Quotes About Reasoning

Facts can be most persuasive.

My father used to say, "Don't raise your voice. Improve your argument."

Don't raise your voice, improve your argument." [ Address at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Houghton, Johannesburg, South Africa , 23 November 2004]

My father always used to say, "Don't raise your voice. Improve your argument." Good sense does not always lie with the loudest shouters, nor can we say that a large, unruly crowd is always the best arbiter of what is right.

?ovek ima razlog da se razo?ara samo u sebe. U svet i ljude, razo?arani su glupaci.

Logic merely enables one to be wrong with authority.

People think common sense is common - but it's not.

Satori," ripeté Xue Xin. "Se i nostri pensieri ci imprigionano, è ragionevole che possano anche liberarci.

One thing I have seen over and over again in life is that there is virtually no correlation between intelligence and common sense. IQ doesn't seem to translate that way.

Reason is the life of the law.

You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you're suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another.

Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.

True courage is a result of reasoning. A brave mind is always impregnable.

The sun will rise tomorrow morning; I know that perfectly well. But figuring out how I could know it is, as Hume pointed out, a bit of a puzzle.

It does bear emphasis that slippery-slope arguments are notoriously invalid.

One man's modus ponens is another man's reductio, as epistemologists are forever pointing out (In Critical Condition, p. 70)

One man's affirmation of the consecuent is another's man inference to the best explanation (Psychosemantics, pp. 149)

I don't know why, it's the same reason why you like some music and you don't like others. There's something about it that you like. Ultimately I don't find it's in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it's fundamentally emotional.

Notice, there is a fundamental difference between providing a biological explanation of why we are inclined to accept a given moral principle and showing that we should accept it. If the ultimate explanation is biological, it is far from obvious that such principles truly obligate us to follow them.

While the blustery Luther, with his categorical denials of any ambiguity in the Bible, stands as the champion of the humble reader, the reasoning Luther stands within the stream of creeds and scholarship that defines more soberly and narrowly the scope and nature of the Bible's clarity.

students ingested mountains of facts and arithmetic, but were bereft of analytic ability and utterly incapable of understanding sophisticated prose or poetry. They were taught not to reason but to cram.

Die Idee, dass man die Wahrheit auf dem Weg des Denkens finden könne, führt nicht nur zum Dogma, sondern auch zur Wissenschaft.

The capacity to see and—equally so—blindness are not divisible. The critical faculty of the human mind is one: To believe one can be seeing internally but blind as far as the outside world is concerned is like saying that the light of a candle gives light only in one direction and not in all. The light of the candle is reason's capacity for critical, penetrating, uncovering thought.

Even to begin to understand the problem of faith one must differentiate between rational and irrational faith.