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One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.

Julian Baggini

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Julian Baggini
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 9
Author
Philosopher
Writer
Self
Emotion
Vocabulary
Good
Side
Promote
Thinking
Sides
Replaced
Moral
Emotions
Help
Anger
Helping
Negative
Become
Harder
Lexicon
Reason
Positive
Beneficial

More quotes by Julian Baggini

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In my experience, those who make the biggest fuss about not spending much at Christmas are generally the ones who buy what they want and eat where they want 12 months a year.
Julian Baggini
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Philosophy has to be enquiring it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.
Julian Baggini
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If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it's done for us lately.
Julian Baggini
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The supposed revelations of God to humanity through Christ, or the word of God to Mohammed through the angel Gabriel, had the power they did because they indicated new truths, new directions for followers.
Julian Baggini
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If I hammer my own thumb while doing some DIY, it's not nice, but it's not the end of the world. To care obsessively about similar levels of discomfort in animals seems to be a case of mistaken moral priorities.
Julian Baggini
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Science works because the phenomenon being described can be relied on to remain the same. Even in quantum physics, where phenomena are changed by observation, the way in which observation interferes is regular and falls within a limited range of possibilities. Human culture, however, has the nasty habit of never staying the same for very long.
Julian Baggini
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Justice can only be dispensed when you have all the facts in front of you.
Julian Baggini
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Many people are never happier than when they get the opportunity to complain, while others are deeply unhappy with how things are but just accept the fact. Complaint occurs when we refuse to accept that things are wrong and we do something about it, even if that something is simply articulating our unease.
Julian Baggini
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Any celebration meal to which guests are invited, be they family or friends, should be an occasion for generous hospitality.
Julian Baggini
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When you try to translate any kind of real-life problem into a neat logical form, you're almost always simplifying it. We need a kind of blend - we need to use not just tools of logic, which are important and valuable - I'm not denying that, but also tools of judgement, and of inductive and abductive reasoning which can also inform.
Julian Baggini
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Yesterday's news feeds our fear that our neighbours are more likely than not to be bad eggs: benefit fraudsters, bogus asylum seekers, paedophiles or jihadist terrorists.
Julian Baggini
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The modern believer is not suspicious enough, which is perhaps why when they try to construct arguments in their defence, the convictions are left doing all the work and reason, debilitated by neglect, weakly fails to prop them up.
Julian Baggini
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No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science.
Julian Baggini
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The truly humble feel the ground beneath their feet every day and do not only become aware of it when held aloft or pushed down to their knees.
Julian Baggini
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As a teenager, I increasingly had questions about religion to which I found no good answers.
Julian Baggini
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Being able and willing to complain is what makes us rational and moral animals, capable of seeing and articulating the difference between how things are and how they should be.
Julian Baggini
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There are many things you shouldn't measure. Don't, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife!
Julian Baggini
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I am only me for practical purposes.
Julian Baggini
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I think that a lot of social movements, political movements, powerful ones - certainly they form, collectively, an idea of the truth which becomes hard to question. It becomes a dogma, and from the inside it starts to look like common sense.
Julian Baggini
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Rules matter, and to be rules they need to be universal in form: always do this, never do that. But it is foolish to rule out in advance the possibility that an occasion might arise when normal rules just don't apply. Rules are not there to be broken, but sometimes break them we must.
Julian Baggini