Quotes About Reason

Ignorance is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.

Art works to satisfy the instinct and the science works to satisfy the reason.

Reason observation and experience - the Holy Trinity of Science.

The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.

Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.

One cannot exchange ideas with a rational person any more than one can argue with a religious fanatic.

Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.

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.

We do not lealve the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions, We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore.

Muziek, poëzie, religie - ze ontstaan allemaal in de ontmoeting van de ziel met een aspect van de werkelijkheid waarvoor de rede geen begrippen en geen taal heeft. (p.56)

This is the secret of the spirit, not disclosed to reason: the adaptation of the mind to what is sacred, intellectual humility in the presence of the supreme. The mind surrenders to the mystery of spirit, not in resignation but in love.

Take all that you can of this book upon reason, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man. (When a skeptic expressed surprise to see him reading a Bible)

Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.

Be guided by reason. Cold Calculated unimpassioned reason

Where pre-Enlightenment Europe was sporadically cruel, post-Enlightenment Europe was systematically inhumane; where the pre-Enlightenment was haphazardly prejudiced, the Enlightenment was systematically racist, creating a scientific hierarchy of humanity that justified imperialism. Reason became another name for bourgeois oppression, the triumph of science merely an excuse for more orderly forms of social subjugation.

What [Adam] Smith took from [David] Hume's demonstration of the limits of reason, the absurdity of superstition, and the primacy of the passions was not a lesson of Buddhist-Stoical indifference but something more like a sense of Epicurean intensity—if we are living in the material world, then let us make it our material.

The unadmitted reason why traditional readers are hostile to e-books is that we still hold the superstitious idea that a book is like a soul, and that every soul should have its own body.

The madness of faith is a very different thing from the madness of Enlightenment Reason.

Pleasure and pain are the great objects of desire and aversion: but these are distinguished not by reason, but by immediate sense and feeling. If virtue, therefore, be desirable for its own sake, and if vice be, in the same manner, the object of aversion, it cannot be reason which originally distinguishes those different qualities, but immediate sense and feeling.

I will speak in defense of reason: for the very child of vanity is violence.

Now, by the altar, Over the victim Ripe for our ritual, Sing this enchantment: A song without music, A sword in the senses, A storm in the heart And a fire in the brain; A clamour of Furies To paralyse reason, A tune full of terror, A drought in the soul!

Abraham Lincoln, said in 1838, when he and the United States were both very young, "Reason—cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—must furnish all materials for our future support and defence. Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws.

The Politics of Fear Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason. Both fear and reason are essential to human survival, but the relationship between them is unbalanced. Reason may sometimes dissipate fear, but fear frequently shuts down reason. As Edmund Burke wrote in England twenty years before the American Revolution, "No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—was and remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.