REASON QUOTES III
quotations about reason
Reason has built the modern world. It is a precious but also a fragile thing, which can be corroded by apparently harmless irrationality. We must favor verifiable evidence over private feeling. Otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth.
RICHARD DAWKINS
"Slaves to Superstition", The Enemies of Reason
Humor is reason gone mad.
GROUCHO MARX
attributed, The Laughter Prescription
We are not to renounce our senses and experience, nor (that which is the undoubted Word of God) our natural Reason. For they are the talents which he hath put into our hands to negotiate, till the coming again of our blessed savior, and therefore not to be folded up in the napkin of an implicate faith, but employed in the purchase of justice, peace, and true religion. For though there be many things in God's Word above Reason--that is to say, which cannot by natural reason be either demonstrated or confuted--yet there is nothing contrary to it.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
I am the eternal optimist. I think that, over time, people respond to civility and -- and rational argument.
BARACK OBAMA
press conference, February 9, 2009
There is a set of imperious and arrogant people, with whom it is dangerous to engage, that always arrogate reason and sense to themselves, and allow no one else to be in the right.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.
THOMAS MANN
"An Appeal to Reason"
He who, superior to the checks of nature,
Dares make his life the victim of his reason,
Does in some sort that reason deify,
And take a flight at heav'n.
EDWARD YOUNG
The Revenge
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.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Twelve Types
You might be looking for reasons but there are no reasons.
NINA LACOUR
Hold Still
Every man carries about him a touchstone, if he will make use of it, to distinguish substantial gold from superficial glitterings, truth from appearances. And indeed the use and benefit of this touchstone, which is natural reason, is spoiled and lost only by assuming prejudices, overweening presumption, and narrowing our minds.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Reason always stands in need of being purified by faith.
BENEDICT XVI
Caritas in Veritate
Reason in man is rather like God in the world.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Opuscules
Reason is like a runner who doesn't know that the race is over, or, like Penelope, constantly undoing what it creates.... It is better suited to pulling things down than to building them up, and better at discovering what things are not, than what they are.
PIERRE BAYLE
Reply to the Questions of a Provincial, 1703
The sleep of reason produces monsters.
FRANCISCO GOYA
caption on etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Our Knowledge of the External World
Reason is a necessary instrument, to be used for good or evil, but it has no moral qualities.
REINHARD BENDIX
Embattled Reason
Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Orthodoxy
Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.
ANTON CHEKHOV
Uncle Vanya
The problem is that barbarism does not respond to reason. Rejection of reason is a distinguishing characteristic of barbarism. Brute force, another characteristic of barbarism, beats reason every time, as scissors beat paper.
LES MACPHERSON
"Reason no deterrent to barbaric enemies", Saskatoon Star Phoenix, February 11, 2016
Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.
WILLIAM BLAKE
There is No Natural Religion