Julian Baggini

“Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger.”

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

“The truly humble feel the ground beneath their feet every day and do not only become aware of it when held aloft or pushed down to their knees.”

“On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.”

“Seek first what is true and of value, and then whatever happiness follows will be of the appropriate quantity and, more importantly, quality.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Untested assumptions and lazy habits of thought can be shown up, once put in a spotlight of a different hue.”

“It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.”

“Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging.”

“Looking out over the port of Dover, with the endless steam of boats coming in and out, every British citizen is reminded that belonging here has never been about blood or genes. It's simply about being at home on this discrete island and being aware of the privileges and responsibilities that brings.”

“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.”

“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.”

“People do care where their food, or other goods, comes from, not merely if the price is right. And that means no business can afford to ignore the impacts their buying practices have on producers and on the perceptions and choices of consumers.”

“No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science.”

“Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe that that the universe is governed by benign forces, at some point you have to explain why there is so much suffering, misfortune and misery in the world.”

“Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.”

“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.”

“Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.”