Julian Baggini quotes
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“Atheists have to live with the knowledge that there is no salvation, no redemption, no second chances. Lives can go terribly wrong in ways that can never be put right.”
-- Julian BagginiSource : "Yes, life without God can be bleak. Atheism is about facing up to that". www.theguardian.com. March 9, 2012.
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“Even if we can agree that some things are natural and some are not, what follows from this? The answer is: nothing. There is no factual reason to suppose that what is natural is good (or at least better) and what is unnatural is bad (or at least worse).”
-- Julian Baggini -
“I don't think anyone who genuinely embraced sincerity, charity and modesty could be intolerant or divisive.”
-- Julian BagginiSource : "Give me a reasonable believer over an uncompromising atheist any day" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. March 15, 2012.
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“The greatest moral failing is to condemn something as a moral failing: no vice is worse than being judgmental.”
-- Julian BagginiSource : "The dangers of a closed mind" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. December 2, 2009.
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“You don't choose what you believe moment to moment, but choices you have made do shape what you come to believe.”
-- Julian BagginiSource : "Choice is rarely black and white" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. August 2, 2010.
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“Atheists should point out that life without God can be meaningful, moral and happy.”
-- Julian BagginiSource : "Yes, life without God can be bleak. Atheism is about facing up to that" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. March 9, 2012.
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“As a teenager, I increasingly had questions about religion to which I found no good answers.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Morality is more than possible without God, it is entirely independent of him.”
-- Julian BagginiSource : Julian Baggini (2009). “Atheism”, p.53, Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.
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“Truth and Truthfulness is an ambitious work, and its journeys into history give it a breadth unusual in these days of increased academic specialization. . . . William's book combines real history and fictional constructs to tell a revealing story that makes us reconsider the meaning of familiar concepts.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Justice can only be dispensed when you have all the facts in front of you.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Love is indeed, at root, the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science.”
-- Julian BagginiSource : "Philosophy v science: which can answer the big questions of life?" by Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss, www.theguardian.com. September 8, 2012.
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“Society needs both justice and compassion, a head and a heart, if it is to be civilised.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Yesterday's news feeds our fear that our neighbours are more likely than not to be bad eggs: benefit fraudsters, bogus asylum seekers, paedophiles or jihadist terrorists.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“We can't control whether we are rewarded for our endeavours, with cash or recognition. It is not up to us how much cash or time we get on Earth, but it is down to us how we spend it.”
-- Julian BagginiSource : " What good luck to miss out on a £64m lottery win" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. December 6, 2012.
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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.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Philosophy has to be enquiring; it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Science works because the phenomenon being described can be relied on to remain the same. Even in quantum physics, where phenomena are changed by observation, the way in which observation interferes is regular and falls within a limited range of possibilities. Human culture, however, has the nasty habit of never staying the same for very long.”
-- Julian Baggini -
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“The border between the natural and the supernatural, religion and philosophy, may not always be clear. But there are lines, and we should know and accept which side of it we are on.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“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 -
“'That which does not kill me makes me stronger' is not a law of the universe. What it can be, if we so choose, is a resolution.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Christmas is a rare occasion when we are reminded that we have obligations to people we did not choose to be related to, and that love is not just a spontaneous feeling but something we sometimes really have to work at, with people we may not even much like.”
-- Julian Baggini -
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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.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“The reason Buddhism can be so naturalised is because, stripped of its supernatural elements, its core teachings can be giving a sound, secular philosophical interpretation. In other words, it becomes a religion acceptable to the contemporary, naturalistic mind only when it ceases to be a religion.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“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.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“There are many things you shouldn't measure. Don't, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife!”
-- Julian Baggini -
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“There is such a thing as fanaticism, it is always wrong, and if you disagree, you're wrong too.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I'm tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“People should not expect the state to protect them from fraudsters. If we do, we get into the habit of neglecting our own powers of intellectual discernment.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I think, a pretty worthwhile practice and it is not something you can only do if you believe you are talking to an unseen creator.”
-- Julian Baggini -
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“The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“The simplest and clearest motivation for taking animal welfare seriously is the recognition that pain is in and of itself a bad thing, and that to inflict significant amounts of it unnecessarily is wrong.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe that that the universe is governed by benign forces, at some point you have to explain why there is so much suffering, misfortune and misery in the world.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“The supposed revelations of God to humanity through Christ, or the word of God to Mohammed through the angel Gabriel, had the power they did because they indicated new truths, new directions for followers.”
-- Julian Baggini -
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“Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“True virtue would never liken its rewards to points on a loyalty card, not because it is its own reward, but because it is not something we should practice to accrue future benefits.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Many people are never happier than when they get the opportunity to complain, while others are deeply unhappy with how things are but just accept the fact. Complaint occurs when we refuse to accept that things are wrong and we do something about it, even if that something is simply articulating our unease.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“It is often said that having gone through any kind of suffering tends to makes you appreciate life more and live more in the present. I'm not sure how universal or long-lasting these effects really are.”
-- Julian Baggini -
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“Wellbeing is a notion that entails our values about the good life, and questions of values are not ultimately scientific questions.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“I don't believe in God because certain reasons and arguments weigh more heavily in my mind than others, not because I have willfully decided to reject my creator, as many religious people seem to think. I could no more simply decide to believe in God than I could decide to like beetroot, just like that.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Anger clearly has its proper place at work, which is neither wholly absent nor ever present. The manager who is an emotional blank is just as hard to work for as the volcanic boss, and both can do great harm by setting an unhelpful example for what kind of emotional expression is expected and accepted.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Being able and willing to complain is what makes us rational and moral animals, capable of seeing and articulating the difference between how things are and how they should be.”
-- Julian BagginiSource : "Don't complain less - do it better" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. july 14, 2010.
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“Believers are right when they say that to understand a religion properly you need to get under its skin. But to understand it fully, you cannot stay there: you have to take a more objective view, too.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“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.”
-- Julian BagginiSource : "The science of ignorance" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. November 25, 2008.
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“If there's one thing that makes me cynical, it's optimists. They are just far too cynical about cynicism. If only they could see that cynics can be happy, constructive, even fun to hang out with, they might learn a thing or two.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“If you believe you are right, then you should believe that you can make the case that you're right. This requires you to deal with serious objections properly.”
-- Julian BagginiSource : "The dangers of a closed mind" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. December 02, 2009.
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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.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“We can take suffering to be an opportunity to learn and to grow. But if we are honest, we should remember that this is making the best of a bad job, and that minimising suffering takes priority over optimising its outcome.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“People do care where their food, or other goods, comes from, not merely if the price is right. And that means no business can afford to ignore the impacts their buying practices have on producers and on the perceptions and choices of consumers.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Dover's cliffs call to mind the Roman invasion; the Battle of Britain; our proximity to, yet difference from, mainland Europe; and international trade and exploration, both fair and exploitative.”
-- Julian Baggini -
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“Any celebration meal to which guests are invited, be they family or friends, should be an occasion for generous hospitality.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“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.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Cooking can be rewarding when it is a choice and no longer the onerous duty of the housewife, and when a dishwasher can lighten the load at the other end of the process.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Untested assumptions and lazy habits of thought can be shown up, once put in a spotlight of a different hue.”
-- Julian Baggini -
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“Constructive complaint requires only two things: that what you are complaining about should be different, and that it can be different. It sounds simple, but too often our protests fail this test.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Big sporting events and spectacles might give the national morale a shot in the arm, but they are too transient and taste-specific to stand as robust symbols of nationhood.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“True respect means taking other people's beliefs seriously and assuming they are adult and intelligent enough to be able to cope with it if you tell them, clearly and civility, why you think they are totally, utterly and disastrously wrong.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“True humility is expressed in deeds, not words. The humble are those who truly walk the same ground as everyone else - not necessarily with grovelling, hunched backs, but certainly not lording it over others, either.”
-- Julian Baggini -
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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.”
-- Julian BagginiSource : "In praise of cynicism" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. July 10, 2013.
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“The mark of a mature, psychologically healthy mind is indeed the ability to live with uncertainty and ambiguity, but only as much as there really is. Uncertainty is no virtue when the facts are clear, and ambiguity is mere obfuscation when more precise terms are applicable.”
-- Julian BagginiSource : "What is this foolish lust for uncertainty?" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. October 28, 2011.
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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.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“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.”
-- Julian Baggini -
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“Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“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.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Heathens are unredeemed outcasts from heaven who roam the planet without hope of surviving the deaths of their bodies. They may have values, but they are not secured by any divine source. Yet we embrace this because we think it represents the truth.”
-- Julian Baggini -
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“One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“No matter how convinced we are that someone is nasty, evil or just plain criminal, if they have not been convicted of any crime and support views that are upheld and defended by many law-abiding citizens, the only way to tackle them is through democratic debate.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“Most people believe, more or less, that the value of a human life is the same, irrespective of where on the planet it happens to find itself. But, of course, not every life has the same value for us.”
-- Julian Baggini -
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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.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“If we find it hard to believe that winning millions might not be so lucky after all, we just don't have a good enough imagination. If I fantasise about winning the lottery, it doesn't take long before all sorts of worrisome potential consequences occur to me.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“If there is an art of living, it is not something that can be taught timelessly. We have lessons to learn from Aristotle et al, for sure, but not if we simply uproot them from their epoch and stamp them into 21st-century soil.”
-- Julian Baggini -
“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.”
-- Julian Baggini -
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“I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.”
-- Julian Baggini
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