Quotes about reason
page 62

Paul Saffo photo

“The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the expanses of cyberspace.”

Paul Saffo (1954) American writer

Wired Magazine: 3/1994 " It's the Context, Stupid. https://www.saffo.com/essays/its-the-context-stupid/"

Ethan Allen photo
Robert Greene photo
Robert Greene photo
Robert Greene photo
Robert Greene photo
Robert Greene photo
Teal Swan photo
Teal Swan photo
Alfred, Lord Tennyson photo

“Then some one spake: "Behold! it was a crime
Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time."
Another said: "The crime of sense became
The crime of malice, and is equal blame."
And one: "He had not wholly quench'd his power;
A little grain of conscience made him sour."
At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, "Is there any hope?"”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

To which an answer peal'd from that high land,
But in a tongue no man could understand;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.
"The Vision of Sin", sec. 5 (1842)

W. Somerset Maugham photo
James P. Gray photo

“Sending Robert Downey, Jr. to prison for drug use makes no more sense than locking up Betty Ford for using alcohol. Now if it's Darryl Strawberry and he uses drugs while driving, that's a different matter; he should do time.”

James P. Gray (1945) American judge

As quote in Coast Magazine, Jim Wood, “Interview—Judge James P. Gray—The Newport Beach resident talks about America's War on Drugs” (June 2001) Vol.10 No. 7

Thomas Kuhn photo

“A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.””

Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth’ for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle’s than either of them is to Newton’s.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Postscript (1969)

Tracey Thorn photo

““Never fancied him anyway,” I’d write when a boy dumped me. I’d leave out things that had gone wrong, or been difficult. I think it was partly an exercise in defiance, a refusal to be defeated by life’s adversities. So in that sense, my diary was a bit of a self-help manual, written by me, for me.”

Tracey Thorn (1962) English singer and songwriter

On reading past diaries in “Tracey Thorn: ‘I went through a phase of carrying Camus under my arm’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/25/tracey-thorn-interview-another-planet-memoir in The Guardian (2020 Jan 25)

Amit Ray photo

“Breathing is our participation with the cosmic dance. When our breath is in harmony, cosmos nourishes us in every sense.”

Amit Ray (1960) Indian author

Beautify your Breath - Beautify your Life (2015)

Daniel Abraham photo

“Computers, it seemed, could be programmed to do almost anything but sense when someone was up to no good.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 7 (p. 76)

Linda McQuaig photo

“Not only has capitalism failed to bring us to the brink of a scarcity-free world, but in a sense, you could say that capitalism invented scarcity”

Linda McQuaig (1951) journalist and author

at least as a deliberate method of economic organization.... The flipside of this bounty, this endless feast, is scarcity.
All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism (2001)

James McBride (writer) photo

“Writing is the act of failing at something all the time. Do it with a sense of humor, and it ain’t no big deal. Life is just about falling on stage and getting up, and that’s what writing is all about, too.”

James McBride (writer) (1957) American journalist

On the potential failure of writing in “James McBride: How I Write” https://www.writermag.com/writing-inspiration/author-interviews/james-mcbride-write/ in The Writer (2013 Dec 30)

Uwem Akpan photo
Joseph Goebbels photo

“What we demand is new, decisive, and radical, revolutionary in the truest sense of the word.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

1930s, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)

Jimmy Carter photo

“Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Remarks at a White House meeting commemorating the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (6 December 1978), Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Jimmy Carter, 1978 Book 1: January 1 to June 30, 1978, p. 2164
Presidency (1977–1981), 1978

Michel Henry photo
John Allen Paulos photo
Thomas Hylland Eriksen photo
Thomas Hylland Eriksen photo
William Quan Judge photo
William Quan Judge photo
Buffy Sainte-Marie photo
Clifford D. Simak photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Marilyn Ferguson photo
Alexander Calder photo
Michel Henry photo

“That which is felt without the intermediary of any sense whatsoever is in its essence affectivity.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Original: (fr) Ce qui se sent sans que ce soit par l'intermédiaire d'un sens est dans son essence affectivité.
Source: Books on Phenomenology of Life, The Essence of Manifestation (1963)
Michel Henry, L'Essence de la manifestation, PUF, 1963, t. 2, § 52, p. 577

Benjamin Creme photo
John Allen Paulos photo

“The universe acts on us, we adapt to it, and the notions that we develop as a result, including the mathematical ones, are in a sense taught us by the universe. Evolution has selected those of our ancestors (both human and not) whose behavior and thought were consistent with the workings of the universe.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Part 3 “Four Psycho-Mathematical Arguments”, Chapter 4 “The Universality Argument (and the Relevance of Morality and Mathematics)” (p. 131)
Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (2008)

John Denham photo
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar photo
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar photo

“Not only this, but the Hindus have no sense of bortherhood towards you. You are treated by them worse than foreigners. If one looks at the relations of the neighbouring Hindus and the Untouchables of the village, no one can say that they are brothers. They can rather be called two opposite armies in warring camps.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

As quoted in http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/txt_ambedkar_salvation.html

Donald J. Trump photo

“We have an invisible enemy. We have a problem a month ago nobody ever thought about. [...] This is a bad one, this is a very bad one. This is bad in the sense that it's so contagious. It's just so contagious. Sort of record-setting type contagion.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Coronavirus task force press briefing, , quoted in * 2020-03-17

The Last Great Pandemic

Jarrett Stepman

The Daily Signal

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/03/17/the-last-great-pandemic/
2020s, 2020, March

William Wordsworth photo
William Wordsworth photo
Benjamin Creme photo
Marilu Henner photo

“When we participate actively in our lives and open our senses to all the stimuli around us, we build memories that can be retrieved and enjoyed the rest of our lives.”

Marilu Henner (1952) American actress

Total Memory Makeover (2012), p. 23 https://books.google.it/books?id=LCPiLFodRHMC&pg=PA4023.

Marilyn Ferguson photo

“Relationships are the crucible of the transformative process. They are bound to alter, given the individual's greater willingness to risk, trust in intuition, sense of wider connection with others, recognition of cultural conditioning.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing, p. 387

Alexander Calder photo
China Miéville photo
Anna J. Cooper photo

“We too often mistake individuals’ honor for race development and so are ready to substitute pretty accomplishments for sound sense and earnest purpose.”

Anna J. Cooper (1858–1964) African-American author, educator, speaker and scholar

Source: A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892), p. 29

Immanuel Kant photo
Immanuel Kant photo
Noam Chomsky photo
Goldie Hawn photo
William Lane Craig photo
Warren Buffett photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Arun Shourie photo

“Caste is real. The working class is real. Being a Naga is real. But ‘India is just a geographical expression!’ Similarly, being a Muslim of course is real – Islam must be seen and talked of as one block of granite – ... But Hinduism? Why, there is no such thing: it is just an aggregation, a pile of assorted beliefs and practices – ... And anyone who maintains anything to the contrary is a fascist out to insinuate a unity, indeed to impose a uniformity, where there has been none. That is what our progressive ideologues declaim, as we have seen. In a word, the parts alone are real. The whole is just a construct. India has never been one, these ideologues insist – disparate peoples and regions were knocked together by the Aryans, by the Mughals, by the British for purposes of empire. Anyone who wants to use that construct – India – as the benchmark for determining the sort of structure under which we should live has a secret agenda – of enforcing Hindu hegemony.
This is the continuance of, in a sense the culmination of, the Macaulay-Missionary technique. The British calculated that to subjugate India and hold it, they must undermine the essence of the people: this was Hinduism, and everything which flowed from it. Hence the doggedness with which they set about to undermine the faith and regard of the people for five entities: the gods and goddesses the Hindus revered; the temples and idols in which they were enshrined; the texts they held sacred; the language in which those texts and everything sacred in that tradition was enshrined and which was even in mid-nineteenth-century the lingua franca – that is, Sanskrit; and the group whose special duty it had been over aeons to preserve that way of life – the Brahmins. The other component of the same exercise was to prop up the parts – the non-Hindus, the regional languages, the castes and groups which they calculated would be the most accessible to the missionaries and the empire – the innocent tribals, the untouchables.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud (1998)

“A sense of identity is the gift of love, and only love can give it.”

Elizabeth Goudge (1900–1984) English fiction writer

The Dean's Watch (1960), Chapter 9.2

Aparna Sen photo

“I think that the best of artists are androgynous in a sense. If a man is a very macho male, I don't know whether he'll make a very good director, he may make a very good craftsman. Or if a woman is a very sort of typically feminine woman, I don't think she will make a very good film. She has to have a bit of both.”

Aparna Sen (1945) Indian filmmaker, script writer and actress

Rendezvous with Simi Garewal, Rendezvous with Simi Garewal - Aparna Sen & Konkana Sen - 24 Mar 2014 (First Broadcast 2003), at 7 Min 51 Sec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkkOKmyld5k

Benjamin Creme photo
Benjamin Creme photo
Wendell Berry photo
Fred Hoyle photo
Patañjali photo

“The mind can be trained to steadiness through those forms of concentration which have relation to the sense perceptions.”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect : a paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with commentary by Alice A. Bailey, (1927)

Benjamin Creme photo
Alethea Arnaquq-Baril photo

“That was a life lesson to me. Because, yes it's important to take back those choices and be who we are un-apologetically, but we should always think of it in the modern context and what makes sense for our lives today, and to not be fundamentalist about anything.”

Alethea Arnaquq-Baril (1978) director

as an answer to using a modern tattoo technique on herself, as opposed to a more traditional technique

Q & A with Alethea Arnaquq-Baril - TUNNIIT: RETRACING THE LINES OF INUIT TATTOOS, Cinema Politica - 12 Jan 2017, at 10 Min 54 Sec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1cXIe4IR7w

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton photo

“[I]t will not do to act as if the moral question was not the supreme question in public life, and, in a sense, the vera causa of party conflict.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Letter to William Ewart Gladstone (21 November 1891), quoted in J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (eds.), Selections from the Correspondence of the First Lord Acton, Vol. I (1917), p. 257
1890s

Ursula K. Le Guin photo

“He had waked her; he had given her what she lacked, and what few men could have given her: the sense of peril, which is the root of love.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Ile Forest (p. 29)
Short fiction, Orsinian Tales (1976)

David Pearce (philosopher) photo
Paddy Ashdown photo

“Bosnia is under my skin. It's the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all; there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years.”

Paddy Ashdown (1941–2018) British politician and diplomat

As quoted in "Farewell, Sarajevo" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/02/warcrimes.politics (1 November 2005), The Guardian

Mick Jackson (director) photo

“This sense of things...getting out of control very quickly is a lesson that we’ve forgotten. [...] I hope we don’t learn it in the wrong way. This is what you’re risking when you talk about fire and fury.”

Mick Jackson (director) (1943) film director

On Donald Trump's rhetoric to North Korea
The Director of the Scariest Movie We've Ever Seen Still Fears Nuclear War the Most

H. H. Asquith photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“With all of that unity we have, in one sense, we have great unity, in another sense, I think they're going to come along, I mean, you know, I certainly hope so, but the main thing I have to do is bring our country back, and I want to get it back to where it was or maybe beyond where it was, you know, we have tremendous stimulus, all the money we've been talking about so far tonight.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

As quoted by * 2020-05-04

The 45 most shocking lines from Donald Trump's Lincoln Memorial Fox town hall

Chris Cillizza

CNN

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/04/politics/donald-trump-fox-lincoln-memorial/index.html
2020s, 2020, May

Benjamin Creme photo
Alice A. Bailey photo

“The mind can be trained to steadiness through those forms of concentration which have relation to the sense perceptions.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect: a paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with commentary (1927)

John Ruskin photo

“I choose my physician and my clergyman, thus indicating my sense of the quality of their work.” By all means, also, choose your bricklayer; that is the proper reward of the good workman, to be “chosen.”

The natural and right system respecting all labour is, that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed. The false, unnatural, and destructive system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his work at half-price, and either take the place of the good, or force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum.

Essay I: "The Roots of Honour," section 29
Unto This Last (1860)

Wilfred Thesiger photo
Robert Graves photo

“…every day I’m convinced that if one is firmly planted in his own world, the work necessarily appeals to a greater number of people. In that sense, I want to profit from my Caribbean self and incorporate it into my literature, hoping to give testimony to who and what I am…”

Luis Rafael Sánchez (1936) Puerto Rican playwright and novelist

On the lack of ubiquity regarding Puerto Rican writings in “Luis Rafael Sánchez: Counterpoints" https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00096005/00024/14j (Sargasso, 1984)

Alex Grey photo
Edith Windsor photo

“We told ourselves that it didn’t matter if there was no word to cement our reality…We were the ones that made it real. And yet, the sense of otherness loomed.”

Edith Windsor (1929–2017) American LGBT rights activist and a technology manager at IBM

On wanting to legitimize her relationship (as quoted in “Gay rights icon Edie Windsor’s sheer force carries ‘A Wild and Precious Life’” https://www.tampabay.com/arts-entertainment/arts/books/2019/10/08/gay-rights-icon-edie-windsors-sheer-force-carries-a-wild-and-precious-life/) (Tampa Bay; 2019 Oct 8)

Harry Hay photo

“…it was not in the dictionary. I've always said, If I had the sense I was born with and looked it up in the legal code, I would have found it.”

Harry Hay (1912–2002) American gay rights activist

And it was in the penal code, of course. It wouldn't be in any American dictionary until 1938. And in most American dictionaries not until the Second World War. We had no words for ourselves. That's the important point--we didn't have words...

On not having the word to define his sexual orientation in “Meet Pioneer of Gay Rights, Harry Hay” https://progressive.org/magazine/meet-pioneer-gay-rights-harry-hay/ in The Progressive (2016 Aug 9)

“Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.”

Source: Philosophy in a New Key (1942), Ch. 10, p. 216

David Pearce (philosopher) photo
Alexander Pope photo

“Thou Great First Cause, least understood
Who all my sense confined
To know but this, that Thou art good
And that myself am blind.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Stanza 2
Source: The Universal Prayer (1738)

Sir Richard Temple, 1st Baronet photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo

“That idea only makes sense if you don’t think too hard about it.”

Chapter 18 (p. 308) Vorkosigan Saga, The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)

Jack Kirby photo

“No, we didn’t do horror in the sense of haunted houses or people with masks the way you might see them today; something lurking in an anteroom. Our stories were more like peasants sitting around a fire. We had the “Strange World of Your Dreams.””

Jack Kirby (1917–1994) American comic book artist, writer and editor

Ours didn’t run to bloody horror. Ours ran to weirdness. We began to interpret dreams. Remember, Joe and I were wholesome characters. We weren’t guys that were bent on the weird and the bizarre. We were the kind of guys who wouldn’t offend our mother, who wouldn’t offend anyone in your family, and certainly not the reader. So we knew that we had to depart from adventure and that there were other ways to go and we came up with the “Strange World of Your Dreams”.
Context: page 4 http://www.tcj.com/jack-kirby-interview/4/ 1990, Gary Groth interview

Bhagawan Nityananda photo
David Fleming photo