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All Quotes by author - Julian Baggini

" Accepting that the world is full of uncertainty and ambiguity does not and should not stop people from being pretty sure about a lot of things. "

" Anger clearly has its proper place at work, which is neither wholly absent nor ever present. The manager who is an emotional blank is just as hard to work for as the volcanic boss, and both can do great harm by setting an unhelpful example for what kind of emotional expression is expected and accepted. "

" Any celebration meal to which guests are invited, be they family or friends, should be an occasion for generous hospitality. "

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

" Atheists have to live with the knowledge that there is no salvation, no redemption, no second chances. Lives can go terribly wrong in ways that can never be put right. "

" Atheists should point out that life without God can be meaningful, moral and happy. "

" Being able and willing to complain is what makes us rational and moral animals, capable of seeing and articulating the difference between how things are and how they should be. "

" Being a good neighbour is about compassion, which is as warm-blooded as justice is cool-headed. "

" Being virtuous is wonderful thing, but feeling virtuous is a shortcut to vice. "

" Believers are right when they say that to understand a religion properly you need to get under its skin. But to understand it fully, you cannot stay there: you have to take a more objective view, too. "

" Big sporting events and spectacles might give the national morale a shot in the arm, but they are too transient and taste-specific to stand as robust symbols of nationhood. "

" Christmas is a rare occasion when we are reminded that we have obligations to people we did not choose to be related to, and that love is not just a spontaneous feeling but something we sometimes really have to work at, with people we may not even much like. "

" Constructive complaint requires only two things: that what you are complaining about should be different, and that it can be different. It sounds simple, but too often our protests fail this test. "

" Cooking can be rewarding when it is a choice and no longer the onerous duty of the housewife, and when a dishwasher can lighten the load at the other end of the process. "

" Daily life is better when it involves interactions with real people who have a personal investment in their labour, like shopkeepers, than it is with someone 'just doing my job' or the infernal self-checkout machine. "

" Dover's cliffs call to mind the Roman invasion; the Battle of Britain; our proximity to, yet difference from, mainland Europe; and international trade and exploration, both fair and exploitative. "

" Economics is uncertain because its fundamental subject matter is not money but human action. That's why economics is not the dismal science, it's no science at all. "

" From time to time, it is worth wandering around the fuzzy border regions of what you do, if only to remind yourself that no human activity is an island. "

" Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing. "

" Heathens are unredeemed outcasts from heaven who roam the planet without hope of surviving the deaths of their bodies. They may have values, but they are not secured by any divine source. Yet we embrace this because we think it represents the truth. "

" I don't believe in God because certain reasons and arguments weigh more heavily in my mind than others, not because I have willfully decided to reject my creator, as many religious people seem to think. I could no more simply decide to believe in God than I could decide to like beetroot, just like that. "

" I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere. "

" I don't think anyone who genuinely embraced sincerity, charity and modesty could be intolerant or divisive. "

" If I hammer my own thumb while doing some DIY, it's not nice, but it's not the end of the world. To care obsessively about similar levels of discomfort in animals seems to be a case of mistaken moral priorities. "

" If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it's done for us lately. "

" If there is an art of living, it is not something that can be taught timelessly. We have lessons to learn from Aristotle et al, for sure, but not if we simply uproot them from their epoch and stamp them into 21st-century soil. "

" If there's one thing that makes me cynical, it's optimists. They are just far too cynical about cynicism. If only they could see that cynics can be happy, constructive, even fun to hang out with, they might learn a thing or two. "

" If we find it hard to believe that winning millions might not be so lucky after all, we just don't have a good enough imagination. If I fantasise about winning the lottery, it doesn't take long before all sorts of worrisome potential consequences occur to me. "

" If we now find ourselves looking down on the cheap and convenient, it is only because we now have better things which are affordable. "

" 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. "

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