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.

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.

I am very Aristotelian in approach - not in detail - so I always find I'm saying things that get people frustrated like 'It's a matter of balance and judgement'. To a lot of philosophers these are terrible words because they're admitting of vagueness and uncertainty. The more I've done philosophy, the more I've become convinced that that is the way it is.

Many people are never happier than when they get the opportunity to complain, while others are deeply unhappy with how things are but just accept the fact. Complaint occurs when we refuse to accept that things are wrong and we do something about it, even if that something is simply articulating our unease.

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

Waiting is so unusual that many of us can't stand in a queue for 30 seconds without getting out our phones to check for messages or to Google something.

It's not leftovers that are wasteful, but those who either don't know what to do with them or can't be bothered.