University Of Oxford Faculty

"Remember on the other hand that, though neither Reformers in the sixteenth century or Puritans in the seventeenth century strove in any sense for "religious liberty," or for anything but to set up one intolerant system instead of another, yet every blow of the kind was a gain for religious liberty in the long run."

"What was really uncommon in Freeman was the...entire absence of any pretence of caring for things which he did not really care for. He was in this, as in all other matters, a singularly simple and truthful man, never seeking to appear other than as he was, and finding it hard to understand why other people should not be equally simple and direct. This directness made him express himself with an absence of reserve which sometimes gave offence; and the restriction of his interest to a few topics—wide ones, to be sure—seemed to increase the intensity of his devotion to those few."

"I know that to run down Lord Macaulay is the fashion of the day. I have heard some speak against him who have a right to speak; I have heard many more who have none. I at least feel that I have none; I do not see how any man can have the right who has not gone through the same work through which Macaulay went, or at least through some no less thorough work of a kindred sort. I can see Macaulay's great and obvious faults as well as any man; I know as well as any man the cautions with which his brilliant pictures must be studied; but I cannot feel that I have any right to speak lightly of one to whom I owe so much in the matter of actual knowledge, and to whom I owe more than to any man as the master of historical narrative. Read a page of Macaulay; scan well his minute accuracy in every name and phrase and title; contrast his English undefiled with the slipshod jargon which from our newspapers has run over into our books; dwell on the style which finds a fitting phrase in our own tongue to set forth every thought, the style which never uses a single word out of its true and honest meaning; turn the pages of the book in which no man ever read a sentence a second time because he failed to catch its meaning the first time, but in which all of us must have read many sentences a second or a twentieth time for the sheer pleasure of dwelling on the clearness, the combined fulness and terseness, on the just relation of every word to every other, on the happily chosen epithet, or the sharply pointed sarcasm ."

"At Trieste I saw Burton. ... I remember him, thirty-five years ago, the wildest-looking creature; now he is shorn and looks quite respectable. He has killed more men than most people; but they were mainly Turks."

"I believe I hate the British army more than any institution in being. My loathing for it is in exact proportion to my admiration for the men who fought at Senlac and Muratovizza. Forwhy, if you have conscription or landwehr, a man simply obeys the law; if the war is unjust, it is simply like obeying or enforcing any bad law. ... The fault rests not with him, but with those who send him. But in our army every man, officer and private, is there by his own choice. He is not consulted about that particular war; but he chose the man-slaying trade, when he might have chosen some other; so he is, what the conscript or landwehr man is not, responsible for being there. I grant that this is rather ideal; and, as circumstances go I don't rate the responsibility very high, if they only keep quiet. But when they came back, strutting and swaggering, talking as if they had done something to be proud of instead of ashamed, I hold that they made themselves accomplices with the Jew in the murther of the Zulus. ... I don't value skill or bravery, any more than height, strength, or beauty, unless they are used to a good purpose."

"This would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it."

"But we are told that English interests demand it; that our dominion in India will be imperilled, that the civilized world will crumble into atoms, if a Russian ship should be seen in the Mediterranean Sea. If it be so, then I say, perish the interests of England, perish our dominion in India, rather than that we should strike a blow or speak a word on behalf of the wrong against the right."

"One can speak of Freeman as forming a view of English history based on his political prejudices; it would be at least equally justifiable and perhaps more accurate to speak of his forming political prejudices based on his view of English history. For The Norman Conquest was certainly not, as Round's criticism may be taken to imply, written primarily to support a political case. Freeman's Teutonic racialism, his liberal-democratic bias, and his general view of early English history were inextricably entangled to form a general view of the world. The Norman Conquest was the precipitate of the enthusiasms, obsessions, and prejudices of a lifetime... [I]t would be truer to say that Freeman admired Gladstone because he admired Harold than, as Round insinuates, vice versa."

"As far at least as our race is concerned, freedom is everywhere older than bondage; we may add that toleration is older than intolerance. Our ancient history is the possession of the Liberal, who, as being ever ready to reform, is the true Conservative, not of the self-styled Conservative who, by refusing to reform, does all he can to bring on destruction."

"That Mahometanism is essentially an obstructive, intolerant system, supplying just sufficient good to stand in the way of greater good. It has consecrated despotism; it has consecrated polygamy; it has consecrated slavery. It has declared war against every other creed; it has claimed to be at least dominant in every land. And in one sense it has rightly so claimed. So long as a Mahometan nation is dominant and conquering, so long is it great and glorious after its own standard. When it ceases to have an enemy to contend against, it sinks into sluggish stupidity and into a barbarism far viler than that of the conquerors who raised it to greatness. It must have an enemy; if cut off, like Persia, from conflict with the infidel, it finds its substitute in sectarian hatred of brother Moslems. Islam has founded mighty empires, it has reared splendid palaces, it has accumulated libraries of countless volumes. But it has done nothing for man in his highest earthly capacity, as the citizen of a free state; it has done nothing for the higher even of his purely speculative faculties. By slightly reforming, it has perpetuated and sanctified all the evils of the eastern world. It has, by its aggressive tenets, brought them into more direct antagonism with the creed and civilization of the west. A system, originally the greatest of reforms in its own age and country, has proved the curse and scourge of the world for twelve hundred years."

"Now the position for which I have always striven is this, that history is past politics, that politics are present history. The true subject of history, of any history that deserves the name, is man in his political capacity, man as the member of an organized society, governed according to law."

"I have actually sat down to make a distinct History of the Norman Conquest, which I can do easier than anybody else, as I have worked so much at the subject for twenty years past, that is, a great part of the story; there will be little more to do than to write down what is already in my head."

"It seems to me that an age of belief sowed the good seed of which an age of unbelief, an age at least of less fervent belief, reaps the fruits. It strikes me that the moral precepts and moral influences of Christianity needed the dogmatic teaching and the systematic discipline of past times to gain for them a hold in the world. The sower may sometimes have sowed tares along with his wheat, but the wheat has survived the tares. I believe that many a man who has little faith in Christian theology is deeply influenced by Christian morality, and that he is altogether a different man from what he would have been had Christianity never been."

"I cannot but think that the indulgence in cruelty in any form and in any degree must more or less harden the heart. I am far from saying that every fox-hunter is a bad man, but I certainly think that, cæteris paribus, the fox-hunter would be a better man if he were not a fox-hunter. And few would approve of devotion to pursuits of this kind when it becomes the distinguishing feature in the character. A mere fox-hunter, a mere bull-baiter, a mere amateur of gladiators, can never have been an estimable character in any age."

"I must confess that I have never read W. Malmsb. de Pont. His Kings are enough to make me thoroughly despise him as a lying affected French scoundrel."

"I have no doubt that, if I had stood on the hill of Senlac, I should have felt a strong satisfaction in cleaving the skull of a Norman. But feelings of this kind need to be kept under careful control. As soon as either war or hunting loses its purely defensive character, as soon as it is pursued, not distinctly for the public good, but as a matter of sport or out of sheer love of slaughter, as soon as suffering is needlessly inflicted or wantonly prolonged, it ceases to be a righteous and praiseworthy occupation, and comes under the general head of cruelty."

"We must recognize the spirit which dictated the Petition of Right as the same which gathered all England around the banners of returning Godwin, and remember that the "good old cause" was truly that for which Harold died on the field and Waltheof on the scaffold."

"Can any modern fox-hunter honestly say that his hunting is done with the legitimate object of getting rid of a noxious animal in the quickest way? It is nothing of the kind. It is plain that instead of men hunting with any object of getting rid of foxes, the fox exists simply for the purpose of being hunted. But for the practice of hunting, the fox would long ago have been as extinct in England as his cousin the wolf."

"I say then without hesitation that fox-hunting, which ages back may have been a praiseworthy means of ridding the country of a noxious animal, has, in its modern shape, degenerated into a sport of wanton and deliberate cruelty. Strip it of its disguises, and it is that and nothing else."

"[I]t may be doubted whether any work of comparable importance in English historical literature has ever been more easy to criticize than Freeman's Norman Conquest. It was in Green's phrase "far too rhetorical and diffuse", and yet despite its excessive length, it concentrated too exclusively upon strictly political events. Nor was the treatment of the authorities itself comprehensive, so that a generation which has been taught to value the record sources of history, and which pays perhaps even an excessive reverence to material which has not yet been printed, is inevitably sceptical of an historian who neglected records, who misinterpreted Domesday Book, and who positively boasted his contempt for manuscripts. Freeman was, in fact, more erudite than critical, and even the narrative sources which were the sure foundation of his work were sometimes by him mishandled. Generally, as J. R. Green remarked, he tended to be unjust to the Norman writers, but otherwise he often gives the impression of giving equal credence to all his authorities and of blending together their contradictory accounts into an unreal synthesis. In this way his account of the crisis of 1051–2 is, for instance, incomprehensibly confused. It must, moreover, be added that, having made up his mind, he could show most obstinate bias towards his sources, selecting only those which could best illustrate his point of view... Freeman's Norman Conquest was, in short, magisterial without being definitive."

"See, ladling butter from alternate tubs Stubbs butters Freeman, Freeman butters Stubbs."

"[T]he risk of these sports, and the supposed manliness of facing that risk, is generally put forth as one of their merits. Now I may be very blind and mean-spirited, but the manly sport of foxhunting seems to me not to be manly at all, but to be at once cowardly and fool hardy. It is cowardly as regards the cruelty practised on a victim which cannot defend himself by tormentors who, as far as the victim is concerned, are perfectly safe. It is foolhardy as risking men's lives for no adequate cause. It is manly, it is something much better than manly, when a man sacrifices or risks his life in a good cause. But I can see nothing manly, nothing in any way praiseworthy, in a man risking his life in a bad cause or in no cause at all. When a fox-hunter is suddenly cut off in the midst of his cruelties, I can see nothing in his end at all resembling the end of the martyr who dies for his religion or of the hero who dies for his country. I believe I am unfashionable in thinking so, but I cannot help it."

"His Historical Geography has been for years the stumbling-block between us, as I had told him openly that I did not find much geography in the book, but rather a mess that had been made especially on German matters and a vague predilection for Slav and other barbarian stepchildren of his. I rather expect that William Rufus is more in his line, though radicalism and republicanism will continue to peep through the monarchical constellations of the twelfth century."

"Cast away all prejudices, all conventionalities, all subterfuges, look the thing boldly in the face, and will any one tell me either that it is really right to seek amusement in the suffering of any living creature, or that hunting is anything but amusement sought in the sufferings of a living creature? Will any one who engages in such sports tell me that he does not, for the time at least, stifle the divine voice of mercy within him, that he does not, for the time at least, give the reins to the passions of the wild beast or the savage? It may sound a hard saying, but in truth the joy of the hunter is only a lesser form of that intensified delight in cruelty which saw only a “merry, merry show," in those sports, those huntings, of old in which the human victim had to struggle against the lion and the tiger."

"My point is not to claim that science has told us everything important about the world, that there are no longer any mysteries yet to be discovered, or even that science can ever tell us everything we would like to know. I have no doubt that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in anyone’s philosophy. My point is rather that we know enough to accept our ignorance. We have enough idea of how we can, sometimes, find out even quite profound truths about the world we inhabit that we should no longer be satisfied with mythologies that are made up from sheer ignorance."

"And that is the real force of my earlier insistence on empiricism. My brand of empiricism does not insist that we must have fully compelling grounds for the things we believe, or indeed that we can find totally irresistible grounds for anything much beyond the immediate and banal. It insists only that we have some reason for the things we believe and that we decline to believe those things for which we have no reasons. A modest requirement, perhaps, but one that would dispose, I contend, with a large part of the religious and superstitious mythologies that continue to dominate and sometimes devastate human lives."

"The main point, which would perhaps be unnecessary to labour if it were not so controversial and if it had not been denied in important respects by some quite unlikely people, is that the theory of evolution has been a major, even decisive, contributor to the process of undermining prescientific supernaturalistic metaphysical views and replacing them with the naturalistic metaphysics assumed by most contemporary philosophers. The question is not whether evolution and a particular religious tradition are logically consistent. Provided the religious tradition avoids factual claims, as Gould’s conception of distinct magisteria forces them to do by fiat and as sensible theologians have been increasingly willing to do for centuries, they are consistent because they do not speak on the same subjects. But it is nevertheless the case that science and religion speak for radically different conceptions of the universe. And as the conception fostered by the former has become more compelling, so that promoted by the latter has become less tenable. Science does not contradict religion; but it makes it increasingly improbable that religious discourse has any subject matter."

"Whatever the unique features of humans may be, there are realms of behaviour for which the similarities between ourselves and our near relatives are too great for it to be credible that in one case the behaviour reflects an underlying soul or mind, while in the other there is no such thing, only the grinding away of neural machinery."

"Darwin and his intellectual descendants have provided us with fundamental insight into the nature of the world we live in and of our place within it, a contribution to our basic metaphysics. It is still widely supposed that this is the sort of thing that should come from philosophers or even theologians. In this case, at any rate, the insight has come from biology and I, as a philosopher, am happy just to do my best to interpret it. The theologians, I have suggested, can be less complacent about this insight, and may even need to retrain for a discipline with a subject matter with stronger claims to existence."

"The limits of a creature’s consciousness are closely related to its particular set of capacities. As I shall elaborate in a moment, language provides us with an extraordinarily enhanced set of capacities, and consequently with an equally enhanced realm of consciousness. Perhaps this should be seen as a case in which a difference of degree amounts to a difference of kind. But if so, it is crucial to remember, from the point of view of evolution, that a difference in kind can be the summation of many small differences of degree."

"One commonly held ideal of a possible good life is one spent in adoration of or service to the Supreme Being. It is hard to believe that the value of such a life is independent of whether there is, in fact, any such being to adore or serve. In sum, how we should live is a question that cannot be wholly separated from facts about how things are."

"Obviously enough, we cannot decide what evolution entails without a fairly sharp conception of what it is."

"Empiricism provides the standard to which beliefs should answer. If we are capable of finding out what kind of world we live in, surely the best way of doing so is through our experience of it."

"Faith is, I suppose, a rough synonym for belief, with an additional connotation that this belief is not grounded on anything. This is a difficult concept to take seriously from a philosophical point of view. Obviously if one has it, one finds it convincing. If one doesn’t, it’s hard to know how to understand the conviction, since no reasons can be offered for it. The difficulty is exacerbated by the variety of objects of faith that are on offer. How does one decide whether to be more impressed by the convinced Christian or the convinced Muslim? Or, for that matter, the person equally convinced of the healing powers of crystals or that faith can move mountains? If there are no reasons for adopting these systems of belief, it seem impossible for there to be any reason for choosing between them. My own response is, I hardly need say, not to take very seriously. It is one thing to admit that our knowledge of the universe is extremely limited, but a counsel of despair to respond to this by believing whatever we feel like."

"The main point I want to make in this chapter is that prior to the development of a convincing theory of evolution there was an argument of sorts for belief in God, and an argument that could have been seen to meet naturalistic standards. However, this argument, always problematic, was entirely undermined by the development of a convincing account of evolution. Consequently, I claim, we have no good reason for belief in God. This is, of course, a very major contribution to our world-view."

"Religious difference, arguably, remains the most effective basis for defending boundaries between them and us, and the withering away of this kind of mythology would, I think, be entirely salutary. This is to say nothing of the thought that it may well be better for people to believe what is true."

"I should mention the possibility that there are moral rather than empirical reasons that favor religious belief. It is, of course, enormously problematic to offer as a sufficient reason for belief the suggestion that one would be better off believing it. This is generally described as wishful thinking."

"The health care system will soon be placed in a very difficult situation where they have to make a choice between who to provide care to and who to simply say, 'sorry, we can’t do anything for you'."

"Suppose that we could arrange the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones. Or suppose that we could intervene genetically, so that currently carnivorous species would gradually evolve into herbivorous ones, thereby fulfilling Isaiah's prophecy. If we could bring about the end of predation by one or the other of these means at little cost to ourselves, ought we to do it?"

"[I]f suffering is bad for animals when we cause it, it is also bad for them when other animals cause it. That suffering is bad for those who experience it is not a human prejudice; nor is an effort to prevent wild animals from suffering a moralistic attempt to police the behavior of other animals. Even if we are not morally required to prevent suffering among animals in the wild for which we are not responsible, we do have a moral reason to prevent it, just as we have a general moral reason to prevent suffering among human beings that is independent both of the cause of the suffering and of our relation to the victims. The main constraint on the permissibility of acting on our reason to prevent suffering is that our action should not cause bad effects that would be worse than those we could prevent."

"It seems, moreover, that my argument has some relevance to choices we must make even now. There are some species of large predatory animals, such as the Siberian tiger, that are currently on the verge of extinction. If we do nothing to preserve it, the Siberian tiger as a species may soon become extinct. The number of extant Siberian tigers has been low for a considerable period. Any ecological disruption occasioned by their dwindling numbers has largely already occurred or is already occurring. If their number in the wild declines from several hundred to zero, the impact of their disappearance on the ecology of the region will be almost negligible. Suppose, however, that we could repopulate their former wide-ranging habitat with as many Siberian tigers as there were during the period in which they flourished in their greatest numbers, and that that population could be sustained indefinitely. That would mean that herbivorous animals in the extensive repopulated area would again, and for the indefinite future, live in fear and that an incalculable number would die in terror and agony while being devoured by a tiger. In a case such as this, we may actually face the kind of dilemma I called attention to in my article, in which there is a conflict between the value of preserving existing species and the value of preventing suffering and early death for an enormously large number of animals."

"Viewed from a distance, the natural world often presents a vista of sublime, majestic placidity. Yet beneath the foliage and hidden from the distant eye, a vast, unceasing slaughter rages. Wherever there is animal life, predators are stalking, chasing, capturing, killing, and devouring their prey. Agonized suffering and violent death are ubiquitous and continuous."

"The suffering that animals undergo while being caught and eaten may be intense and the process by which they are killed may last for a quarter of an hour or more. Because the number of predators worldwide is enormous, and because, like us, many of them must eat with considerable frequency, the aggregate amount of suffering in the world at any time that is caused by predation is unimaginably vast."

"Conceptual simplicity, recursiveness, and formal separation of levels of selection are attractive features of these equations. But, of course, being able to point to a relevant and generally non-zero part of selective change is far from showing that group selection can override individual selection when the two are in conflict. Moreover, even the possibility of devising model circumstances in which a positive group-selection term (first term) outweighs a negative individual selection one (second term, assuming no further levels), gives no guarantee that ‘altruism’ can evolve by group selection: we have to consider whether the population can get into the specified state, and, if it can, whether its present trend will continue."

"All great minds have their unique style and Bill Hamilton was no different. While Huey Newton would blast you against the far wall with the force of his argument, you had to lean in to hear what Bill was saying, so soft was he spoken. It was almost as if he clutched his thoughts close to the chest, but the effort on your part was well worth it. His every thought on every topic was worth your close attention."

"The incursions of barbaric pastoralists seem to do civilizations less harm in the long run than one might expect. Indeed, two dark ages and renaissances in Europe suggest a recurring pattern in which a renaissance follows an incursion by about 800 years. It may even be suggested that certain genes or traditions of the pastoralists revitalize the conquered people with an ingredient of progress which tends to die out in a large panmictic population for the reasons already discussed. I have in mind altruism itself, or the part of the altruism which is perhaps better described as self-sacrificial daring. By the time of the Renaissance it may be that the mixing of genes and cultures (or of cultures alone if these are the only vehicles, which I doubt) has continued long enough to bring the old mercantile thoughtfulness and the infused daring into conjunction in a few individuals who then find courage for all kinds of inventive innovation against the resistance of established thought and practice. Often, however, the cost in fitness of such altruism and sublimated pugnacity to the individuals concerned is by no means metaphorical, and the benefits to fitness, such as they are, go to a mass of individuals whose genetic correlation with the innovator must be slight indeed. Thus civilization probably slowly reduces its altruism of all kinds, including the kinds needed for cultural creativity"

"If humans turn out to be near the Kondrashov limit —that is, if on average every gamete has one bad mutation created during the lifetime of its producer— it is obviously not going to be nearly enough to test a baby for the subset of the few hundreds or so of well-characterized genetic defects"

"... the biggest risk to the British Isles from climate change would be from flooding this side of the end of the century."

"Climate change is not the biggest challenge of our time, it's the biggest challenge of all time."

"Integrity is a scientist's most precious possession, and I have guarded mine carefully through 40 years of research. If any government tried to persuade me to change my scientific views for political purposes I would certainly resign. Happily, my experiences to date suggest that this is never likely to happen. Thus it is my scientific, not political, opinion that nuclear energy should be part of a wide portfolio of approaches."