and struggle to go round, but not enough of the good things; and reflection on these useful insights is a check on thoughtlessness and self-satisfaction – what the Russians expressively call poshlost – which threaten to make one live in banal fashion. So a little depression is good at times, in any season.

Therefore, encourage and toughen your mind against the mishaps that afflict even the most powerful and the most successful, For accident and illness can in a moment take away all that was built over many years. So I declare to you: he is lord of your life that scorns his own. Be the lord of your own life therefore, by not fearing to lose it. Since the day we were born we are being led towards the day we die: in the interim let us be courageous, and do good things.

the word God is typically invoked to denote the all-encompassing and unanswerable source of authority governing what people can think, say, eat and wear, in what circumstances and with whom they can have sexual relations, how they must behave on specified days or weeks of the year, and so comprehensively on. The fact that different religions claim that their god or gods have different requirements in these respects should be evidence that religions are man-made and historically conditioned, but religious people think that this insight only applies to other people’s religions, not their own

The fact that a human nose (use the letter X to symbolise the nose) is a necessary condition for spectacles to be perched in front of the eyes (use the letter Y to symbolise ‘spectacles being perched in front of the eyes’) does not entail that, because Y is the case, X is in itself necessary. ‘Necessity’ in the logical sense of ‘having to be so’ is not the same thing as the necessity involved in a ‘necessary condition’ – here things have to be so only relative to something else’s being the way it is. In the case of X’s being a necessary condition relative to Y, but not in itself necessary, X could have been different, and if it were so, there would, or at least might, be no Y. For example: if humans did not have noses, spectacles might be worn as goggles are, held before the eyes by an elastic strap. This is just how it is with the universe. We humans are the Y of which nature’s parameters are the X. We exist because the parameters are as they are; had they been different, we would not be here to know it. The fact that we exist because of how things happen to be with the universe’s structure and properties entails nothing about design or purpose. Depending on your point of view, it is just a lucky or unlucky result of how things happen to be. The universe’s parameters are not tuned on purpose for us to exist. It is the other way round: we exist because the laws happen to be as they are

The world pullulates with profoundly unrespectable people, views and actions, at all levels and in all neighbourhoods, and PC's reflex tendency to attack most of those who attack many of them makes matters worse. True discrimination - careful and fair-minded separation of worth from dross - is bundled by PC with all discrimination, and banned; hence the trouble. What began as a movement to rectify relationships has become a minefield of suspicion and anxiety. Much of the anger that has made it so is understandable; none of the humourlessness and puritanism that keeps it so is acceptable. It is particularly a pity that its excesses have stained left-liberal thinking, of which it is a strand; but not, thankfully, the whole.

What sort of charge against old age is the nearness of death, when this is shared by youth? Yes, you will say; but a young man expects to live long; an old man cannot expect to do so. Well, the young man is a fool to expect it. For what can be more foolish than to regard the uncertain as certain, the false as true? An old man has nothing even to hope. ' Ah, but it is just there that he is in a better position than the young man, since what the latter only hopes he has obtained: The one wishes to live long; the other has lived long. And yet! what is 'long' in a man's life? For grant the utmost limit: let us expect an age like that of the king of the Tartessi, who reigned eighty years and lived a hundred and twenty. Nothing seems long in which there is any . last' , for when that arrives, then all the past has slipped away -only that remains which you have earned by virtue and righteous actions. Hours indeed, and days and months and years depart, nor does past time ever return, nor can the future be known. Whatever time each is granted for life, with that he is bound to be content.

The meaning of things lies not in things themselves, but in out attitudes to them.’ ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

Fear begets intolerance, and intolerance begets fear: the cycle is a vicious one.

Hope If it were not for hope, the heart would break.

Just as dumb creatures are snared by food, human beings would not be caught unless they had a nibble of hope,’ Petronius remarked.

In the preface to his little book of miscellaneous essays called Guesses at Truth, the nineteenth-century cleric Julius Hare wrote, ‘I here present you with a few suggestions … little more than glimmerings, I had almost said dreams, of thought … If I am addressing one of that numerous class who read to be told what to think, let me advise you to meddle with this book no further. You wish to buy a house ready furnished; do not come to look for it in a stone quarry. But if you are building up your opinions for yourself, and only want to be provided with the materials, you may meet with many things in these pages to suit you.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness,’ Tennessee Williams observed.

Civility The knowledge of courtesy is a very necessary study; like grace and beauty, it breeds mutual liking. MONTAIGNE

Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

Speciesism Animals are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time. HENRY BESTON

One cloud is enough to eclipse all the sun. THOMAS FULLER

Yet apes are intelligent, inquisitive, affectionate and sociable, with capacities for suffering and grief that match our own, and with a grave beauty and dignity which recalls Schopenhauer’s remark that ‘There is one respect in which brutes show real wisdom when compared to us – I mean their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.

In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior. FRANCIS BACON

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it is highly unprofitable to most people. E. B. WHITE

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! THOREAU

We find little in a book but what we put there,’ Joseph Joubert said. ‘But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

There are several kinds of poverty. Third-and first-world poverty are entirely different in character because of the great difference in their historical and economic settings. The gruel-ling problems faced by the third world’s poor relate to bare survival, to the basic task of getting water and food. Their plight is often further complicated by war, corruption, flood or drought. Third-world poverty is life on the margins of existence, a tough and unforgiving struggle, dedicated to the present moment and having room in it for only two feelings: despair and hope.

Our repentance is not so much regret for the evil we have done as fear of what might happen to us because of it. LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. HERMAN MELVILLE

Lying That lies should be necessary to life is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of existence. NIETZSCHE

In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice,’ wrote Montaigne; ‘we have no tie upon one another, other than the reliability of our word.

Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head. THOREAU

Obscenity’ is not a term capable of exact legal definition; in the practice of the Courts, it means ‘anything that shocks the magistrate’. BERTRAND RUSSELL

Along with enraged responses to Zeppelin air raids, the sinking of the Lusitania, and the use of poison gas in the trenches, these demonisations prompted outrage in the United States and other neutral states at the moral vileness of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. Bad things were undoubtedly done, but the propaganda technique of encouraging pro-war sentiment in one’s own country by claiming that the enemy commits atrocities is both too tempting to resist and too commonplace to ignore. Its effect is to make going to war against a supposed such enemy more acceptable, providing a moral justification and the requisite preparedness to make and accept sacrifices.

Implicit in the idea of degeneration from the best form of government, the aristocratic, is Plato’s claim that the members of the demos lack the knowledge and virtue of the aristoi, which is what make the latter fit to govern. He thinks that the collapse of the democratic state is inevitable given the supposed opposite characteristics of the polloi or general public: ignorance, self-interest, prejudice, envy, and rivalry.

The cumulative case against religion shows it to be a hangover from the infancy of modern humanity, persistent and enduring because of the vested interests of religious organisations, proselytisation of children, complicity of temporal powers requiring the social and moral policing that religion offers, and human psychology itself. Yet even a cursory overview of history tells us that it is one of the most destructive forces plaguing humanity.

Penicros answered, ‘A bad man quarrelled with a good man, saying “For every word of abuse I hear from you, I will retort ten.” 9. ‘The good man replied, “For every ten words of abuse I hear from you, I will not retort one.” 10. ‘That is the difference between a bad man and a good; and between a foolish man and a wise.

Los enemigos del progreso son quienes imponen la censura o el conformismo,

For sheer size the Summa Theologiae is rarely beaten; it is over two million words long* – and Aquinas did not finish what he had originally intended to cover. It takes the form of questions, proposed answers of competing kinds, and discussions of those answers. This is similar to the form of a university disputation in the Scholastic tradition. The size of the book meant that Aquinas’ ideas developed as he worked on it; for example, the third part of the Summa Theologiae, corresponding to the third part of the Summa Contra Gentiles on how to attain happiness, was written at the same time that he made his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and the influence shows.

Human life was once without order, on the level of the beasts, subject to force; there was no reward for the good or punishment for the bad. Then people established laws as punishers, so that justice could be the mighty ruler of all equally, and make violence its slave.

for it is not courage when you are ignorant of the possibilities.

Plato’s belief that political chaos must inevitably result in tyranny – because a tyrant would step in to restore order, only making matters worse thereby

AQUINAS (1225–1274) By a considerable margin St Thomas Aquinas, as he is known in religious circles, is the greatest philosopher as well as theologian of the medieval period. His combination of theology and philosophy survives today as ‘Thomism’, still taught in Catholic universities and colleges as the official philosophy of the faith.

Without free speech one cannot claim other liberties, or defend them when they are attacked. Without free speech one cannot have a democratic process, which requires the statement and testing of policy proposals and party platforms. Without free speech one cannot have a due process at law, in which one can defend oneself, accuse, collect and examine evidence, make a case or refute one. Without free speech there cannot be genuine education and research, enquiry, debate, exchange of information, challenges to falsehood, questioning of governments, proposal and examination of opinion. Without free speech there cannot be a free press, which...is necessary...as one of the two essential estates of a free society (the other being an independent judiciary).

For the grace of bearing life's inevitable evils is itself a good, and makes goodness arise even from evils by opposing them or enduring them with courage.