A. C. Grayling Quotes

19 Sourced 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.

A. C. Grayling
There is a beautiful and life-enhancing alternative outlook that offers insight, consolation, inspiration and meaning, which has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with the best, most generous, most sympathetic understanding of human reality.

A. C. Grayling
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.

A. C. Grayling
Nothing 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. Grayling
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.

A. C. Grayling
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.

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

A. C. Grayling
People should be left to believe what they like, so long as they harm no one else. Apart from normal expectations of politeness, it is not however clear why people should require their personal beliefs to be treated with special sensitivity by others, to the point that if others fail to tip-toe respectfully around them they will start throwing bombs.

A. C. Grayling
Mastery of the emotions is fundamental to a virtuous life.

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

A. C. Grayling
Good biography requires the psychologist's eye, the historian's nose, the novelist's feel for narrative. It is a form of highly organized gossip, and the more private corners the biographer can wriggle into — especially the dark ones — the better the resulting book.

A. C. Grayling
Nature has made sex pleasurable not just to ensure reproduction but, in some of the higher mammals at least, to create bonds. The narrow views of the ancient Jews and the modern Catholics, that sex must always have pregnancy as a possible outcome, miss a very important point here.

A. C. Grayling
It is absolutely typical of any human interest that if it is thwarted it will bulge or leak or mutate through the cracks in the constraints — drugs and sex are prime examples of how prohibition and repression make things vastly worse than they need be.

A. C. Grayling
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.

A. C. Grayling
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. C. Grayling
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.

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

A. C. Grayling
If I see two men do good, one because he takes himself to be commanded to it by a supernatural agency and the other solely because he cares about his fellow man, I honor the latter infinitely more.

A. C. Grayling