Quotes from A.C. Grayling

Humanism is the philosophy that you should be a good guest at the dinner table of life.

For the grace of bearing life's inevitable evils is itself agood, and makes goodness arise even from evils byopposing them or enduring them with courage.

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.

Try lighting your house by prayer instead of electricity and see which one works.

Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance.

Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.

Inculcating the various competing - competing, note - falsehoods of the major faiths into small children is a form of child abuse, and a scandal.

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.

Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends.

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.

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.

...mastery of the emotions is fundamental to a virtuous life.

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 human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it.

I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton's head.

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