Selected reason quotes

1. If there are sound reasons or bases for the points you demand, then there is no need for violence. On the other hand, when there is no sound reason that concessions should be made to you but mainly your own desire, then reason cannot work and you have to rely on force. Thus using force is not a sign of strength but rather a sign of weakness.

2. People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament.

3. Reason gains all people by compelling none.

4. I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

5. The law is reason unaffected by desire.

6. The best reason for having dreams is that in dreams no reasons are necessary.

7. The trouble is that sex is a force of nature, and reason is not.

8. To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.

9. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

10. As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.

11. I don't know if God would agree with me, but believing in God is kind of unimportant when compared to believing in yourself. Because if you go with the idea that God gave you a mind and an ability to judge things, then he would want you to believe in yourself and not worry about believing in him. By believing in yourself you will come to the conclusion that will point to something.

12. The two principles of truth, reason and senses, are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and the senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions.

13. Reason must be the universal rule and guide; all things must be done according to reason without allowing oneself to be swayed by emotion.

14. Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

15. Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

16. Reason, it is true, is DICTATOR in the Society of Mankind; from her there ought to lie no Appeal; But here we want a Pope in our Philosophy, to be the infallible Judge of what is or is not Reason.

17. To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.

18. I would warn against too much of a radical devotion to rationality. Rationality is an illusion, an invented concept, a construct from the mind of man. It is not a property of the universe. Rationality may be a useful tool when it suits our purposes, however, it is merely a measuring stick, calibrated against what we know of the nature of the universe - all of which may or may not be completely inaccurate.

19. Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth and that which enables him to die for the truth.

20. Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

21. My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.

22. To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable.

23. Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the world with which man is confronted.

24. Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

25. A vast sector of modern advertising... does not appeal to reason but to emotion; like any other kind of hypnoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually.

26. The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.

27. I always disagree, however, when people end up saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.

28. Precedents deliberately established by wise men are entitled to great weight. They are evidence of truth, but only evidence...But a solitary precedent...which has never been reexamined, cannot be conclusive.

29. But man has still another powerful resource: natural science with its strictly objective methods.

30. As early pioneers in the knowing, that when you lose your reason, you attain highest perfect knowing.

31. In a sometimes unreasonable business, Jack Valenti was a giant voice of reason. He was the greatest ambassador Hollywood has ever known and I will value his wisdom and friendship for all time.

32. An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

33. Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens Reason, confounds discretion; deaf to Counsel It runs a headlong course to desperate madness.

34. Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason.

35. As I conceive this doctrine to be a gross misrepresentation of the character and moral government of God, and to affect many other articles in the scheme of Christianity, greatly disfiguring and depraving it; I shall show, ... that it has no countenance whatever in reason, or the Scriptures; and, therefore, that the whole doctrine of atonement, with every modification of it, has been a departure from the primitive and genuine doctrine of Christianity.

36. The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence.

37. The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction, preferably in the form of rational and disciplined criticism. He seeks not to convince but to arouse - to challenge others to form free opinions.

38. I don't believe that any human mind is capable of 100 percent error... Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.

39. Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.

40. Reason's biological function is to preserve and promote life and to postpone its extinction as long as possible. Thinking and acting are not contrary to nature; they are, rather, the foremost features of man's nature. The most appropriate description of man as differentiated from nonhuman beings is: a being purposively struggling against the forces adverse to his life.

41. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.

42. No mistake is more to be deplored than the conception that a system of morals and religion should derive any portion of its authority either from the circumstance of its novelty or its antiquity, that it should be judged excellent, not because it is reasonable or true, but because no person has ever thought of it before, or because it has been thought of from the beginning of time.

43. Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it.

44. We can master change not though force or fear, but only though the free work of an understanding mind, though an openness to new knowledge and fresh outlooks, which can only strengthen the most fragile and most powerful of human gifts: the gift of reason.

45. It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.

46. There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality.

47. In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.

48. If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

49. The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.

50. If superstition enters, the brain is gone.

51. To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad.

52. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is.

53. As I am never better than when I am mad; then methinks I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders: but reason abuseth me, and there's the torment, there's the hell.

54. It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God.

55. What more does man want to know than that the hand or power that made these things is divine, is omnipotent? Let him believe this with the force it is impossible to repel, if he permits his reason to act, and his rule of moral life will follow of course.

56. Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic; it can be mitigated by reason and evaluation.

57. Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.

58. The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

59. Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.

60. Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.

61. 'God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.

62. There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

63. The Way to see by Faith, is to shut the Eye of Reason.

64. The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.

65. Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence; it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

66. There is a wisdom of the Head, and ... there is a wisdom of the Heart.

67. It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.

68. One said of suicide, 'As long as one has brains one should not blow them out.' And another answered, 'But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.'

69. Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.

70. The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires.

71. If the human intellect is allowed to impose a preconceived pattern on society, if our powers of reasoning are allowed to lay claim to a monopoly of creative effort: then we must not be surprised if society, as such, ceases to function as a creative force.

72. Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.

73. All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.

74. Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.

75. A noble heart will always capitulate to reason.

76. It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.

77. He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

78. A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

79. Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

80. Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.

81. Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.

82. First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.

83. Theologians always try to turn the Bible into a book without common sense.

84. Catholic - which I was until I reached the age of reason.

85. If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

86. The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just... I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don't understand.

87. Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

88. When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any.

89. It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period.

90. Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalised.

91. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

92. All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.

93. Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.

94. 'There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.'

95. 'At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,' was his mildly cadaverous reply.

96. It is not credible that any one should possess so little understanding as to desire the faith and yet be destitute of the most necessary faculty to enable him to receive it.

97. [W]e have more than two options... a critique of reason does not have to be a call for the return of superstition and arbitrary power.... [O]ur problems do not lie with reason itself but with our obsessive treatment of reason as an absolute value. Certainly it is one of our qualities, but it functions positively only when balanced and limited by the others.

98. Logic works; metaphysics contemplates.

99. People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense.

100. The single greatest world transformation would simply be the embrace of global reasonableness and pluralistic tolerance - the global embrace of egoic-rationality (on the way to centauric vision-logic).