Quotes from Kenan Malik

Humans are, as Sartre put it, 'condemned to be free'. To insist that science, or God, objectively defines moral values is to abandon our responsibility as human beings to make such judgments.

As universities have turned into businesses, so students have turned into consumers.

Jesus reveals salvation, as the Marxist critic and occasional atheist Terry Eagleton observes, to be a matter not 'of cult, law and ritual', but of 'feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants, visiting the sick, and protecting the poor, orphaned and widowed from the violence of the rich'.

This, for Homer, is the tragedy of being human: to desire freedom, and be tortured by a sense of autonomy, and yet be imprisoned by forces beyond our control.

Even the most minor inconvenience, Chrysippus suggested, had been carefully designed by God for our benefit.

There is more to the human mind than its evolutionary heritage.

Through me the way into the city of woe: Through me the way into eternal pain: Through me the way among the lost. Justice moved my maker on high Divine power made me, Wisdom supreme, and primeval Love. Before me nothing was but things eternal And eternal I endure. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

What is called 'offence to a community' is more often than not actually a struggle within communities.

To talk of humans as 'transcendent' is not to ascribe to them spiritual properties. It is, rather, to recognize that as subjects we have the ability to transform our selves, our natures, our world—an ability denied to any other physical being.

Insofar as it is true, the idea that our actions or beliefs are merely one link in a causal link that runs back to the beginning of the universe is making a trivial claim. Insofar as it is saying something profound, the claim is untrue.

What is Empire but the predominance of race?' the English liberal imperialist and prime minister Lord Rosebery observed.

Humans are, as Sartre put it, 'condemned to be free'. To insist that science, or God, objectively defines moral values is to abandon our responsibility as human beings to make such judgments.

Education is not a product but a relationship and a process; a relationship between student and lecturer, and process by which knowledge transforms the individual.

The first was that culture, not biology, was the principal force that shaped human affairs; the second, that humanity comprised a multitude of cultures that could not be ranked on an evolutionary scale, but each of which had to be understood in its own terms.

Racial ideology was the inevitable product of the persistence of differences of rank, class and peoples in a society that had accepted the concept of equality.

Faith, wrote Origen (185–245), perhaps the first great Christian theologian, is 'useful for the multitude', a means of teaching 'those who cannot abandon everything and pursue a study of rational argument to believe without thinking out their reasons'.

Even the most minor inconvenience, Chrysippus suggested, had been carefully designed by God for our benefit. God had created bedbugs to 'awaken us out of our sleep' and mice to encourage humans to be tidy.