Aristotle’s thought is that to live well and flourishingly, a person needs to be educated—which means: informed, and able to think. He is of course r… - A. C. Grayling

In one collective form of insanity, whole populations of people rise from sleep at about the same time each day, move in great herds to locations at some distance from their home territory, perform repetitive manoeuvers there, return home when evening falls, slump in front of a flickering coloured light, and after a while fall asleep again. They repeat the process day after day for decades. The disease is called “normal life”, and variations from it are regarded as eccentric; if the variations are marked enough they are even called “madness” and “delusion”.
This thought is intended to show that what counts as abnormal is a relative matter.

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.