People should not expect the state to protect them from fraudsters. If we do, we get into the habit of neglecting our own powers of intellectual discernment.

From time to time, it is worth wandering around the fuzzy border regions of what you do, if only to remind yourself that no human activity is an island.

Atheists have to live with the knowledge that there is no salvation, no redemption, no second chances. Lives can go terribly wrong in ways that can never be put right.

No matter how convinced we are that someone is nasty, evil or just plain criminal, if they have not been convicted of any crime and support views that are upheld and defended by many law-abiding citizens, the only way to tackle them is through democratic debate.

Any celebration meal to which guests are invited, be they family or friends, should be an occasion for generous hospitality.

The idea that there is a sharp boundary between our true inner selves and the outside world is pervasive but highly questionable. The boundaries of the self might well be more porous than we ordinarily think.

The simplest and clearest motivation for taking animal welfare seriously is the recognition that pain is in and of itself a bad thing, and that to inflict significant amounts of it unnecessarily is wrong.

There are many things you shouldn't measure. Don't, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife!

Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger.

The border between the natural and the supernatural, religion and philosophy, may not always be clear. But there are lines, and we should know and accept which side of it we are on.

We can't control whether we are rewarded for our endeavours, with cash or recognition. It is not up to us how much cash or time we get on Earth, but it is down to us how we spend it.

Looking out over the port of Dover, with the endless steam of boats coming in and out, every British citizen is reminded that belonging here has never been about blood or genes. It's simply about being at home on this discrete island and being aware of the privileges and responsibilities that brings.

'That which does not kill me makes me stronger' is not a law of the universe. What it can be, if we so choose, is a resolution.

Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe that that the universe is governed by benign forces, at some point you have to explain why there is so much suffering, misfortune and misery in the world.

Seek first what is true and of value, and then whatever happiness follows will be of the appropriate quantity and, more importantly, quality.

When you do the right thing, but not to any particular person, we instinctively feel that we have earned some sort of pay back. Since no-one will do that for us, we opt for self-service reciprocation.

One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.

Being a good neighbour is about compassion, which is as warm-blooded as justice is cool-headed.

The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives.

If philosophy is to be a valuable part of life, we have to appreciate it for its own sake, and not just for what it's done for us lately.

Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging.

Most people believe, more or less, that the value of a human life is the same, irrespective of where on the planet it happens to find itself. But, of course, not every life has the same value for us.

The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy.

Constructive complaint requires only two things: that what you are complaining about should be different, and that it can be different. It sounds simple, but too often our protests fail this test.

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

The supposed revelations of God to humanity through Christ, or the word of God to Mohammed through the angel Gabriel, had the power they did because they indicated new truths, new directions for followers.

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.

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.

It may not have the virtuous ring of the golden rule, but the maxim 'never say never' is one of the most important in ethics.

Yesterday's news feeds our fear that our neighbours are more likely than not to be bad eggs: benefit fraudsters, bogus asylum seekers, paedophiles or jihadist terrorists.

Believers are right when they say that to understand a religion properly you need to get under its skin. But to understand it fully, you cannot stay there: you have to take a more objective view, too.