Quotes About Rationality

The more complex the world situation becomes, the more scientific and rational analysis you have to have, the less you can do with simple good will and sentiment.

Anarchy is a state of society where the only government is reason.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

You are attempting to be logical, I suspect, and logic has little to do with government, and nothing at all to do with military administration.

The great changes in civilisation and society have been wrought by deeply held beliefs and passion rather than by a process of rational deduction.

Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god, but a great rock, and the sun a hot rock.

Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.

... the happiness of a people is the only rational object of government, and the only object for which a people, free to choose, can have a government at all.

Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.

It is not possible to be intellectually honest and believe in gods. And it is not possible to believe in gods and be a true scientist.

Rationally I have no hope, irrationally I believe in miracles.

I hope you become comfortable with the use of logic without being deceived into concluding that logic will inevitably lead you to the correct conclusion.

We must reason in natural philosophy not from what we hope, or even expect, but from what we perceive.

It is important to reclaim for humanity the ground that has been taken from it by various arbitrarily narrow formulations of the demands of rationality

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

The belief in supernatural forces remains to this day a yoke on the neck of humanity, but at least Thales made it possible, for those of us who wish it, to be free of that yoke.

The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place.

An important function of theology is to keep religion tied to reason and reason to religion. Both roles are of essential importance for humanity.

That's the beauty of argument, if you argue correctly, you're never wrong.

Humor could not flourish in a wholly serious and rational atmosphere.

A mathematician may say anything he pleases, but a physicist must be at least partially sane.

Humor is reason gone mad.