Julian Baggini

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I t...”

“There is such a thing as fanaticism, it is always wrong, and if you disagree, you're wrong too.”

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

“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.”

“In my experience, those who make the biggest fuss about not spending much at Christmas are generally the ones who buy what they want and eat where they want 12 months a year.”

“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.”

“The supposed revelations of God to humanity through Christ, or the word of God to Mohammed through the angel Gabriel, had the power they did because they indicated new truths, new directions...”

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

“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...”

“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 infer...”

“I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contrad...”

“Science works because the phenomenon being described can be relied on to remain the same. Even in quantum physics, where phenomena are changed by observation, the way in which observation in...”

“No matter how convinced we are that someone is nasty, evil or just plain criminal, if they have not been convicted of any crime and support views that are upheld and defended by many law-abi...”

“It's not leftovers that are wasteful, but those who either don't know what to do with them or can't be bothered.”

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

“It is often said that having gone through any kind of suffering tends to makes you appreciate life more and live more in the present. I'm not sure how universal or long-lasting these effects...”

“Too often, complaint is not about principled objection on moral grounds, but opportunistic objection on grounds of self-interest. To rectify this, we need to work on mastering the art of com...”