Julian Baggini Quotes & Sayings (Page 9)

“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.”

“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.”

“The modern believer is not suspicious enough, which is perhaps why, when they try to construct arguments in their defence, the convictions are left doing all the work and reason, debilitated by neglect, weakly fails to prop them up.”

“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.”

“Life is full of what-ifs, many of which could easily have been realities, had just a few things been different.”

“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.”

“Justice can only be dispensed when you have all the facts in front of you.”

“Instead of showing strangers kindness and giving them the benefit of the doubt, we increasingly show them only fear, and that is bad for us and them.”

“Wellbeing is a notion that entails our values about the good life, and questions of values are not ultimately scientific questions.”

“As a teenager, I increasingly had questions about religion to which I found no good answers.”