Quotes About Reason

All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically

It was essential for the discovery of science that religious ideas be divorced from the study of nature.

He means people who let their faith take the place of their reason, people who believe this world is just a prelude to another, more glorious life. He means people like you. *

Man has no need of divine inspiration, his reason is sufficient unto itself.

You're looking for a reason, she said. And that doesn't help. It doesn't change the present.

McCarthy's drinking and his arrogance were finally his downfall—he flew too close to the sun. As chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he went after the State Department and the Voice of America. His tactics were always the same—bluster replaced reason.

You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms.

A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you're committed to Enlightenment, you're committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.

Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.

One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment . . . and I don't believe it's true. . . . I have the impression that thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking.

Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato's Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature.

One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.

It is often asserted that "the West" has increasingly come to see war itself as a spectacle. Reports of the death of reality—like the death of reason, the death of the intellectual, the death of serious literature—seem to have been accepted without much reflection by many who are attempting to understand what feels wrong, or empty, or idiotically triumphant in contemporary politics and culture.

Do you trust the House? I ask Myself. Yes, I answer Myself. And if the House has made you forget, then it has done so for good reason. But I do not understand the reason. It does not matter that you do not understand the reason. You are the Beloved Child of the House. Be comforted. And I am comforted.

Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius.

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.

They have great reason to love their country and to fear the white man's yoke, for once harnessed to the plow, their life would no longer be a poem.

The only reason a road is good as every wanderer knows Is just because of the homes, the homes, the homes to which one goes

precaria, su presencia misma en estos lugares donde busca algo de estabilidad la gente cuya vida, por la razón que sea, es inestable.

The central argument of this book is that U.S. economic and political domination over Latin America has always been—and continues to be—the underlying reason for the massive Latino presence here. Quite simply, our vast Latino population is the unintended harvest of the U.S. empire.

man—if for no other reason than so she could argue with

But Reason's voice could not always be heard above the clamour of self-doubt

Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningles actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.

Nothing is as inimical to passion as the slow, sensible weighing of practicalities.