A. C. Grayling Quotes

Ideas are the cogs of history—and too often the barricades that stand in its way.

On the best view, justice is fairness.

It is the technique of the baboon to try to get its way by violence.

None of the major faiths is bloodless; history reeks with the gore of their wars and persecutions, all the more disgusting a spectacle for being, in essence, as simple as this: A kills B because B does not agree with A that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden.
People should be left to believe what they like, so long as they harm no one else. Apart from normal expectations of politeness, it is not however clear why people should require their personal beliefs to be treated with special sensitivity by others, to the point that if others fail to tip-toe respectfully around them they will start throwing bombs. From a secular point of view, religious beliefs are at best absurd and at worse dangerous, and the amount of free play they are given in the public domain is a menace. Believed-in fairies should be kept at home as an entirely private matter, and their votaries encouraged to cease taking themselves so seriously that, when irritated by those who differ, they resort to Kalashnikovs. Apart from anything else, such reactions speak little confidence in their own violently-held certainties.

New and challenging moral dilemmas are always likely to arise, so we need to try to make ourselves the kind of people who can respond thoughtfully.

People not only live by symbols, but die by them, as wars of religion and nationalism attest.

The claim is that educating moral sensibility through imagination has a general tendency, not a universal effect.

We can therefore all demand apologies from one another for mankind’s turpitude. But it is better worth remembering that we poison the present by our self-imposed slavery to unforgivingness over offences of the past—and that this explains almost all conflicts, from Northern Ireland via the Balkans to Kashmir. That is a form of slavery which we desperately need to abolish too.

A civilized society is one which never ceases having a discussion with itself about what human life should best be.

Tolerance is not only a key feature of liberalism, but—familiarly—its paradox too. Liberalism’s tolerance leaves the democracy of ideas to decide which among opposing viewpoints will prevail. The risk is the death of liberty itself, because those who live by hard and uncompromising views in political, moral and religious respects always, if given half a chance, silence liberals because liberalism, by its nature, threatens the hegemony they seek to impose.

Outside the formal disciplines of logic and mathematics there are no absolute certainties—except of course in religion, which abounds in them, to the extent that people commit murder for their sake.

Worst of all, symbols sometimes live on in their own right when what they symbolise has long been forgotten.

It is an oddity that those who invoke the sanctity of life are not as invariably opposed to war, arms manufacture and capital punishment as they are to euthanasia and abortion. Yet these latter are intended to help the living, while the former are designed to harm them. A proper sense of what makes death good or bad has to include this premise: that the quality of life is the sacred thing, not its mere quantity.

One can judge between candidates by remembering Georges Pompidou’s remark that a statesman is a politician who puts himself at his country’s service, whereas a politician is a statesman who puts the country at his own service—or that of a group or class, usually his own.

Among the striking ideas that everywhere blossom in Bloom is his view that Shakespeare’s imaginative resources “transcend those of Yahweh, Jesus and Allah”, and provide a grander alternative vision of human nature. He is right. He says that genuinely intelligent people do not think ideologically; right again.