Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

A.C. Grayling
Reading
Chaplain
Read
Chaplains
Stuff
List
School
Lists
Back
Atheism
Everything
Gave
Believe
Question
Really
Went

More quotes by A.C. Grayling

Image
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
Image
Try lighting your house by prayer instead of electricity and see which one works.
A.C. Grayling
Image
Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance.
A.C. Grayling
Image
I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton's head.
A.C. Grayling
Image
...mastery of the emotions is fundamental to a virtuous life.
A.C. Grayling
Image
Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person's broad mind and narrow waist change places.
A.C. Grayling
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Look at the blogosphere - the biggest lavatory wall in the universe, a palimpsest of graffiti and execration.
A.C. Grayling
Image
Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.
A.C. Grayling
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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