40 quotes
Part of the problem facing teaching in the contemporary world is that its status as a profession has been undermined by the contemptible view that only what makes money is admirable.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
Folly tends to predominate over wisdom because it is usually easier to understand and more convenient (or exciting) to believe; but a little reflection usually sifts one from the other.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
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.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
Tarot is not properly speaking, a divinatory practice, but a complex card game, invented in the fifteenth century, which somewhat like bridge, turns on capturing tricks.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
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.
On the best view, justice is fairness.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
Confusion is the beginning of wisdom.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
Emancipation is always at risk from the usual sources—demagogues, civil and international war, the tenure that superstitions have over the human imagination—so there are no guarantees that progress will continue.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
And sometimes Bloom is thunderously wrong—which is itself valuable, because he thereby ignites explosions of disagreement that prompt thought; and anyone who makes us think does us a service.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
Remembrance Day should therefore also be about war’s causes: ugly faiths, intolerance, lust for power and revenge, mutual hatreds prompted by historical accidents or differences of colour, custom or culture.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
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.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
When the Bible was the only book people knew, they naturally thought it embodied all that is true; but when their reading expanded, and with it the world, and a sense of other times, other voices, other possibilities and points of view, that authority could not last.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
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.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
Credulity, insecurity and desire form a potent combination in the human psyche. Together they make us eager to believe any nonsense if it purports to yield a glimpse of the future, or offers even the slenderest hope of success in love or fortune. On this rests the livelihood of many tricksters and charlatans—the crystal-ball gazers, palmists, astrologers, and readers of tarot cards.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
Politicians react to terrorism by limiting liberties….Zealots, most especially religious zealots, hate the liberality of liberal society; their terrorism aims to destroy it. To start putting handcuffs on ourselves is to achieve their goals for them.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
If there is a deity of the kind imagined by votaries of the big mail-order religions such as Christianity and Islam, and if this deity is the creator of all things, then it is responsible for cancer, meningitis, millions of spontaneous abortions every day, mass killings of people in floods and earthquakes—and too great a mountain of other natural evils to list besides.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
Sceptics and idlers think that their one vote will make no difference either way. They are wrong—wrong both in practice: some elections turn on mere handfuls of votes, as witness Al Gore’s fate in Florida—and in principle: for every refusal to vote is an act of self-disenfranchisement in which a citizen, betraying the endeavours of history, demotes himself into a serf.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
They beautifully illustrate the recipe for nonsense, which is: take something strange-looking, whose meaning is now forgotten, and liberally stir in imagination and superstition. In this respect the divinatory tarot is a paradigm of all superstitions and wonderfully illustrates humanity’s clever, ingenious, and intricate capacity for folly.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
Anger is the chief emotion driving the deadly reciprocity of reprisal and revenge which has engulfed the recent history of the Middle East. The other dominating emotions of that tragedy—grief and terror—would bring the violence to an end without it. But anger, bitter and implacable when the only response it gets is anger returned, feeds on its reflection until it becomes insanity.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)
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.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)