9 Quotes & Sayings By Kenan Malik

Kenan Malik is a writer and broadcaster. He is the author of The Meaning of Tolerance: Race, Religion and the Struggle for Liberty (2008) and co-author of Islam – A Short History (2012). The Meaning of Tolerance was named "one of the 100 best books of the decade" by the Times Literary Supplement and one of the top ten books on religious tolerance by The Economist. Malik has also written regularly for many publications, including The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Channel 4 News, and The New Statesman Read more

He regularly contributes to Radio 4's "The Life Scientific", and regularly appears on The Guardian's Bloggingheads.tv.

1
There is more to the human mind than its evolutionary heritage. Kenan Malik
2
As universities have turned into businesses, so students have turned into consumers. Kenan Malik
3
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. Kenan Malik
4
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. Kenan Malik
5
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. In the six million years since the human and chimpanzee lines first diverged on either side of Africa's Great Rift Valley, the behaviour and lifestyles of chimpanzees have barely changed. Human behaviour and lifestyles clearly have. Humans have learnt to learn from previous generations, to improve upon their work, and to establish a momentum to human life and culture that has taken us from cave art to quantum physics and the conquest of space. It is this capacity for constant innovation that distinguishes humans from all other animals. All animals have an evolutionary past. Only humans make history. Kenan Malik
6
Moral questions may not have objective answers–whether revealed by God or by science–but they do have rational ones, answers rooted in a rationality that emerges out of social need. That rationality can only be discovered through exercising the human potential for rational dialogue, the potential for thinking about the world, and for discussing, debating and persuading others. Values can never be entirely wrenched apart from facts; but neither can they be collapsed into facts. It is the existence of humans as moral agents that allows us to act as the bridge between facts and values. . Kenan Malik
7
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. Kenan Malik
8
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. Kenan Malik