“Ignorance is ignorance, not a licence to believe what we like.”

“I had a pupil who turned in a couple of well-crafted essays on Descartes, subjecting "cogito ergo sum" to effective and damaging criticism...This was the sort of thing the best students did, and it was thought to be Oxford intellectual training at its most sophistocated. But I said to him, "If all the criticisms you've made of Descartes are valid-- and on the whole I think they are-- why are we spending our time here now discussing him? Why have you just devoted a fortnight of your life to reading his main works and writing two essays about them? ...More to the point: if all these things are wrong with his ideas--and I think they are-- why is his name known to every educated person in the Western world today, three and a half centuries after his death? ...[text].. The pupil saw my point straight away but was at a loss to answer...[text].. Along such lines as these I made it a conscious principle of my teaching, whatever the subject, to get the pupil first of all to do the necessary learning, and the detailed work of analysis and criticism, and then to raise "Yes, but what is the point of all this-- why are we doing it?" questions. And students almost invariably found that it was only when that stage was reached that the really exciting interest and importantance of what it was they were doing opened up before their eyes.”

“Like the character Moliere who discovered to his astonishment that he had been speaking prose all his life, I discovered to my astonishment that I had been immersed in philosophical problems all my life. And I had been drawn into the same problems as great philosophers by the same felt need to make sense of the world...The chief difference between me and them, of course, was that whereas they had something to offer by way of solutions to the problems, I had failed even to formulate very rich or sophistocated versions of the problems, let alone work my way through to defensible solutions for them. In consequence I fell on their work like a starving man on food, and it has done a geat deal to nourish and sustain me ever since.”

“I have my issues with organized religion and cafeteria-style religion, picking and choosing certain dogmas that apply or seem ethical while ignoring the oppressive, non-inclusive, and outdated ones as if they don't exist. The trouble began a long time ago when we tried to bring God indoors. Leave it to mankind to screw it up and to Christians to turn heaven into an exclusive country club.”

“He was a true English butler, just like his father before him, and his grandfather before that. Three generations; bred and butlered.”

“Bildon killed Tad. Look, there’s his dagger hidden in the pot of semolina. There’s the proof,” he screamed. “It’s in the pudding.”What an idiot, thought Madrick as he raced up the steps, the proof is always in the eating.”

“Im not a baker so im not going to sugar coat it.”