Colin McGinn Quotes

• Our treatment of animals, in every department, is deeply and systematically immoral. Becoming a vegetarian is only the most minimal ethical response to the magnitude of the evil.

  Colin McGinn

  Animal, Evil, Becoming

  Colin McGinn (1997). “Minds and Bodies: Philosophers and Their Ideas”, p.207, Oxford University Press

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• Once you were just insentient cells, no more aware of anything than your liver is now. Today you are brimming with consciousness. How did you make the grade? What catapulted you into consciousness? There must be some kind of natural process behind this astonishing leap, but this process is obscure.

  Colin McGinn

  Cells, Today, Kind

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• Faith is believing things by definition, which are not justified by reason. If it were justified by reason, it wouldn't be faith. It would just be ordinary belief. It's something you can't prove. That's what faith is, believing something you can't prove.

  Colin McGinn

  Believe, Ordinary, Definitions

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• Our general repression of matters disgusting prevents us facing up to a serious health problem. If we are the 'god that shits,' then we are in full flight from ourselves. I even wonder whether religion itself and the whole idea of a god is produced by our self-disgust.

  Colin McGinn

  Self, Ideas, Matter

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• Tolerating somebody else's beliefs is not failing to criticize them. It's not persecuting them for having those beliefs. That is absolutely important. You should not persecute people for their beliefs. It doesn't mean you can't criticize their beliefs.

  Colin McGinn

  Mean, People, Important

  "Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason", billmoyers.com. June 30, 2006.

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• Brains cause technology, society, art, science, soap operas, sin. A remarkable set of effects for such a small chunk of coagulated atoms.

  Colin McGinn

  Art, Technology, Brain

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• Bernard Williams has been a distinctive presence on the intellectual scene for more than three decades. . . . His writings do not offer the dubious exhilaration of grand philosophical theory, in which messy reality is tamed and caged, but the thrill of seeing pretension punctured by a kind of high-voltage common sense (backed up by impressive erudition). . . . There is no one in philosophy quite like him.

  Colin McGinn

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Writing

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• To me the ultimate sin was refusing to listen to reason.

  Colin McGinn

  Sin, Reason, Ultimate

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• It is an odd fact of evolution that we are the only species on Earth capable of creating science and philosophy. There easily could have been another species with some scientific talent, say that of the average human ten-year-old, but not as much as adult humans have; or one that is better than us at physics but worse at biology; or one that is better than us at everything. If there were such creatures all around us, I think we would be more willing to concede that human scientific intelligence might be limited in certain respects.

  Colin McGinn

  Philosophy, Thinking, Average

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