Top 100 Julian Baggini Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

52. “The capacity to make free choices is not something we either have entirely or not at all. Rather, choices become freer the more they are the result of our own capacity to reflect on and assess facts and arguments.”

— Julian Baggini

53. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

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

— Julian Baggini

55. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

56. “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-abiding citizens, the only way to tackle them is through democratic debate.”

— Julian Baggini

57. “Morality is more than possible without God, it is entirely independent of him.”

— Julian Baggini

58. “We can’t control whether we are rewarded for our endeavours, with cash or recognition. It is not up to us how much cash or time we get on Earth, but it is down to us how we spend it.”

— Julian Baggini

59. “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 complaint.”

— Julian Baggini

60. “The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy.”

— Julian Baggini

61. “Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.”

— Julian Baggini

62. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

63. “Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren’t that bad and are bound to get better anyway.”

— Julian Baggini

64. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

65. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

66. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

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

— Julian Baggini

68. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

69. “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 contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.”

— Julian Baggini

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

— Julian Baggini

71. “I don’t think anyone who genuinely embraced sincerity, charity and modesty could be intolerant or divisive.”

— Julian Baggini

72. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

73. “People should not expect the state to protect them from fraudsters. If we do, we get into the habit of neglecting our own powers of intellectual discernment.”

— Julian Baggini

74. “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 really are.”

— Julian Baggini

75. “Yesterday’s news feeds our fear that our neighbours are more likely than not to be bad eggs: benefit fraudsters, bogus asylum seekers, paedophiles or jihadist terrorists.”

— Julian Baggini

76. “The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives.”

— Julian Baggini

77. “No one has ever understood anything better by assuming that there is no reason for why it is the way it is.”

— Julian Baggini

78. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

79. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

80. “No genuine choice is ever simply a matter of the arbitrary exercise of will. Take your choice of lunch today. You can’t decide to want anything, but what you want will at least in part be a result of a series of other choices and judgments you’ve made in your life to date.”

— Julian Baggini

81. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

82. “Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality.”

— Julian Baggini

83. “Our desire to preserve is a form of denial about our own mortality. The fact that art can indure longer than people has lead some to seek a form of proxy-immortality through it. If we accept that art is mortal too, and that nothing is truly permanent, maybe we can see more clearly where the value of art and life is to be fount – in experiencing them.”

— Julian Baggini

84. “You should protest about the views of people you disagree with over major moral issues, and argue them down, but you should not try to silence them, however repugnant you find them. That is the bitter pill free speech requires us to swallow.”

— Julian Baggini

85. “The reason Buddhism can be so naturalised is because, stripped of its supernatural elements, its core teachings can be giving a sound, secular philosophical interpretation. In other words, it becomes a religion acceptable to the contemporary, naturalistic mind only when it ceases to be a religion.”

— Julian Baggini

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

— Julian Baggini

87. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

88. “It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim ‘never say never’ is one of the most important in ethics.”

— Julian Baggini

89. “Trade has played a vital role in the social evolution of humankind. It allowed people to specialise, which raises both skill levels and efficiency. It brought people from different lands together, co-operating rather than competing over resources.”

— Julian Baggini

90. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

91. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

92. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

93. “This is the deal: we are happy to single out people as superior just as long as they don’t accept the description themselves. We want heroes and idols, but we also want egalitarianism, and that requires proclamations of humility from our gods.”

— Julian Baggini

94. “We do wrong willfully when we fail to think hard about whether what we’re doing is right.”

— Julian Baggini

95. “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.”

— Julian Baggini

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

— Julian Baggini

97. “One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.”

— Julian Baggini

98. “Is it how we feel or how we think that is more important in determining whether we are morally good human beings?”

— Julian Baggini

99. “This line of reasoning would seem to lead to the absurd conclusion that the world is filled with noises no one hears, colours no one sees, flavours no one tastes, textures no one feels, as well as a host of other sense experience we cannot even imagine. For there is no end in which creatures might possibly perceive the world.”

— Julian Baggini

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

— Julian Baggini