Colin McGinn famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Our treatment of animals, in every department, is deeply and systematically immoral. Becoming a vegetarian is only the most minimal ethical response to the magnitude of the evil.
-- Colin McGinn

#Animal #Evil #Becoming
Faith is believing things by definition, which are not justified by reason. If it were justified by reason, it wouldn't be faith. It would just be ordinary belief. It's something you can't prove. That's what faith is, believing something you can't prove.
-- Colin McGinn

#Believe #Ordinary #Definitions
Tolerating somebody else's beliefs is not failing to criticize them. It's not persecuting them for having those beliefs. That is absolutely important. You should not persecute people for their beliefs. It doesn't mean you can't criticize their beliefs.
-- Colin McGinn

#Mean #People #Important
Brains cause technology, society, art, science, soap operas, sin. A remarkable set of effects for such a small chunk of coagulated atoms.
-- Colin McGinn

#Art #Technology #Brain
To me the ultimate sin was refusing to listen to reason.
-- Colin McGinn

#Sin #Reason #Ultimate
Bernard Williams has been a distinctive presence on the intellectual scene for more than three decades. . . . His writings do not offer the dubious exhilaration of grand philosophical theory, in which messy reality is tamed and caged, but the thrill of seeing pretension punctured by a kind of high-voltage common sense (backed up by impressive erudition). . . . There is no one in philosophy quite like him.
-- Colin McGinn

#Philosophy #Philosophical #Writing
Once you were just insentient cells, no more aware of anything than your liver is now. Today you are brimming with consciousness. How did you make the grade? What catapulted you into consciousness? There must be some kind of natural process behind this astonishing leap, but this process is obscure.
-- Colin McGinn

#Cells #Today #Kind
Our general repression of matters disgusting prevents us facing up to a serious health problem. If we are the 'god that shits,' then we are in full flight from ourselves. I even wonder whether religion itself and the whole idea of a god is produced by our self-disgust.
-- Colin McGinn

#Self #Ideas #Matter
It is an odd fact of evolution that we are the only species on Earth capable of creating science and philosophy. There easily could have been another species with some scientific talent, say that of the average human ten-year-old, but not as much as adult humans have; or one that is better than us at physics but worse at biology; or one that is better than us at everything. If there were such creatures all around us, I think we would be more willing to concede that human scientific intelligence might be limited in certain respects.
-- Colin McGinn

#Philosophy #Thinking #Average

Therefore a person fully absorbed in the bodily concept of life is surely killing himself by not making spiritual progress. Such a person is called pasu-ghna. Especially excluded from spiritual life are the animal hunters, who are not interested in hearing and chanting the holy name of the Lord. Such hunters are always unhappy, both in this life and in the next. It is therefore said that a hunter should neither die nor live because for such persons both living and dying are troublesome.
Indulgence in animal killing for the taste of the tongue is the grossest kind of ignorance
Animals keep you company when you're really lonely. It helps because when you have a friend around who always likes you no matter what - it's harder to feel bad or down.
I'm a vegetarian and very much active in regards to how I feel about animal rights and protecting animals and giving animals a voice. But at the same time, I appreciate and respect other people's decisions to eat meat. The only thing that I hope is that people are educated, that they're aware, that they're living a conscious lifestyle.
We need a way of life in which the animal, guided by reason, may romp but will not bite.
There is evil in the world, but it can be overcome through repentance Âand aspiration, and therein lies the true meaning and adventure of life.
As I am becoming older, the only thing that speeds up is time.
Obviously I was challenged by becoming a Naval aviator, by landing aboard aircraft carriers and so on.
You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.
The American lives even more for his goals, for the future, than the European. Life for him is always becoming, never being.

Colin McGinn famous quotes

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