Quotes about reason
page 32

“But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere … Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust? The truth or falsity of evolution is a secondary matter. Rationalists must listen to the complaints of the Fundamentalists with a psychiatrist's "third ear", and respond to the more subtle messages.”

Garrett Hardin (1915–2003) American ecologist

Naked Emperors : Essays of a Taboo-Stalker (1982)

Truth, Lie, Fear, Family

“I got divorced from my wife on June 6, 2006. Yeah, 6-6-06, which coincidentally, was when my wife turned into a slithering demon spawned from the fiery depths of Satan's anus. But for legal reasons, I have to call her, "Kate."”

Christopher Titus (1964) actor, writer, podcaster

Love is Evol (2009)

“What, finally, are the functions of reason and rationality in human behaviors? They are the functions, respectively, of the prince’s tutor and his councilor. The tutor teaches the prince to promote the public good in the long term. The councilor tells him how to act in order to achieve his goals, whatever they might be, in the most efficient way. It is not incumbent upon the councilor to impose the demands of reason; but if the tutor has done his job well, the prince will make them his own.”

Jon Elster (1940) Norwegian academic

Reason and Rationality (2009)

Way, Behavior

“Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. … At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question “What will make me happy?” as “What will make me healthy?””

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

… Our souls do not spell out their troubles.
Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), pp. 53-54.

Soul, Idea, Question, Knowledge

“There are reasons to believe that the world economy is once again in the throes of a phase change. There are also reasons to believe that this phase change, like the preceding ones, will involve a paradigmatic shift in the organization of people around their work. If this is so, then our perceptions of what has happened in the past decade or more in the world of work may need to be modified; likewise our perceptions of where those changes are leading us”

Fred Emery (1925–1997) Australian psychologist

Fred Emery (1982) " Socio-Technical Foundations for a New Social Order? http://www.moderntimesworkplace.com/archives/ericsess/sessvol2/Soc_Order.pdf" in Human Relations, Vol 35: p. 1095-1122.

People, World, Change, Past

“I have already said that a thing which 'exists in a person's head' and nowhere else is alternatively called an imaginary thing. The actual making of the tune is therefore alternatively called the making of an imaginary tune. This is a case of creation, just as much as the making of a plan or a disturbance, and for the same reasons, which it would be tedious to repeat. Hence the making of a tune is an instance of imaginative creation. The same applies to the making of a poem, or a picture, or any other work of art.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: The Principles of Art (1938), p. 134

Art, Imagination, Personality

“I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Book VI, ch. vi
The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Women, Home

“I do exceedingly commend the Judges that are curious and almost subtil, Astuti (which is the word used in the Proverbs of Solomon in a good sense, when it is to a good end) to invent reasons and means to make Acts, according to the just intent of the parties, and to avoid wrong and injury which by rigid rules might be wrought out of the Act.”

Sir Henry Hobart, 1st Baronet (1554–1625) English politician

Earl of Clanrickard's Case (1614), Lord Hobart's Rep. 277.

Sense

“The reason that economic textbooks now begin with imaginary villages is because it has been impossible to talk about real ones. Even some economists have been forced to admit that Smith's Land of Barter doesn't really exist.

The question is why the myth is perpetuated anyway.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Three, "Primordial Debts", p. 43

Question

“There's a human race, and different skin colors, and different racial, what we call racial characteristics. There's several theories about where those come in. Probably the best theory is that the Tower of Babel, which would have been a few hundred years after the flood, is where the races began. When god confused the languages, they went off into their small groups, all speakin' the same language. And if you get a small in-breeding group, you know, 2000 years after the creation, you're gonna get genetic disorders, and racial traits could be a result of this Tower of Babel incident. But I think that there's no question from scripture and from science that all humans are the same race, and have the same genetic code, and certainly can interbreed. So there's no reason scripturally to be a racist. You know, we all came from Adam and Eve, and then later from Noah and his family.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Coast-to-Coast AM interview (August 2-3, 2000)

God, Family, Color, Question

“Instead of combating my slight prejudice against you as uncharitable, I mean to cherish it, until I am convinced that I have no reason to distrust this kind, insinuating friendship you are so anxious to push upon me.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXIX : The Neighbour; Helen to Walter

Friendship

“Utility is the emotion pleading to be let into the house of pure reason and thereby enriching it.”

Dennis Lindley (1923–2013) British statistician

2. Stylistic Questions. p. 20.
Understanding Uncertainty (2006)

Housing

“Riemann has shewn that as there are different kinds of lines and surfaces, so there are different kinds of space of three dimensions; and that we can only find out by experience to which of these kinds the space in which we live belongs. In particular, the axioms of plane geometry are true within the limits of experiment on the surface of a sheet of paper, and yet we know that the sheet is really covered with a number of small ridges and furrows, upon which (the total curvature not being zero) these axioms are not true. Similarly, he says although the axioms of solid geometry are true within the limits of experiment for finite portions of our space, yet we have no reason to conclude that they are true for very small portions; and if any help can be got thereby for the explanation of physical phenomena, we may have reason to conclude that they are not true for very small portions of space.”

William Kingdon Clifford On the Space-Theory of Matter

Abstract
On the Space-Theory of Matter (read Feb 21, 1870)

Help

“Hers was simply not a pew-shaped spine.
“I just never had a reason ever to sit in a church,” she had told people. She wasn’t vehement about it. She just walked around and lived and moved her hands that were pebble-smooth and pebble-small. Work had polished the nails of those hands with a polish you could never buy in a bottle. The touching of children had made them soft, and the raising of children had made them temperately stern, and the loving of a husband had made them gentle.”

Ray Bradbury book The Golden Apples of the Sun

Powerhouse (1948)
The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

Love, Children, People

“Second sight is redundant to reason anyway.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Curse of Chalion (2000), p. 328

“Tis a dangerous thing to engage the authority of scripture in disputes about the natural world, in opposition to reason; lest time, which brings all things to light, should discover that to be evidently false which we had made scripture to assert … We are not to suppose that any truth concerning the natural world can be an enemy to religion; for truth cannot be an enemy to truth, God is not divided against himself.”

Thomas Burnet

The Sacred Theory of the Earth, quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), p. 32; ellipsis Gould's.

God, Truth, World, Religion

“It is written (1 John 4:16): "He that abideth in charity abideth in God, and God in him." Now charity is the love of God. Therefore, for the same reason, every love makes the beloved to be in the lover, and vice versa… the beloved is said to be in the lover, inasmuch as the beloved abides in the apprehension of the lover, according to Philippians 1:7, "For that I have you in my heart": while the lover is said to be in the beloved, according to apprehension, inasmuch as the lover is not satisfied with a superficial apprehension of the beloved, but strives to gain an intimate knowledge of everything pertaining to the beloved, so as to penetrate into his very soul.”

Thomas Aquinas book Summa Theologica

Source: Summa Theologica (1265–1274) I-II, q. 28, art. 2

Love, God, Soul, Lovers

“They are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable, and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all people and societies strive to organize themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

A definition of what he meant when referring to "liberals"in Up from Liberalism (1959); as quoted in "An American original: appreciating Bill Buckley" by George Shadroui (2003) http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2003/an-american-original-appreciating-bill-buckley/.

Women, Men, People, Truth

“Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

Difference of the Fichtean and Schellingean System of Philosophy, cited in W. Kaufmann, Hegel (1966), p. 49

Art, Exercises, Appearance

“You have all heard the old bromide to the effect that man has his eyes on the stars and his feet in the mud. It is usually taken to mean that man's reason and his physical senses are the element pulling him down to the mud while his mystical, super-rational emotions are the element that lifts him to the stars. This is the grimmest inversion of many in mankind's history. But, last summer, reality offered you a literal dramatization of the truth. It is man's irrational emotions that bring him down to the mud. It is man's reason that lifts him to the stars.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Apollo and Dionysus (1969)

Truth, History, Star, Reality

“Dear Polly,
Tom wishes you, for some reason I can't understand, to consider the human back. He says there are many other matters you should consider too, but that was a particularly glaring example. He invites you, he says, to walk along a beach this summer and watch the male citizens there sunning themselves. There you will see backs - backs stringy, backs bulging, and backs with ingrained dirt. You will find, he says, yellow skin, blackheads, pimples, enlarged pores and tufts of hair.
This is making me ill, but Tom says go on. Peeling sunburn, warts, boils, moles and midge bites and floppy rolls of skin. Even a back without these blemishes, he claims, seldom or never ripples, unless with gooseflesh. In fact, he defies you to find an inch of silk or a single powerful muscle in any hundred yards of average sunbathers. I hope you know what all this is about, because I don't. I think you should stay away from the seaside if you can.
Yours ever, Sam.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Fire and Hemlock

Source: Fire and Hemlock (1985), p. 265.

Hope, Understanding, Thinking, Sun

“People are a bit blind. They don’t see life. Being a photographer I see life, every inch of it. I’m obsessed with nature and animals and the earth; I find concrete things that distract me. Most people are the opposite… they find life boring, squirrels or sparrows boring, whereas I find them fascinating. It has to do with the way we live. It probably started with religion which leads some people astray. To fight over whose god is better has nothing to do with love or spirituality. Perhaps it’s guilt. We are suppressed and spend our time trying to figure out who we are. The most shocking thing I’ve learned concerns abuse, child abuse, animal abuse, abuse to every living creature. There is a world of little Hitlers out there. Slaughterhouses, vivisection and experimenting on animals for no reason is sick. Luckily younger people are becoming more aware.”

Linda McCartney (1941–1998) American photographer

Interview with Linda McCartney http://oobujoobu.tumblr.com/post/10590341050/interview-with-linda-mccartney by Karen Fox, Diamond Hard Music Entertainment, 1989.

Love, Life, God, People

“I soon came to know in the weary debates and the 104 divisions against the European Communities Bill who it was with whom I shared feelings of anger, outrage and hatred at what was being perpetrated. I am aware that the "Left" is supposed to be motivated only by the desire to be unimpeded by "Europe" in converting Britain into a socialist state; but I am compelled to depose that the instincts and reasoning of the "Left" opponents of membership…were exactly as nationalistic, not to say patriotic, as my own…[I part company with Labour only] because of my blind, high Tory ultimate faith in the people. If they are the people I thought and still want to think that they are, those who represent them will assuredly be pulled back in time from the betrayal of their birthright of parliamentary freedom either to a European state or to a Marxist bureaucracy.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

The Daily Telegraph (14 September 1980), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), p. 631, p. 840.
1980s

People, Faith, Feeling, Communication

“Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence. Now the sole reason why painters of this sort are not aware of their own error is that they have not learnt Geometry, without which no one can either be or become an absolute artist; but the blame for this should be laid upon their masters, who are themselves ignorant of this art.”

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) German painter, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist

The Art of Measurement (1525).

Art, Error, Knowledge

“Before you get any kid vaccinated for any reason, you'd better study the subject before you make a decision on vaccines. […] Did you know autism has increased 75,000% in Illinois over a ten-year span? Autism is increasing everywhere. There are many folks like Mary Tocco, her web site is www. MaryTocco. com It is a good website. She studied this intently said, Look, these autism increases are because of vaccinations. That's what is causing it. America has the highest sudden infant death rate syndromes among industrialized nations. In 1970, Australia made vaccines non-mandatory. Fifty percent of the parents opted out of the program and SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) dropped by 50%.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

Death, Parent, Decision, Study

“Jesus, if I know one thing about the industry, it's that it's a moment. A flash in the pan. That's what's lovely about it. But it's hard, because one moment you're the hot thing, and the next moment — you're not. And there's no rhyme or reason for it.”

Keira Knightley (1985) British actress

Interview in Allure magazine (October 2007)

Love

“For it is extremely absurd to expect to be enlightened by reason, and yet to prescribe to her beforehand on which side she must incline.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

A 747, B 775; as translated by F. Max Mueller
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

“I cannot agree with you that the money in Spain has been ineffectual in producing the better hope which now exists…I still think that our opinions at the beginning and in the progress of the Spanish contest were well warranted by such data as we then had to reason upon…But I cannot say that as things have turned out, contrary certainly to any expectations, the event of the Spanish war has not been both honourable and advantageous to this country.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Letter to Lady Grenville (27 October 1813), quoted in E. A. Smith, Lord Grey. 1764-1845 (Alan Sutton, 1996), p. 174.
1810s

Money, War, Hope, Thinking

“One reason for the primacy of the market in shaping the modern world is that it forces a reorganization of society in order to make the market work properly. When a market comes into existence, as Marx fully appreciated, it becomes a potent force driving social change.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

Source: The Political Economy of International Relations (1987), Chapter One, Nature of Political Economy, p. 19

World, Change

“An uprising of the reasonable is our only chance.”

Keith Olbermann (1959) American sports and political commentator

[From Twitter, July 22, 2010]

Chance

“Theism is irrational by definition, because it is not based on reason and is not reasonable. There was no evidence indicating this conclusion, yet it is a firm conviction anyway, and believers are determined not to let any evidence change their minds either. The very purpose and existence of apologetics all by itself demonstrates how theism is irrational.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Philosophistry http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/04/12/philosophistry/ (April 12, 2017)

Change

“No, we don’t have faith in reason and science in the same way as “Cru” members have faith in God. I see “faith” according to Walter Kaufmann’s definition: strong belief in propositions for which there is insufficient evidence to command the assent of every reasonable person. We have confidence in science because it has led us to provisional truths—it works. Cru doesn’t even know if there’s any God, or, if there is a divine presence, that it’s the Abrahamic god rather than the Hindu god, Yahweh, or Wotan. And we use reason in the same way: it leads us to truth. Revelation, dogma, and authority do not, for if they did there would be only one religion rather than thousands with their disparate and often conflicting doctrines.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Atheism grows on campus http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/religion-dispatches-on-atheism/" February 10, 2013

God, Truth, Faith, Religion

“So Dubya goes to war because god told him to. There's a woman down in Texas who bashed in her kid's skulls for the same reason.”

Ed Krebs (1951) American photographer and musician

Had Enough Religious Bullshit

God, War

“Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 1, ch. 9
Atticus Finch
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

People, Understanding, Madness

“One of the paradoxes of our age is the fact that the intellectuals, the politicians, and all the sundry voices that choke like asthma the throat of our communications media, have never gasped and stuttered so loudly about their devotion to the public good, and about the people's will as the supreme criterion of value - and never have they been so grossly indifferent to the people. The reason, obviously, is that collectivist slogans serve as the rationalization for those who intend, not to follow the people, but to rule them.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Apollo and Dionysus (1969)

People, Age, Communication, Indifference

“If imagination would disentangle itself from absurdities, soon we should have it harnessed to reason, pulling the same plough.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 117

Imagination

“Without doubt, the reason for increasing demands on the Federal Government is that the States have not discharged their full duties. Some have done better and some worse, but as a whole they have not done all they should. So demand has grown up for a greater concentration of powers in the Federal Government. If we will fairly consider it, we must conclude that the remedy would be worse than the disease. What we need is not more Federal government but better local government. Yet many people who would agree to this have large responsibility for the lapses of local authority.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

People, Disease

“Where religion speaks, reason has only a right to hear.”

Stanisław Leszczyński (1677–1766) king of Poland

No. 2.
Maxims and Moral Sentences

Religion

“I’m against these aggressive tax avoidance schemes but I’m not just against them, this Government has taken a huge amount of steps to legislate and toughen the laws and go after aggressive tax avoidance schemes for the very simple reason that if people go after these schemes and aggressively avoid tax they’re making it the case that everyone else has to pay higher taxes as a result so I think we should be very clear, tax evasion is illegal and for that you can be prosecuted, you can go to prison for tax evasion. Tax avoidance is in these cases, very aggressive tax avoidance schemes, they are wrong and we should really persuade not to do them and that’s why we have these court cases where the court looks at whether a scheme is really about avoiding tax rather than anything else and the court was very clear in this case.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

On Good Morning Britain speaking about his view of tax avoidance schemes and if Gary Barlow should give back his OBE following claims that the singer took part in one - Prime Minister David Cameron speaks to Good Morning Britain, ITV (12 May 2014) http://www.itv.com/presscentre/press-releases/prime-minister-david-cameron-speaks-good-morning-britain 2010s, 2014

People, Law, Thinking

“The most superficial fact regarding the Discourses, the fact that the number of its chapters equals the number of books of Livy's History, compelled us to start a chain of tentative reasoning which brings us suddenly face to face with the only New Testament quotation that ever appears in Machiavelli's two books and with an enormous blasphemy.”

Leo Strauss book Thoughts on Machiavelli

Source: Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), p. 49

Books, History, Appearance

“These Chinese novels are not perfect according to Western standards. They are not always planned from beginning to end, nor are they compact, any more than life is planned or compact. They are often too long, too full of incident, too crowded with character, a medley of fact and fiction as to material, and a medley of romance and realism as to method, so that an impossible event of magic or dream may be described with such exact semblance of detail that one is compelled to belief against all reason”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Chinese Novel (1938)

Life, Dreams, Perfection

“I'm not quite sure that I know how they complement each other, because I use them for the opposite reason. I find music to be an intensely personal kind of thing, perhaps it's because I write a lot of the stuff. I use acting to escape from being me, and I use music to explore being me. I think that's the best way to put it.”

Colleen Fitzpatrick (1972) American singer and actress

Asked how dancing & music complement each other
Attributed

Music, Way, Thinking, Personality

““It’s no use!” it was the custom of his grandfather to say. “There’s not a bit o’ use in having brains! All they do is get you into trouble! A lucky idiot’s ten times better off than a brainy man with a jinx on him! A smart man starts thinkin’, and he thinks himself into a jail cell if his luck is bad, and good luck’s wasted on him because it ain’t reasonable and he don’t believe in it when it happens! It’s taken me a lifetime to keep my brains from ruinin’ me! No, sir! I hope none o’ my descendants inherit my brains! I pity ‘em if they do!”
Hoddan had been on Darth not more than four hours. In that time he’d found himself robbed, had resented it, had been the object of two spirited attempts at assassination, had ridden an excruciating number of miles on an unfamiliar animal, and now found himself in a stone dungeon and deprived of food lest feeding him obligate his host not to cut his throat. And he’d gotten into this by himself! He’d chosen it! He’d practically asked for it!
He began strongly to share his grandfather’s disillusioned view of brains.”

Murray Leinster book The Pirates of Zan

Source: The Pirates of Zan (1959), Chapter 4

Food, Hope, Thinking, Time

“The doll? Who decided that the young should rehearse the physical care of infants, so that they know them as objects to be bounced, cuddled, or abandoned when boring before they know their own, real infants as living beings full of the responsiveness anterior to language that is the basis of all expressed reason?”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 3, “Of Markets, Maps, Cellars, and Cisterns” (p. 62)

“Being the champion of the working man against the corporations is the reason for the Democrat Party's existence. For them to lose working class Americans to Donald Trump is not that the Democrats have a problem in terms of election, but in terms of identity.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

citation needed

Problem

“Surely the most comically deluded people on this planet, outside creationists, Jehovah's Witnesses and Scientologists, are idealistic left-wing gay people who think they share a common cause with Muslims as two oppressed minorities, when opinion polls tell us that most Muslims are disgusted by homosexuality and think it's completely unacceptable. Among U. K. Muslims, disapproval is 100%. Admittedly, that's from a sample of only 500 people, who all happened to agree unanimously, but that's hardly representative. After all, not all Muslims were included, so we can't reasonably extrapolate anything from it without being racist. That's a relief. I thought we might have to face an unpleasant truth there for a second, didn't you?”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"How gay is Islam?" (11 November 2013) https://youtube.com/watch?v=nLbltj-tD1Y 2013

People, Truth, Thinking

“In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

"Solutions," Vietnam (1967)

“Nobody can overthrow the fascist dictator by being nicer than him. The reason for this is: by definition everybody is always already nicer than the fascist dictator.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 3, Chapter 8, “The Wrath of Diana” (p. 337).
Jack Glass (2012)

“We were not prepared intellectually. Those of us in the national security field still carried the baggage of the Cold War. We thought in concepts of coalition warfare and the Warsaw Pact. When we thought of terrorism, we thought only of state-sponsored terrorism, which is why the immediate reaction of many in our government agencies after 9/11 was: Which state did it? Saddam, it must have been Saddam. We had failed to grasp, for a variety of reasons, the new phenomenon that had emerged in the world. This was not state-sponsored terrorism. This was religious war. …. This was the emergence of a transnational enemy driven by religious fervor and fanaticism. Our enemy is not terrorism. Our enemy is violent, Islamic fundamentalism.”

John Lehman (1942) American banker and government official

Ibid.

War, World

“America`s relatively brief experiment with a generous welfare state was doomed by our African-American population. America tried to import the two fundamentals of the Swedish welfare state—high welfare payments and an end to social disapproval of illegitimacy—beginning about 1961. In parts of the U. S., such as heavily Scandinavian Minnesota, this worked reasonably well. But American voters were confronted with stunning speed with the realization that African-Americans responded differently than Swedes did to the new incentive structures. Welfare allowed much of African-American society to revert to African-style family structures.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

More Diversity = Less Welfare? http://www.vdare.com/articles/more-diversity-less-welfare, VDARE, March 14, 2004

Family, Parting, Speed

“It is difficult for us to appreciate the pressures which are being put on men I know to be realistic and reasonable, not only in their executive capacity but in the highly organised strike committees in the individual ports, by this tightly knit group of politically motivated men who, as the last General Election showed, utterly failed to secure acceptance of their views by the British electorate, but who are now determined to exercise backstage pressures, forcing great hardship on the members of the union and their families, and endangering the security of the industry and the economic welfare of the nation.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the House of Commons (20 June 1966) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1966/jun/20/seamens-strike, referring to the organisers of a Seamen's strike. Wilson meant to imply they were Communists. Among the union officials offended by this quote was John Prescott. Prime Minister

Men, Family, Exercises, Motivation

“I've had about fifty people tell me that I fear intimacy. And it is true. I fear what people will think of me, and that is the reason I don't date very often. People really like me a lot when they only know me a little, but I have this great fear that if they knew me a lot they wouldn't like me. That is the number one thing that scares me about having a wife because she would have to know me pretty well in order to marry me and I think if she got to know me pretty well she wouldn't like me anymore.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

People, Fear, Thinking

“It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Vol. I, p. 53
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Faith

“They [mathematicians] only take those things into consideration, of which they have clear and distinct ideas, designating them by proper, adequate, and invariable names, and premising only a few axioms which are most noted and certain to investigate their affections and draw conclusions from them, and agreeably laying down a very few hypotheses, such as are in the highest degree consonant with reason and not to be denied by anyone in his right mind. In like manner they assign generations or causes easy to be understood and readily admitted by all, they preserve a most accurate order, every proposition immediately following from what is supposed and proved before, and reject all things howsoever specious and probable which can not be inferred and deduced after the same manner.—Barrow, Isaac.”

Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician

Source: Mathematical Lectures (1734), p. 66

Idea, Drawing

“All my life,” said Schweiz, “has been a quest for plausible reasons to believe in what I know to be irrational.”

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 53 (p. 168)

Life

“Saying that what we call our “selves” consist only of our bodies and that reason, soul, and love arise only from the body, is like saying that what we call our body is equivalent to the food that feeds the body. It is true that my body is only made up of digested food and that my body would not exist without food, but my body is not the same as food. Food is what the body needs for life, but it is not the body itself. The same thing is true of my soul. It is true that without my body there would not be that which I call my soul, but my soul is not my body. The soul may need the body, but the body is not the soul.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 12

Love, Life, Food, Soul

“Communist writers likewise maintain that the Judaic-Christian code of ethics is "class" morality. By this they mean that the Ten Commandments and the ethics of Christianity were created to protect private property and the property class. To show the lengths to which Communist writers have gone to defend this view we will mention several of their favorite interpretations of the Ten Commandments. They believe that "Honor thy Father and thy Mother" was created by the early Hebrews to emphasize to their children the fact that they were the private property of their parents. "Thou shalt not kill" was attributed to the belief of the dominant class that their bodies were private property and therefore they should be protected along with other property rights. "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" were said to have been created to implement the idea that a husband was the master of the home and the wife was strictly private property belonging to him. This last line of reasoning led to some catastrophic consequences when the Communists came into power in Russia. In their anxiety to make women "equal with men" and prevent them from becoming private property, they degraded womankind to the lowest and most primitive level. Some Communist leaders advocated complete libertinism and promiscuity to replace marriage and the family.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Women, Men, Marriage, Children

“This possession is a simple and abysmal tasting of all good and of eternal life; and in this tasting we are swallowed up above reason and without reason, in the deep Quiet of the Godhead, which is never moved…And therefrom follows the last point that can be put into words, that is, when the spirit beholds a Darkness into which it cannot enter with the reason. And there it feels itself dead and lost to itself, and one with God without difference and without distinction.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Life, God, Feeling, Dead

“It is the profoundest of cosmic ironies. The divine power, our true spiritual essence, does not achieve perfection until it hits the ‘rock’ bottom of the cosmos – the dense and crude earth. It remains imperfect until the moment of entombment for the simple reason that until that dark nadir is reached the experiential adventure of existence remains incomplete, and Self is not yet endowed with the entire spectrum of the light of consciousness – from spirit to matter – from the highest high to the lowest low.”

Lon Milo DuQuette (1948) American occult writer

Source: Angels, Demons, & Gods of the New Millennium (1997), Chapter 3

Light, Perfection

“Contemplation does not mean abject surrender to every "mystical" impression that comes in. It is no sentimental aestheticism or emotional piety to which you are being invited: nor shall the transcending of reason ever be achieved by way of spiritual silliness.”

Evelyn Underhill book Practical Mysticism

Source: Practical Mysticism (1914), Chapter VI, Love And Will, p. 105

Way

“Having given up autonomy, reason has become an instrument.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 21.

“The relationship that in our time unites us with Money is completely abstract. That’s where our society resembles to the one in the Middle Ages: we fear a symbolic and invisible entity, like men feared God thousands of years ago. The stock exchange changes without our participation. Between the stock and us there’s a theology of money called “economy” that, in general, is in charge of rationally explaining something that doesn’t have more reason than it’s symbolic power.”

Jorge Majfud (1969) Uruguayan-American writer

"Teología del dinero" http://www.bitacora.com.uy/articulos/2002/noviembre/98/98general.htm Bitácora, magazine, La República, Uruguay (13 November 2002)

Men, Money, God, Age

“The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think; their notions are almost all adoptive; and, in general, I believe it is better that it should be so; as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet, than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

7 February 1749
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

Thinking

“Religions are many, reason is one, we are all brothers.”

A. J. Cronin (1896–1981) Scottish novelist and physician

Chinese proverb, as quoted in The Chinese Empire (1855), by M. Huc,Vol. II, p. 199; also in "M. Huc's Travels in China" in Living Age (1855), p, 668
Misattributed

Religion

“There is nothing reasonable about faith. Those two words mean completely opposite things. Putting them together creates an oxymoron, That’s why William Lyin’ Craig thought it would make a clever book title. Faith is an unreasonable conviction which is assumed without reason and defended against all reason. That’s why faith is the most dishonest position it is possible to have. It really is!”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, A Letter to a Certain Christian http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2013/10/12/a-letter-to-a-certain-christian/ (October 12, 2013)

Books, Faith

“There is, I venture to think, no ground for the ordinarily accepted statement of the relation of philosophy to theology and religion. It is usually said that while^hilosophy is the creation of an individual mind, theology or religion is, like folk-lore and language, the product of the collective mind of a people or a race. This is to confuse philosophy with philosophies, a conmion and, it must be admitted, a not unnatural confusion. But while a philosophy is the creation of a Plato, an Aristotle, a Spinoza, a Kant, or a Hegel, ^hilosophy itself is, like religion, folk-lore and language, a product of the collective mind of humanity. It is advanced, as these are, by individual additions, interpretations and syntheses, but it is none the less quite istinct from such individual contributions. philosophy is humanity's hold on Totality, and it becomes richer and more helpful as man's intellectual horizon widens, as his intellectual vision grows clearer, and as his insights become more numerous and more sure. Theology is philosophy of a particular type. It is an interpretation of Totality in terms of God and His activities. In the impressive words of Principal Caird, that philosophy which is theology seeks "to bind together objects and events in the links of necessary thought, and to find their last ground and reason in that which comprehends and transcends all— the nature of God Himself." Religion is the apprehension and the adoration of the Grod Whom theology postulates.
If the whole history of philosophy be searched for material with which to instruct the beginner in what philosophy really is and in its relation to theology and religion, the two periods or epochs that stand out above all others as useful for this purpose are Greek thought from Thales to Socrates, and that interpretation of the teachings of Christ by philosophy which gave rise, at the hands of the Church Fathers, to Christian theology. In the first period we see the simple, clear-cut steps by which the mind of Europe was led from explanations that were fairy-tales to a natural, well-analyzed, and increasingly profound interpretation of the observed phenomena of Nature. The process is so orderly and so easily grasped that it is an invaluable introduction to the study of philosophic thinking. In the second period we see philosophy, now enriched by the literally huge contributions of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, intertwining itself about the simple Christian tenets and building the great system of creeds and thought which has immortalized the names of Athanasius and Hilary, Basil and Gregory, Jerome and Augustine, and which has given color and form to the intellectual life of Europe for nearly two thousand years. For the student of today both these developments have great practical value, and the astonishing neglect and ignorance of them both are most discreditable.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

" Philosophy" (a lecture delivered at Columbia University in the series on science, philosophy and art, March 4, 1908) https://archive.org/details/philosophyalect00butlgoog"

Life, God, People, Religion

“That's what really interested me about India, the religious aspect-and the extravagance of it. There was so much of it; the temples had all these things crawling all over them. It was so alive and complicated compared to the relative austerity that I saw in Jewish and especially Protestant ceremonies. Not so much Catholic ceremonies, though. I always loved Catholicism for the same reason that I love Hinduism, they're so much alike: the kitsch, the colors, the incense, the saints and the pageantry.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

Love, Color

“Older children always sit down to paint or write after they have seen a picture or read a story that appeals to them, and attempt to create. So life ought to be a struggle of desire towards adventures whose nobility will fertilise the soul and lead to the conception of new, glorious things. To avoid the ordeal of emotion that leads to the conception is the impulse of death. Sterility is the deadly sin. Today so many of our activities are sterile. Our upper classes are impotent by reason of their soft living. Our lower classes have had their vitality sweated out of them by their filthy labours: they can only bear dead things.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

"The Gospel According to Granville-Parker", in The Freewoman (7 March 1912); re-published in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17 (1982), p. 21

Life, Death, Children, Soul

“One does not like to differ from a man without knowing the reasons which influenced him.”

Nathaniel Lindley, Baron Lindley (1828–1921) English judge

Ex parte Strawbridge; In re Hickman (1883), L. R. 25 C. D. 276.

“Before you cut me off, Raven, the reason I hate you, the reason in my heart of hearts why I hate you, is I did not know any better when I was a little kid. When my dad came home smelling like beer. I thought it was a hard day’s work he was doing. I did not realize he was out at a bar. I did not realize ‘work’ meant ‘unemployment office.’ I did not think it was strange for someone to come home and take an Old Style up into the shower. I did not think it was strange for somebody to pass out. I thought an Old Style, a pack a day, was the norm. Raven, my father is exactly like you. Since day one of Ring of Honor, where fighting spirit is supposed to be revered, things are not supposed to be this way! I’d shake your hand like a normal man, but the thing is, I don’t respect you! I hate you! I hate you for everything you have pissed away! Everything I have scrapped and clawed for that I haven’t even earned yet! That you got handed to you and you flushed down the toilet! For what? For pills? For booze? For alcohol? For women? I’m born of your poison society. So, on the seventeenth of July, I will become a monster to fight the monsters of the world! Your time in Ring of Honor will be done. That is a promise. This is true! This is real! This is straight edge!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

Ring of Honor: WrestleRave '03. June 28th, 2003.
Promo aimed at Raven after a tag team match with Colt Cabana against Raven and Christopher Daniels
Ring of Honor

Women, Hate, Alcohol, World

“The best reason I can think of for not running for President of the United States is that you have to shave twice a day.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

As quoted in Bartlett's Unfamiliar Quotations (1971) by Leonard Louis Levinson, p. 237

Thinking

“There is no reason at all why there aren't enough people to guard New Orleans and to help stabilise Baghdad.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"Voters will remember disaster response, Hitchens says" http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2005/s1453763.htm, Lateline interview with Tony Jones, Australian Broadcasting Corporation {2005-09-05): On the 2003 invasion of Iraq 2000s, 2005

People, Help

“After all human beings have to live dogs too so as not to know that time is passing, that is the whole business of living to go on so they will not know that time is passing, that is why they get drunk that is why they like to go to war, during a war there is the most complete absence of the sense that time is passing a year of war lasts so much longer than any other year. After all that is what life is and that is the reason there is no Utopia, little or big young or old dog or man everybody wants every minute so filled that they are not conscious of that minute passing. It's just as well they do not think about it you have to be a genius to live in it and know it to exist in it and express it to accept it and deny it by creating it.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 4

Life, War, Dogs, Business

“The czech skull is impervious to reason, but it is scuceptible to blows.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

“There's a point you reach before you're perverted and tainted by all the things that drag you into the music business, like avarice or a lust for fame. The original reason why I started was some feeling of community, equality, wanting to fight for things you believe in. Any kid who's gone to a state school knows what it's all about - bullying, racism. And you've just got to make a stand.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

2004, The Socialist Review; on why it was important to do the Love Music, Hate Racism gig
Music and politics

School, Music, Feeling, Communication

“The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticism of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system, which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them; and for this obvious reason, that nonsense can never be explained.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to John Adams (5 July 1814). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-11_Bk.pdf, pp. 397–398 1810s

Understanding, Christ

“The realization of the pathetic frailty of the knowledge or beliefs on which our life depends thus leads not to despair but to open-eyed courage. But it also points to a most intimate connection between scientific method and liberal civilization. Science is not, as is popularly conceived, a new set of dogmas taught by a newer and better set of priests called scientists. It is rather a method which is based on a critical attitude to all plausible and self-evident propositions. It seeks not to reject them, but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives. This open eye for possible alternatives, each to receive the same logical treatment before we can determine which is the better grounded, is the essence of liberalism in art, morals, and politics.... Like science, liberalism insists on a critical examination of the content of all our beliefs, principles, or initial hypotheses and on subjecting them to a continuous process of verification so that they will be progressively better founded in experience and reason.”

Morris Raphael Cohen (1880–1947) American philosopher

Language in Thought and Action, p. 271, (1939), S.I. Hayakawa

Life, Art, Courage, Support

“Now, there were many reasons why the south did not appeal to the right of revolution. One reason was that there were no abuses that they had been subject to, comparable to the ones enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln, in his inaugural address, said that there was not a single constitutional right which anybody could point to, to say that that had been violated. They were exercising this right as something that was to their pleasure, for their own purposes, but that had nothing to do with the Constitution, and yet they were claiming it as a Constitutional right to withdraw from the Union.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

Pleasure, Exercises

“The knowledge of feudal practices is the reason why I was perhaps the most formidable scourge of feudalism.”

François-Noël Babeuf (1760–1797) French political agitator and journalist of the French Revolutionary period

La connaissance des pratiques féodales « est la raison pour laquelle je fus peut-être le plus redoutable fléau de la féodalité. »
[in Gracchus Babeuf avec les Egaux, Jean-Marc Shiappa, Les éditions ouvrières, 1991, 13, 27082 2892-7]
On feudalism

Knowledge

“The reason why I gave up all the privileges and economic benefits was that I felt I could not let my sons lead a life like me, as a modern-day slave. I believed the best legacy I could leave for my sons was to give them the freedom that is so common to everyone in America.”

Thae Yong-ho (1961) former North Korean diplomat who defected to South Korea

Remarks to the U.S. Congress (November 2017)

Life, Freedom

“Others, who have the common amount of charity and have not yet grown in grace to this extent, but are guided by their own reason, struggle and strive all day against their sins in order to acquire virtues. Like wrestlers, they are sometimes on top, and sometimes underneath. Such people are doing well. They acquire virtues through their own reason and will, but not because they love and delight in virtue, for they have to exert all of their energy to overcome their natural instincts in order to possess them. Consequently they never enjoy true peace or final victory. They will receive a great reward, but they are not yet sufficiently humble. They have not yet put themselves wholly into God's hands, because they do not yet see Him.”

Walter Hilton (1340–1396) English Augustinian mystic.

Book II, ch. 36 (p. 211)
The Ladder of Perfection (1494)

Love, God, People, Peace

“Perhaps the dissenters believe that 'offense to others' ought to be the only reason for restricting nudity in public places generally.... The purpose of Indiana's nudity law would be violated, I think, if 60,000 fully consenting adults crowded into the Hoosierdome to display their genitals to one another, even if there were not an offended innocent in the crowd.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

On decency laws: Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc. (1991) (concurring).
1990s

Law, Thinking

“We need heuristic reasoning when we construct a strict proof as we need scaffolding when we erect a building.”

George Pólya book How to Solve It

Source: How to Solve It (1945), p. 113

“Skeptics need to organize and mobilize — online and offline — to further the cause of reason, science and critical thinking. They need to speak out in the media and to politicians about the harm resulting from undue credulity and challenge and confront the charlatans directly to put up or shut up. Skeptics can no longer afford to keep quiet or remain indifferent in the face of a looming dark age. They need to campaign for a reform of the educational system and encourage the teaching of critical thinking in schools.”

Leo Igwe (1970) Nigerian human rights activist

A Manifesto for a Skeptical Africa (2012)

Age, Education, School, Thinking

“These days a very melancholic mood has taken hold of me. There is nothing else but my work. My dear ones, I have been well and I have been working and my way of working is changing. For this reason I always feel extremely anxious. I am not content and perhaps I will not (ever) be satisfied with my work, not even for one day. I want to attain works which are more personal and clean.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: 1930 - 1941, from 'Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 125: Gorky's quote, in a letter to his sister Vartush Mooradian, 28 February 1938

Way, Feeling, Mood, Change

“The worship of money is the lowest of all human emotions, but it is shared not only by the bourgeoisie, but also by the great majority of us… Little people, humble people, even those who are practically penniless. And I, with all my indignation, all my passion for destruction, I, too, am not free of it. I who am oppressed by wealth, who realise it to be the source of all misery, all my vices and hatred, all the bitterest humiliations that I have to suffer, all my impossible dreams and all the endless torment of my existence, still, all the time, as soon as I find myself in the presence of a rich person, I cannot help looking up to him, as some exceptional and splendid being, a kind of marvelous divinity, and in spite of myself, stronger than either my will of my reason, I feel rising from the very depths of my being, a sort of incense of admiration for this wealthy creature, who is all too often as stupid as he is pitiless. Isn’t it crazy? And why… why?”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Diary ot a Chambermaid

Money, People, Stupidity, Dreams

“Emotions have evolved so that we can make decisions quickly and without thinking in situations where there is no time for reasoning.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Woźniak, Olga; Vetulani, Jerzy (24 December 2011): Stań się dobrym. To się opłaca, interview. Gazeta Wyborcza (in Polish).

Thinking, Decision, Time

“The majority, who through the blindness of their reason do not discern the damages which the soul has sustained, only feel the pain of external injuries, because the faculty of judgment, which alone can enable them to apprehend the damage to the mind, is taken from them.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

55.
Every Good Man is Free

Pain, Feeling, Soul

“I've been on the left of the Party since I joined it about 1934 and I haven't seen much reason for altering…I have always been a strong libertarian both inside the Labour Party and outside…what I want to seek to do over a period of course is to establish a Socialist society.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

Source: On BBC's Panorama (22 March 1976)

Strong

“The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.”

E.L. Doctorow (1931–2015) novelist, editor, professor

Interview in Writers at Work (1988)

“…suddenly certain that what he was doing now was the sole reason he'd been placed on this earth. To love another. To care for someone else, to help another person, to carry her worries until she was strong enough to carry them on her own. To care for someone unconditionally, for in the end that was what gave life meaning.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Jeremy Marsh, Chapter 20, p. 263
2000s, At First Sight (2005)

Love, Life, Strong, Help

“Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don't have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen — or indeed a citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), Ch. 25 : Real Patriots Ask Questions

Children, World, Education, Exercises

“We know that there are people for whom the country and a certain rather mediocre dynasty are in effect unimaginable without one another. There is no need to doubt or mock the sincerity of the conviction. However, there is no reason in our history or our literature to endorse or underwrite it either. We possess an alternative tradition which is capable of outlasting this royal house as it has already outlasted others.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

People, History, Literature, Housing

“The Macedonian language is actually an artifact produced for primarily political reasons.”

Vittore Pisani (1899–1990) Italian linguist

Il Macedonico, Paideia, Rivista Letteraria di informazione bibliografica, vol. 12, p. 250 (1957)

“Our government has the weirdest bias against cannabis. There's no reason for everybody to be so afraid of it. It's not the antichrist the DEA makes it out to be. Industrial hemp is a very useful plant. I challenged the attorney general to get rid of the criminal stigma associated with hemp so we can look at it in terms of how it might be useful. And government has no business telling us what we can and can't use for pain relief.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

I Ain't Got Time To Bleed (1999)

Pain, Business

“My view [is] that what morality boils down to is, “Don’t harm, and do help.” And now the question is, “Can creatures like chickens and cows be harmed?” And the answer is, “Of course they can.” Consequently, I think it’s immoral to harm them. And that seems to me to provide a very strong moral reason to be vegetarian, to not wear leather… it seems to me that our treatment of animals is morally appalling… and that we ought to radically revise the way we live, precisely because they feel pain, they can be hurt, and we’re constantly hurting these creatures!”

Shelly Kagan (1956) American philosopher

Debate: Is God Necessary for Morality? (2011)

Pain, Way, Feeling, Question

“Lueg and Palermo saw what was good, what was bad, in what I was painting. That became the basis of our relationship, that we shared an idea, a sensibility. With Sigmar Polke, it was different. Our relationship was based on being outrageous. I have difficulties with his work. He [Polke] refuses all values and criteria, and for that reason I could never talk to him seriously. He refuses to accept any borders, any limits.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

Idea, Painting

“Two charming young women approached me and lobbied me about this matter because they both have Down's syndrome children with a reasonably high IQ.”

David Norris (1944) Irish scholar, independent Senator, and gay and civil rights activist

29 May 2013 http://www.kildarestreet.com/sendebates/?id=2013-05-29a.223&s=speaker%3A210#g233

Women, Children

“The Muslim whose legs are being reduced to pulp by his American tormentor doesn't care if he's being murdered because he is despised by Christians or because he is an impediment to economic rationality. … For all the inevitability that surrounds the Christian/Enlightenment divide, it should not be so difficult for us to find a third option in our intellectual traditions, even if this tradition seems mostly defeated and lost. It is a tradition that is spiritual and yet hostile to the orthodoxies of institutional Christianity. It is the creation of the Enlightenment and yet it is suspicious of the claims of Reason, especially that form of Reason, economic rationalism, that defines capitalism. This tradition began in Europe with Romanticism and in America with the Concord Transcendentalists.”

Curtis White (1951) American academic

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

Hostility

“As dogs, cats, horses, and probably all the higher animals, even birds, as is stated on good authority, have vivid dreams, and this is shewn by their movements and voice, we must admit that they possess some power of imagination. … Few persons any longer dispute that animals possess some power of reasoning. Animals may constantly be seen to pause, deliberate, and resolve. It is a significant fact, that the more the habits of any particular animal are studied by a naturalist, the more he attributes to reason and the less to unlearnt instincts.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter II: "Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals", page 46 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=59&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Dogs, Dreams, Imagination, Cats

Quotes about reason page 32

Quotes about reason
page 32