A. C. Grayling
39 quotes
Biography
"Of all the questions we can ask ourselves the most important is: how is one best to live?"
"A civilized society is one which never ceases having a discussion with itself about what human life should best be."
"Folly tends to predominate over wisdom because it is usually easier to understand and more convenient (or exciting) to believe; but a little reflection usually sifts one from the other."
"The media no longer hesitate to whip up lurid anxieties in order to increase sales, in the process undermining social confidence and multiplying fears."
"New and challenging moral dilemmas are always likely to arise, so we need to try to make ourselves the kind of people who can respond thoughtfully."
"Emancipation is always at risk from the usual sources—demagogues, civil and international war, the tenure that superstitions have over the human imagination—so there are no guarantees that progress will continue."
"The claim is that educating moral sensibility through imagination has a general tendency, not a universal effect."
"Symbols have the unfortunate power to acquire the importance of what they symbolise."
"Worst of all, symbols sometimes live on in their own right when what they symbolise has long been forgotten."
"People not only live by symbols, but die by them, as wars of religion and nationalism attest."
"Credulity, insecurity and desire form a potent combination in the human psyche. Together they make us eager to believe any nonsense if it purports to yield a glimpse of the future, or offers even the slenderest hope of success in love or fortune. On this rests the livelihood of many tricksters and charlatans—the crystal-ball gazers, palmists, astrologers, and readers of tarot cards."
"Tarot is not properly speaking, a divinatory practice, but a complex card game, invented in the fifteenth century, which somewhat like bridge, turns on capturing tricks."
"Prudery expresses itself most forcibly as censorship."
"The growth of civilisation is measured by refinements of living and increasing distance from the immediacies of survival."
"Aristotle’s thought is that to live well and flourishingly, a person needs to be educated—which means: informed, and able to think. He is of course right."
"Part of the problem facing teaching in the contemporary world is that its status as a profession has been undermined by the contemptible view that only what makes money is admirable."
"When the Bible was the only book people knew, they naturally thought it embodied all that is true; but when their reading expanded, and with it the world, and a sense of other times, other voices, other possibilities and points of view, that authority could not last."
"“The first principle of a civilised state,” said Walter Lippmann, “is that power is legitimate only when it is under contract.”"
"Power’s tendency to corrupt is a function of the work it does in liberating man’s worse characteristics."
"On the best view, justice is fairness."
"Thus justice is not equality but equity; as Aristotle says, “Injustice arises when equals are treated unequally, and unequals are treated equally.”"
"Politicians react to terrorism by limiting liberties….Zealots, most especially religious zealots, hate the liberality of liberal society; their terrorism aims to destroy it. To start putting handcuffs on ourselves is to achieve their goals for them."
"Tolerance is not only a key feature of liberalism, but—familiarly—its paradox too. Liberalism’s tolerance leaves the democracy of ideas to decide which among opposing viewpoints will prevail. The risk is the death of liberty itself, because those who live by hard and uncompromising views in political, moral and religious respects always, if given half a chance, silence liberals because liberalism, by its nature, threatens the hegemony they seek to impose."
"Anger is the chief emotion driving the deadly reciprocity of reprisal and revenge which has engulfed the recent history of the Middle East. The other dominating emotions of that tragedy—grief and terror—would bring the violence to an end without it. But anger, bitter and implacable when the only response it gets is anger returned, feeds on its reflection until it becomes insanity."
"But in vitriolic conflicts there is neither appropriateness nor proportion, so the arguments of history and justice become lost in vengeance."