There is a beautiful and life-enhancing alternative outlook that offers insight, consolation, inspiration and meaning, which has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with the best, most generous, most sympathetic understanding of human reality.
— A. C. Grayling
Nothing is truly unnatural, because everything that exists, including human intelligence, is a product of nature. If human intelligence can devise ways for the genes from two men to result in a child, their doing so is an entirely natural event.
— A. C. Grayling
Inculcating the various competing - competing, note - falsehoods of the major faiths into small children is a form of child abuse, and a scandal.
— A. C. Grayling
It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.
— A. C. Grayling
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.
— A. C. Grayling
Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person's broad mind and narrow waist change places.
— A. C. Grayling
And I say, the meaning of life is what you make it. There will be as many different meaningful lives as there are people to live them.
— A. C. Grayling
Try lighting your house by prayer instead of electricity and see which one works.
— A. C. Grayling
Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.
— A. C. Grayling
Humanism is the philosophy that you should be a good guest at the dinner table of life.
— A. C. Grayling
Look at the blogosphere - the biggest lavatory wall in the universe, a palimpsest of graffiti and execration.
— A. C. Grayling
I do not believe that there are any such things as gods and goddesses, for exactly the same reasons as I do not believe there are fairies, goblins or sprites, and these reasons should be obvious to anyone over the age of ten.
— A. C. Grayling
To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.
— A. C. Grayling
If there is anything worth fearing in the world, it is living in such a way that gives one cause for regret in the end.
— A. C. Grayling
Everybody is entitled to believe. Churches have exactly the same right to exist as a football club, a trade union or a political party. But if you and I set up the Church of the Fairies of the Garden, then I don't think we should automatically be meeting the queen, be entitled to seats in the House of Lords or get public money for our fairy schools.
— A. C. Grayling
Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance.
— A. C. Grayling
A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it.
— A. C. Grayling
Religious apologists complain bitterly that atheists and secularists are aggressive and hostile in their criticism of them. I always say: look, when you guys were in charge, you didn't argue with us, you just burnt us at the stake. Now what we're doing is, we're presenting you with some arguments and some challenging questions, and you complain.
— A. C. Grayling
People should be left to believe what they like, so long as they harm no one else. Apart from normal expectations of politeness, it is not however clear why people should require their personal beliefs to be treated with special sensitivity by others, to the point that if others fail to tip-toe respectfully around them they will start throwing bombs.
— A. C. Grayling
To believe something in the face of evidence and against reason - to believe something by faith - is ignoble, irresponsible and ignorant, and merits the opposite of respect,
— A. C. Grayling
It doesn't have to be the Grand Canyon, it could be a city street, it could be the face of another human being - Everything is full of wonder.
— A. C. Grayling
Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends.
— A. C. Grayling
The media no longer hesitate to whip up lurid anxieties in order to increase sales, in the process undermining social confidence and multiplying fears.
— A. C. Grayling
Christian churches and Muslim groups have no more right to have their say than women's institutes or trades unions. The government has actively encouraged faith-based education, and therefore given a megaphone to religious voices and fundamentalists.
— A. C. Grayling
...mastery of the emotions is fundamental to a virtuous life.
— A. C. Grayling
The wise say that our failure is to form habits: for habit is the mark of a stereotyped world,
— A. C. Grayling
I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton's head.
— A. C. Grayling
I believe that decisions about the timing and manner of death belong to the individual as a human right. I believe it is wrong to withhold medical methods of terminating life painlessly and swiftly when an individual has a rational and clear-minded sustained wish to end his or her life.
— A. C. Grayling
Just as modern motorways have no room for ox-carts or wandering pedestrians, so modern society has little place for lives and ways that are too eccentric.
— A. C. Grayling