Jonathan Miller quotes

What I should have been, you see, is a neurologist. (Jonathan Miller)

I'm not really a Jew; just Jew-ish, not the whole hog.

Jonathan Miller

Errors of taste are very often the outward sign of a deep fault of sensibility.

Jonathan Miller

Science is a self-sufficient activity.

Jonathan Miller

Argumentative exhibitions bring issues to life in a way that very much irritates traditional curators who want to see their pictures valued for themselves.

Jonathan Miller

Perhaps I was too dumb, or just too interested in cricket or in girls, to ask myself any questions about religion. If I had not been, I might have, inevitably, asked myself questions that have troubled skeptics and unbelievers for as long as men and women have been skeptical or have lacked belief. "Is there really no God? And if there really is no supernatural dimension to the universe, why have so many people throughout history and in so many different cultures thought there was?"

Jonathan Miller

Paradoxically, some of the sources of disbelief are to be found amongst the arguments of believers. ... Theologians often formulated the most dangerously skeptical arguments in their efforts to test the impregnability of their own faith, and in doing so, they unknowingly furnished atheists with ready-made weapons.

Jonathan Miller

While the early deists were busy reconstructing Christianity, at the same time being very careful to avoid the accusation of atheism, the world of science had been steadily progressing.

Jonathan Miller

There is one aspect of our own mentality for which it's difficult as yet to foresee what type of explanation would even be relevant. I'm referring, of course, to consciousness. The point is that although I have no reason to believe that my consciousness is implemented by anything other than my brain, I remain convinced that there's something impenetrably mysterious about the relationship between brains and thoughts. And you can understand, therefore, why it's so hard to imagine, let alone tolerate, the idea that the death of the brain necessarily leads to the end of the personal self – and this, of course, is the "trump card" with which religion has consistently played.

Jonathan Miller

Although he never admitted himself to be an atheist as such, he was clearly and unarguably the most vividly elegant and eloquent skeptic of them all. I'm referring, of course, to the great Scottish philosopher David Hume.

Jonathan Miller

Ever since the Reformation, there's a sense in which the road to atheism was paved not with science, but with religious intentions. (Jonathan Miller)

With thoughtfulness-and, above all, with literacy-thoughts themselves become subjects of discussion in a way that they wouldn't have been before they were written down. It's not until they're written down that they become stable enough to bear examination in the same way that physical objects themselves can bear examination.

Jonathan Miller

There were academics and theologians who spent hours calculating what they thought was the precise age of the Earth, on the basis of the Biblical account of it. And as early as 1650, James Ussher had come to the startlingly precise conclusion that the Earth was created in 4004.

Jonathan Miller