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When 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. Grayling

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A.C. Grayling
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More quotes by A.C. Grayling

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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. Grayling
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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.
A.C. Grayling
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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.
A.C. Grayling
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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.
A.C. Grayling
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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
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Religious apologists complain bitterly that atheists and secularists are aggressive and hostile in their criticism of them. I always say: look, when you guys were in charge, you didn't argue with us, you just burnt us at the stake. Now what we're doing is, we're presenting you with some arguments and some challenging questions, and you complain.
A.C. Grayling
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Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance.
A.C. Grayling
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Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person's broad mind and narrow waist change places.
A.C. Grayling
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Humanism is the philosophy that you should be a good guest at the dinner table of life.
A.C. Grayling
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Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.
A.C. Grayling
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Look at the blogosphere - the biggest lavatory wall in the universe, a palimpsest of graffiti and execration.
A.C. Grayling
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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.
A.C. Grayling
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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.
A.C. Grayling
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...mastery of the emotions is fundamental to a virtuous life.
A.C. Grayling
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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.
A.C. Grayling
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I believe that decisions about the timing and manner of death belong to the individual as a human right. I believe it is wrong to withhold medical methods of terminating life painlessly and swiftly when an individual has a rational and clear-minded sustained wish to end his or her life.
A.C. Grayling
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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.
A.C. Grayling
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Try lighting your house by prayer instead of electricity and see which one works.
A.C. Grayling
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A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it.
A.C. Grayling
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Christian churches and Muslim groups have no more right to have their say than women's institutes or trades unions. The government has actively encouraged faith-based education, and therefore given a megaphone to religious voices and fundamentalists.
A.C. Grayling