Mary Midgley Quotes

#1. We don't live in an ideal world, but in a world dominated by sinful, selfish desires.

Billy Graham

#2. My heart is in your hands, keep me safe.

K.I. Lynn

#3. None of us can study anything properly unless we do it with our whole being.

Mary Midgley

#4. Evolution is the creation-myth of our age. By telling us our origin it shapes our views of what we are. It influences not just our thought, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological theory.

Mary Midgley

#5. The only thing that is unqualifiedly given is the total pervasive quality; and the objection to calling it "given" is that the word suggests something to which it is given, mind or thought or consciousness or whatever, as well possibly as something that gives.

John Dewey

#6. To mobilize yourself, decide what you want, determine what will get you what you want, then act - do what will get you what you want most to achieve.

Nido R. Qubein

#7. If God meant for pictures to be sent through the air He'd have never would have given us cinema. Or the national gallery.

Alan Bradley

#8. Few scientists would treat their cars as badly as they treat their conceptual schemes.

Mary Midgley

#9. Education is a change of mind, an acceptance, and an assimilation.

Debasish Mridha

#10. I'm really grateful to Ryan Murphy for so much because he's fearless. He's so confident. He has a very unusual and unique way of seeing the world sometimes, and he's somehow able to translate that into entertainment for the masses, at the right time in pop culture.

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

#11. The idea that being scientific simply means being irreligious is a particularly naive one. It has caused a lot of confusion and will get us nowhere.

Mary Midgley

#12. With age, you get to a place where you don't want to knock people out. You just want to give people a hug.

Vin Diesel

#13. We're getting hurt, but I'm a long-term investor.

Al-Waleed Bin Talal

#14. If you don't trust anyone, they can't let you down.

Simon R. Green

#15. To think that only faultless people are worthwhile seems like an incredible exclusion of almost everything of deep value in the human saga. Sometimes I can't believe the narrowness that has been attributed to God in terms of what he would approve and disapprove.

Marilynne Robinson

#16. Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.

Mary Midgley

#17. Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe, but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated.

Mary Midgley

#18. By contrast, if one conceives the idea of human rights as centring on the notion that each individual is completely autonomous and should have entire control over its own fate, this seems to me unrealistic even for human beings, and far too one-sided to be used as a central tool of morality.

Mary Midgley

#19. The right most valued by all civilized men is the right to be left alone.

Louis D. Brandeis

#20. I'm afraid the SS's relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.

Christopher Hitchens

#21. Morally as well as physically, there is only one world, and we all have to live in it

Mary Midgley

#22. It is extremely urgent to try and adapt our thoughts realistically to a world which has no fixed general direction either upward or downward, but is likely to vary largely according to what we do.

Mary Midgley

#23. The trouble with human beings is not really that they love themselves too much; they ought to love themselves more. The trouble is simply that they don't love others enough.
The End of Anthropocentrism?

Mary Midgley

#24. There is assuredly no more effectual method of clearing up one's own mind on any subject than by talking it over, so to speak, with men of real power and grasp, who have considered it from a totally different point of view.

Thomas Huxley

#25. The world in which the kestrel moves, the world that it sees, is, and always will be, entirely beyond us. That there are such worlds all around us is an essential feature of our world.

Mary Midgley

#26. Go fuck yourself," I replied, always the lady. "I'm staying here.

Ava Gardner