Top 100 Julian Baggini Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Julian Baggini

2. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

3. “Society needs both justice and compassion, a head and a heart, if it is to be civilised.”

— Julian Baggini

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

— Julian Baggini

5. “To become a stoic is to endorse the truthfulness of its world view and accept its prescription for how you ought to live, not just to like how it makes you feel.”

— Julian Baggini

6. “I am only me for practical purposes.”

— Julian Baggini

7. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

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

— Julian Baggini

9. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

10. “Love is indeed, at root, the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones.”

— Julian Baggini

11. “True humility is expressed in deeds, not words. The humble are those who truly walk the same ground as everyone else – not necessarily with grovelling, hunched backs, but certainly not lording it over others, either.”

— Julian Baggini

12. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

13. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

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

— Julian Baggini

15. “Nature deals the cards without thought or care, and there is no point in blaming the dealer. All we can do is make the best of the hands we have been dealt.”

— Julian Baggini

16. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

17. “Philosophy has to be enquiring; it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.”

— Julian Baggini

18. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

19. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

20. “The simplest and clearest motivation for taking animal welfare seriously is the recognition that pain is in and of itself a bad thing, and that to inflict significant amounts of it unnecessarily is wrong.”

— Julian Baggini

21. “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 for followers.”

— Julian Baggini

22. “True respect means taking other people’s beliefs seriously and assuming they are adult and intelligent enough to be able to cope with it if you tell them, clearly and civility, why you think they are totally, utterly and disastrously wrong.”

— Julian Baggini

23. “Being virtuous is wonderful thing, but feeling virtuous is a shortcut to vice.”

— Julian Baggini

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

— Julian Baggini

25. “Real life is about accepting ups and downs, the good and the bad, the possibility of failure as well as the ambition to succeed. Atheism speaks to the truth about our human nature because it recognizes all this and does not seek to shield us from the truth by myth and superstition.”

— Julian Baggini

26. “The mark of a mature, psychologically healthy mind is indeed the ability to live with uncertainty and ambiguity, but only as much as there really is. Uncertainty is no virtue when the facts are clear, and ambiguity is mere obfuscation when more precise terms are applicable.”

— Julian Baggini

27. “You don’t choose what you believe moment to moment, but choices you have made do shape what you come to believe.”

— Julian Baggini

28. “Waiting is so unusual that many of us can’t stand in a queue for 30 seconds without getting out our phones to check for messages or to Google something.”

— Julian Baggini

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

— Julian Baggini

30. “Philosophy without criticism is like hunting deer without a shotgun, so, if you want people to like you, avoid robust philosophical debate.”

— Julian Baggini

31. “True virtue would never liken its rewards to points on a loyalty card, not because it is its own reward, but because it is not something we should practice to accrue future benefits.”

— Julian Baggini

32. “The greatest moral failing is to condemn something as a moral failing: no vice is worse than being judgmental.”

— Julian Baggini

33. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

34. “When you try to cool down hot emotions, what tends to happen is that you end up either repressing them or losing them altogether. Neither is desirable. Without emotion, much social interaction loses its meaning or changes for the worse.”

— Julian Baggini

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

— Julian Baggini

36. “The very act of questioning whether you exist proves you do, because you must be there for the doubt to be entertained in the first place.”

— Julian Baggini

37. “Stress means something different if it is the result of rewarding work rather than struggling to keep the family out of debt.”

— Julian Baggini

38. “Rules matter, and to be rules they need to be universal in form: always do this, never do that. But it is foolish to rule out in advance the possibility that an occasion might arise when normal rules just don’t apply. Rules are not there to be broken, but sometimes break them we must.”

— Julian Baggini

39. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

40. “You know what a word means when you know how to use it, not what its definition is. That is why we can understand and use all sorts of words that we struggle to define clearly if we are put on the spot and asked to do so.”

— Julian Baggini

41. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

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

— Julian Baggini

43. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

44. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

45. “The idea that there is a sharp boundary between our true inner selves and the outside world is pervasive but highly questionable. The boundaries of the self might well be more porous than we ordinarily think.”

— Julian Baggini

46. “When you do the right thing, but not to any particular person, we instinctively feel that we have earned some sort of pay back. Since no-one will do that for us, we opt for self-service reciprocation.”

— Julian Baggini

47. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

48. “The border between the natural and the supernatural, religion and philosophy, may not always be clear. But there are lines, and we should know and accept which side of it we are on.”

— Julian Baggini

49. “The idea that the mind can extend even beyond the body is an intriguing one, and is bound to become more pressing as we increasingly develop technologies that augment our natural abilities.”

— Julian Baggini

50. “We can take suffering to be an opportunity to learn and to grow. But if we are honest, we should remember that this is making the best of a bad job, and that minimising suffering takes priority over optimising its outcome.”

— Julian Baggini