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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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More quotes by 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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The media no longer hesitate to whip up lurid anxieties in order to increase sales, in the process undermining social confidence and multiplying fears.
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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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Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.
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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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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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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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
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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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I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton's head.
A.C. Grayling
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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
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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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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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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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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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The wise say that our failure is to form habits: for habit is the mark of a stereotyped world.
A.C. Grayling
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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.
A.C. Grayling
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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.
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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...mastery of the emotions is fundamental to a virtuous life.
A.C. Grayling