Quote

When you try to cool down hot emotions, what tends to happen is that you end up either repressing them or losing them altogether. Neither is desirable. Without emotion, much social interaction loses its meaning, or changes for the worse.

Julian Baggini

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Julian Baggini
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 9
Author
Philosopher
Writer
Ends
Losing
Tends
Without
Meaning
Interaction
Trying
Emotion
Hot
Much
Loses
Emotions
Either
Cool
Happen
Worse
Repressing
Social
Changes
Altogether
Happens
Neither
Desirable

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Waiting is so unusual that many of us can't stand in a queue for 30 seconds without getting out our phones to check for messages or to Google something.
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No one has ever understood anything better by assuming that there is no reason for why it is the way it is.
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No genuine choice is ever simply a matter of the arbitrary exercise of will. Take your choice of lunch today. You can't decide to want anything, but what you want will at least in part be a result of a series of other choices and judgments you've made in your life to date.
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I don't think anyone who genuinely embraced sincerity, charity and modesty could be intolerant or divisive.
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We do wrong willfully when we fail to think hard about whether what we're doing is right.
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This is the deal: we are happy to single out people as superior just as long as they don't accept the description themselves. We want heroes and idols but we also want egalitarianism and that requires proclamations of humility from our Gods.
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Economics is uncertain because its fundamental subject matter is not money but human action. That's why economics is not the dismal science, it's no science at all.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Looking out over the port of Dover, with the endless steam of boats coming in and out, every British citizen is reminded that belonging here has never been about blood or genes. It's simply about being at home on this discrete island and being aware of the privileges and responsibilities that brings.
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Daily life is better when it involves interactions with real people who have a personal investment in their labour, like shopkeepers, than it is with someone 'just doing my job' or the infernal self-checkout machine.
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The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives.
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Justice can only be dispensed when you have all the facts in front of you.
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The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it's possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by vested interests and corrupted by human venality can we create realistic programmes that actually have a chance of success.
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From time to time, it is worth wandering around the fuzzy border regions of what you do, if only to remind yourself that no human activity is an island.
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Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing.
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The idea that the mind can extend even beyond the body is an intriguing one, and is bound to become more pressing as we increasingly develop technologies that augment our natural abilities.
Julian Baggini