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Quotes from Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God — A. C. Grayling

born 1949 United Kingdom

← All quotes by A. C. Grayling

39 quotes

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

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

Power’s tendency to corrupt is a function of the work it does in liberating man’s worse characteristics.

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

There is no greater social evil than religion. It is the cancer in the body of humanity.

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

“Evil” is first and foremost a religious notion. It means whatever a religion dislikes.

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

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

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

Symbols have the unfortunate power to acquire the importance of what they symbolise.

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

“The first principle of a civilised state,” said Walter Lippmann, “is that power is legitimate only when it is under contract.”

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

But in vitriolic conflicts there is neither appropriateness nor proportion, so the arguments of history and justice become lost in vengeance.

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

Thus justice is not equality but equity; as Aristotle says, “Injustice arises when equals are treated unequally, and unequals are treated equally.”

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

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

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

The one thing that is more dangerous than true ignorance is the illusion of understanding.

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

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

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

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

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

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

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

The growth of civilisation is measured by refinements of living and increasing distance from the immediacies of survival.

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

Prudery expresses itself most forcibly as censorship.

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

The media no longer hesitate to whip up lurid anxieties in order to increase sales, in the process undermining social confidence and multiplying fears.

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

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.

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

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 right.

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

Of all the questions we can ask ourselves the most important is: how is one best to live?

Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: A. C. Grayling (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.