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.

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.

Anger clearly has its proper place at work, which is neither wholly absent nor ever present. The manager who is an emotional blank is just as hard to work for as the volcanic boss, and both can do great harm by setting an unhelpful example for what kind of emotional expression is expected and accepted.

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

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.

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

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