10 Quotes by Kenan Malik

To talk of humans as 'transcendent' is not to ascribe to them spiritual properties. It is, rather, to recognize that as subjects we have the ability to transform our selves, our natures, our world—an ability denied to any other physical being.

As universities have turned into businesses, so students have turned into consumers.

Education is not a product but a relationship and a process; a relationship between student and lecturer, and process by which knowledge transforms the individual.

Humans are, as Sartre put it, ‘condemned to be free’. To insist that science, or God, objectively defines moral values is to abandon our responsibility as human beings to make such judgments.

There is more to the human mind than its evolutionary heritage.

Insofar as it is true, the idea that our actions or beliefs are merely one link in a causal link that runs back to the beginning of the universe is making a trivial claim. Insofar as it is saying something profound, the claim is untrue.

What is called ‘offence to a community’ is more often than not actually a struggle within communities.

This, for Homer, is the tragedy of being human: to desire freedom, and be tortured by a sense of autonomy, and yet be imprisoned by forces beyond our control.

Even the most minor inconvenience, Chrysippus suggested, had been carefully designed by God for our benefit.