Quotes about reason
page 7

“There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Inaugural Address (1905)

Fear, Problem, Future

“The power of the State may be brought to bear, as it often is in England, through public opinion rather than through the laws. By oratory and the influence of the Press, public opinion is largely created by the State, and a tyrannous public opinion is as great an enemy to liberty as tyrannous laws. If the young man who will not fight finds that he is dismissed from his employment, insulted in the streets, cold-shouldered by his friends, and thrown over with scorn by any woman who may formerly have liked him, he will feel the penalty quite as hard to bear as a death sentence. A free community requires not only legal freedom, but a tolerant public opinion, an absence of that instinctive inquisition into our neighbors' affairs which, under the guise of upholding a high moral standard, enables good people to indulge unconsciously a disposition to cruelty and persecution. Thinking ill of others is not in itself a good reason for thinking well of ourselves. But so long as this is not recognized, and so long as the State can manufacture public opinion, except in the rare cases where it is revolutionary, public opinion must be reckoned as a definite part of the power of the State.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1910s, Why Men Fight https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_Men_Fight (1917), pp. 48-50

Death, People, Law, Penalty

“A physical-mental characteristic of mine is a certain passive magnetism of the animal world… The mental-physical passive animal magnetism mentioned is passive, not active, for the reason that the person for whom it is a characteristic does not attract, but rather feels himself attracted, just as a passive magnetism dwells in a piece of soft iron, since it does not attract, but is attracted by the steel magnet, whereas active magnetism is in the attracting steel magnet”

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) German jurist, writer and pioneer of LGBT human rights

perhaps a passive magnetism as well, but at least an active is there
Ulrichs in autobiographical manuscript of 1861, cited in Hubert Kennedy (1988), Ulrichs: The Life and Works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Pioneer of the Modern Gay Movement. Boston: Alyson. p. 44; As cited in: Kennedy (1997, 3)

World, Feeling, Animals, Personality

“No one has yet added up all the heavy, stress-filled workdays as well as the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives that are wasted to produce the world’s amusements. It is for this reason that “amusements” are not so amusing.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 81

World

“The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.”

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) American writer

Preface
Welcome to the Monkey House (1968)

Health, Suicide

“Imagine that each of these layers of existence are like patterns. They're patterns within patterns within patterns within patterns, and there's a way of making all that harmonious. That's what music models. That's why music is so meaningful. You take a beautiful orchestral composition, and they're doing different things are different levels. But they all flow together harmoniously, and you're right in the middle of that as a listener. And it fills you almost with a sense of religious awe, even if you're a punk rock nihilist. The reason for that is because the music is modeling the manner of Being that's harmonious. It's the proper way to exist. Religious writings, in the deepest sense, are guidelines to that mode of Being. They're not true like scientific knowledge is true. They're hyper true, or meta-true. It's like this: if you take the most true things about your life, and then you take the most true things about ten other people's lives, and then we amalgamate them into a single figure. That would be like a literary hero. And then we take a thousands literary heroes and we extract out from them what makes the most heroic person - that's a religious deity. That's what Christ is. He's a meta-hero. And that sits at the bottom of Western Civilization. Christ's archetypal mode of Being is True Speech. That's the fundamental idea of Western Civilization, and it's right.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Life, People, Beauty, Music

“Buddhism is returning home to India after a long exile of a thousand years and, like the proverbial prodigal son, is being received with open arms. Religious tolerance of the average Hindu partly explains the warm reception. But a more important reason is the fact that Buddha and Buddhism form an intimate part of Hindu consciousness. Buddha was a Hindu. Buddhism is Hindu in its origin and development, in its art and architecture, iconography, language, beliefs, psychology, names, nomenclature, religious vows and spiritual discipline…. Hinduism is not all Buddhism, but Buddhism forms part of the ethos which is essentially Hindu”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Buddhism vis-a-vis Hinduism (1958, revised 1984)

Art, Home, Parting

“As soon as an opinion becomes common it is sufficient reason for men to abandon it and to uphold the opposite opinion until that in its turn grows old, and they require to distinguish themselves by other things. Thus if they attain their goal in some art or science, we must expect them soon to cast it aside to acquire some fresh fame, and this is partly the reason why the most splendid ages degenerate so quickly, and, scarcely emerged from barbarism, plunge into it again.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 179.

Men, Age, Art, Science

“Where danger shews it self, apprehension cannot, without stupidity, be wanting; where danger is, sense of danger should be; and so much fear as should keep us awake, and excite our attention, industry, and vigour; but not to disturb the calm use of our reason, nor hinder the execution of what that dictates.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 115
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

Stupidity, Fear, Sense

“Now, justification in this life is given to us according to these three things: first by the laver of regeneration by which all sins are forgiven; then, by a struggle with the faults from whose guilt we have been absolved; the third, when our prayer is heard, in which we say: ‘Forgive us our debts,’ because however bravely we fight against our faults, we are men; but the grace of God so aids as we fight in this corruptible body that there is reason for His hearing us as we ask forgiveness.”

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher

Against Julian, Book II, ch. 8, 22. In The Fathers of the Church, Matthew A. Schumacher, tr., 1957, ISBN 0813214009 ISBN 9780813214009pp. 83-84. http://books.google.com/books?id=lxED1d6DAXoC&pg=PA83&lpg=PA83&dq=%22justification+in+this+life+is+given+to+us+according+to+these+three+things%22&source=bl&ots=K9fP-vBQqj&sig=2yV56Mq2aukLy8iM1FvpSfmULqA&hl=en&ei=8ZuCTdXGC4WO0QGCl-HGCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22justification%20in%20this%20life%20is%20given%20to%20us%20according%20to%20these%20three%20things%22&f=false Contra Julianum

Life, Men, God, Forgiveness

“I was convinced — and I am so still — that the fundamental principles of Christianity have to be proved true by reasoning, and by no other method. Reason, I said to myself, is given us that we may bring everything within the range of its action, even the most exalted ideas of religion. And this certainty filled me with joy.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)

Religion, Idea, Joy

“Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.”

Madalyn Murray O'Hair (1919–1995) Atheist activist

American Atheists charter

“I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles; for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled towards each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other; which forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of nature in vain; but I hope the principles here laid down will afford some light either to that or some truer method of philosophy.”

Isaac Newton book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

Preface
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)

Hope, Search, Nature, Light

“Who is a liar, saith John, but he that denyeth that Jesus is the Christ? He is Antichrist that denyeth the Father & the Son. And we are authorized also to call him God: for the name of God is in him. Exod. 23.21. And we must believe also that by his incarnation of the Virgin he came in the flesh not in appearance only but really & truly, being in all things made like unto his brethren (Heb. 2 17) for which reason he is called also the son of man.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Drafts on the history of the Church (Section 3). Yahuda Ms. 15.3, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel. 2006 Online Version at Newton Project http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00220

God, Appearance, Christ

“How much can you depend on their loyalty? You can depend upon their loyalty as much as the Germans depended upon it in 1916.
And we're going to suffer the same fate as Germany suffered, and for the same reason.”

Benjamin H. Freedman (1890–1984) American businessman

His opinion on the loyalty of Zionists to the United States
Willard Hotel speech (1961)

Fate, Suffering, Dependency, Loyalty

“He neither seeks nor avoids talking about his enemies. When he does speak of them, it is with pride without disdain, humor without rancor, reproach without bitterness, frankness without spite. And in the same way, he speaks of his rivals for glory only with deserved praises that conceal no hidden venom, which can certainly not be said of the praise they sometimes give him. But what I find in him that is most rare in an Author and and even in a sensitive man is the most perfect tolerance in matters of feelings and opinions, and the putting aside of all partisan spirit, even in his own favor; wanting freely to state his opinion and his reasons when the issue demands it, and even doing so with passion when his heart is agitated; but not blaming people for not adopting what he feels any more than he puts up with anyone's wish to deprive him of his feeling; and giving everyone the same freedom of thought as he insists on having for himself. I hear everyone talk about tolerance, but he is the only truly tolerant person I have known.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques (published 1782)

People, Way, Feeling, Freedom

“There is no such thing as an absolute despotism; it is only relative. A man cannot wholly free himself from obligation to his fellows. A sultan who cut off heads from caprice, would quickly lose his own in the same way. Excesses tend to check themselves by reason of their own violence. What the ocean gains in one place it loses in another.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

Way

“Rationalist politics, I have said, are the politics of the felt need, the felt need not qualified by a genuine, concrete knowledge of the permanent interests and direction of movement of a society, but interpreted by 'reason' and satisfied according to the technique of an ideology: they are the politics of the book.”

Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) British philosopher

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

Books, Knowledge

“Human history is not the product of the wise direction of human reason, but is shaped by the forces of emotion—our dreams, our pride, our greed, our fears, and our desire for revenge.”

Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Chinese writer

Confucius Saw Nancy and Essays about Nothing (1936), p. 95

Fear, Dreams, History, Revenge

“For reasons mentioned at the beginning of this section, we cannot offer here a precise structural definition of semantical category and will content ourselves with the following approximate formulation: two expressions belong to the same semantical category if (I) there is a sentential function which contains one of these expressions, and if (2) no sentential function which contains one of these expressions ceases to be a sentential function if this expression is replaced in it by the other. It follows from this that the relation of belonging to the same category is reflective, symmetrical and transitive. By applying the principle of abstraction, all the expressions of the language which are parts of sentential functions can be divided into mutually exclusive classes, for two expressions are put into one and the same class if and only if they belong to the same semantical category, and each of these classes is called a semantical category. Among the simplest examples of semantical categories it suffices to mention the category of the sentential functions, together with the categories which include respectively the names of individuals, of classes of individuals, of two-termed relations between individuals, and so on. Variables (or expressions with variables) which represent names of the given categories likewise belong to the same category.”

Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) Polish-American logician

Source: The Semantic Conception of Truth (1952), p. 45; as cited in: Schaff (1962) pp. 36-37.

Parting

“All classes, therefore, must be brought under women’s influence; for all require to be reminded constantly of the great truth that Reason and Activity are subordinate to Feeling. Of their influence upon philosophers I have spoken. If they are men worthy of their mission, they will be conscious of the tendency which their life has to harden them and lead them into useless speculation; and they will feel the need of renewing the ardour of their social sympathy at its native source. Feeling, when it is pure and deep, corrects its own errors, because they clash with the good to which it is ever tending. But erroneous use of the intellectual or practical faculties, cannot be even recognized, much less corrected, without the aid of Affection, which is the only part of our nature that suffers directly from such errors. Therefore whenever either the philosopher or the people deviate from duty, it will be the part of women to remonstrate with them gently, and recall them to the true social principles which are entrusted to their special charge.”

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) French philosopher

Source: A General View of Positivism (1848, 1856), p. 253-254

Life, Women, Men, People

“Every being which is endowed with reason, and transgresses its statutes and limitations, is undoubtedly involved in sin by swerving from rectitude and justice.”

Origen (185–254) Christian scholar in Alexandria

On First Principles, Bk. 1, ch. 5; vol. 1, p. 45.
On First Principles

Justice

“Unhappiness makes people vulnerable, incessant suffering unjust. Just as in the relations between a creditor and a debtor there is always an element of the disagreeable that can never be overcome, for the very reason that the one is irrevocably committed to the role of giver and the other to that of receiver, so in a sick person a latent feeling of resentment at every obvious sign of consideration is always ready to burst forth.”

Stefan Zweig book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

People, Feeling, Suffering, Personality

“I do not think it possible to get anywhere if we start from scepticism. We must start from a broad acceptance of whatever seems to be knowledge and is not rejected for some specific reason.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1950s, My Philosophical Development (1959), p. 200

Knowledge, Thinking

“But take a brief glance at real life. In present-day economic life you will find, not only competition and monopoly, but also their synthesis, which is not a formula but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. That equation, however, far from alleviating the difficulties of the present situation, as bourgeois economists suppose, gives rise to a situation even more difficult and involved. Thus, by changing the basis upon which the present economic relations rest, by abolishing the present mode of production, you abolish not only competition, monopoly and their antagonism, but also their unity, their synthesis, the movement whereby a true balance is maintained between competition and monopoly.

Let me now give you an example of Mr Proudhon's dialectics. Freedom and slavery constitute an antagonism. There is no need for me to speak either of the good or of the bad aspects of freedom. As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World. After these reflections on slavery, what will the good Mr Proudhon do? He will seek the synthesis of liberty and slavery, the true golden mean, in other words the balance between slavery and liberty. Mr Proudhon understands perfectly well that men manufacture worsted, linens and silks; and whatever credit is due for understanding such a trifle! What Mr Proudhon does not understand is that, according to their faculties, men also produce the social relations in which they produce worsted and linens. Still less does Mr Proudhon understand that those who produce social relations in conformity with their material productivity also produce the ideas, categories, i. e. the ideal abstract expressions of those same social relations. Indeed, the categories are no more eternal than the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. To Mr Proudhon, on the contrary, the prime cause consists in abstractions and categories. According to him it is these and not men which make history. The abstraction, the category regarded as such, i. e. as distinct from man and his material activity, is, of course, immortal, immutable, impassive. It is nothing but an entity of pure reason, which is only another way of saying that an abstraction, regarded as such, is abstract. An admirable tautology! Hence, to Mr Proudhon, economic relations, seen in the form of categories, are eternal formulas without origin or progress. To put it another way: Mr Proudhon does not directly assert that to him bourgeois life is an eternal truth; he says so indirectly, by deifying the categories which express bourgeois relations in the form of thought. He regards the products of bourgeois society as spontaneous entities, endowed with a life of their own, eternal, the moment these present themselves to him in the shape of categories, of thought. Thus he fails to rise above the bourgeois horizon. Because he operates with bourgeois thoughts and assumes them to be eternally true, he looks for the synthesis of those thoughts, their balance, and fails to see that their present manner of maintaining a balance is the only possible one.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, (28 December 1846), Rue d'Orleans, 42, Faubourg Namur, Marx Engels Collected Works Vol. 38, p. 95; International Publishers (1975). First Published: in full in the French original in M.M. Stasyulevich i yego sovremenniki v ikh perepiske, Vol. III, 1912

Life, Men, Truth, World

“I obey Thee Lord, first for the love I ought, in all reason to bear Thee; secondly for that Thou canst shorten or prolong the lives of men.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

Love, Men

“One of the funniest examples of these kinds of statistics comes from Evolution: Possible or Impossible by James F. Coppedge [who] cites an article by Ulric Jelinek … which claims that the odds are 1 in 10^243 against "two thousand atoms" (the size of one particular protein molecule) ending up in precisely that particular order "by accident." Where did Jelenik get that figure? From Pierre Lecompte du Nouy… who in turn got it from Charles-Eugene Guye, a physicist who died in 1942. Guye had merely calculated the odds of these atoms lining up by accident if "a volume" of atoms the size of the Earth were "shaken at the speed of light." In other words, ignoring all the laws of chemistry, which create preferences for the formation and behavior of molecules, and ignoring that there are millions if not billions of different possible proteins--and of course the result has no bearing on the origin of life, which may have begun from an even simpler protein. This calculation is thus useless for all these reasons, and is typical in that it comes to Coppedge third-hand (and thus to us fourth-hand), and is hugely outdated (it was calculated before 1942, even before the discovery of DNA), and thus fails to account for over half a century of scientific progress.”

Pierre Lecomte du Noüy (1883–1947) French philosopher

Richard Carrier, "Bad Science, Worse Philosophy", Addendum B, http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html#et_al at The Secular Web (Internet Infidels: 2000) About

Life, Law, Behavior, Light

“This man has lived here
a reasonably long time and has gladly talked in his life
to no one, has spoken first to no one
except — of necessity, since he is a neighbor and passes by — me,
Pan. And he immediately regrets it,
I'm sure.”

Menander Dyskolos

Pan.
Dyskolos

Life, Time

“I have seen it stated that no expert is quick enough to run over a dog; that a dog is always able to skip out of his way. I think that that may be true; but I think that the reason he couldn't run over the dog was because he was trying to. I did not try to run over any dog. But I ran over every dog that came along.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

"Taming the Bicycle" (1917)

Dogs, Way, Thinking

“Life lives; and in the living flow, no questions are raised. The reason is that life is a living now! So, in order to live life whole-heartedly, the answer is life simply is.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 3

Life, Question

“The general character and disposition of the Rationalist are, I think, not difficult to identify. At bottom he stands (he always stands) for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of 'reason'. His circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious: he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic: sceptical, because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his 'reason'; optimistic, because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his 'reason' (when properly applied) to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action.”

Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) British philosopher

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

Truth, World, Question, Thinking

“Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 14

Behavior, Idea, Appearance

“The final sin of man, said Luther truly, is his unwillingness to concede that he is a sinner. The significant contribution of modern culture to this perennial human inclination lies in the number of plausible reasons which it was able to adduce in support of man's good opinion of himself.”

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) American protestant theologian

vol. 1, p. 121
The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (1941)

Support

“To many, perhaps to most people outside the small company of the great scholars, past and present, 'Celtic' of any sort is, nonetheless, a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come. … Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

English and Welsh (1955)

God, People, Past

“In reading this author [ Montaigne ] and comparing him with Epictetus, I have found that they are assuredly the two greatest defenders of the two most celebrated sects of the world, and the only ones conformable to reason, since we can only follow one of these two roads, namely: either that there is a God, and then we place in him the sovereign good; or that he is uncertain, and that then the true good is also uncertain, since he is incapable of it.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

Conversation on Epictetus and Montaigne

God, World, Reading

“Claggert: We must serve the law, sir, or give up the right and privilege of service. It is only within that law that we may use our discretions according to our rank.
Captain Vere: You're so intelligent and so lucid for the rank you hold, Master At Arms.
Claggert: I thank you, sir.
Captain Vere: Yes, that's no flattery, Mr. Claggart. It's a melancholy fact. It's sad to see such qualities of mind bent to such a sorry purpose. What's the reason for it?
Claggert: I am what I am, sir. And what the world has made me.
Captain Vere: The world? The world demands that behind every peacemaker there be the gun, the gallows, the jail. Do you think it will always be so?
Claggert: I have no reason not to, sir.
Captain Vere: You live without hope?
Claggert: I live.
Captain Vere: But remember, Mr. Claggart, that even the man who wields the whip cannot defy the code we must obey and not be broken by it. That will be all.”

Peter Ustinov (1921–2004) English actor, writer, and dramatist

Billy Budd (1962)

World, Sadness, Law, Hope

“The Aitolians, the Akarnanians, the Macedonians, men of the same speech, are united or disunited by trivial causes that arise from time to time; with aliens, with barbarians, all Greeks wage and will wage eternal war; for they are enemies by the will of nature, which is eternal, and not from reasons that change from day to day…”
Aetolos Acarnanas Macedonas, eiusdem linguae homines, leues ad tempus ortae causae diiungunt coniunguntque: cum alienigenis, cum barbaris aeternum omnibus Graecis bellum est eritque; natura enim, quae perpetua est, non mutabilibus in diem causis hostes sunt...

Livy (-59–17 BC) Roman historian

Liber XXXI, 29, 15

Men, War, Nature, Change

“I regard free speech as a prerequisite to a civilized society, because freedom of speech means that you can have combat with words. That's what it means. It doesn't mean that people can happily and gently exchange opinions. It means that we can engage in combat with words, in the battleground of ideas. And the reason that that's acceptable, and why it's acceptable that people's feelings get hurt during that combat, is that the combat of ideas is far preferable to actual combat.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Maps of Meaning

People, Feeling, Idea, Freedom

“The reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Sec. 29
The Gay Science (1882)

People, Age

“Our first endeavors are purely instinctive prompting of an imagination vivid and undisciplined. As we grow older reason asserts itself and we become more and more systematic and designing. But those early impulses, though not immediately productive, are of the greatest moment and may shape our very destinies. Indeed, I feel now that had I understood and cultivated instead of suppressing them, I would have added substantial value to my bequest to the world. But not until I had attained manhood did I realize that I was an inventor.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

My Inventions (1919)

World, Feeling, Imagination

“Encourage therefore his inquisitiveness all you can, by satisfying his demands, and informing his judgement, as far as it is capable. When his reasons are any way tolerable, let him find the credit and commendation of it, without being laugh'd at for his mistake be gently put into the right; and if he shew a forwardness to be reasoning about things that come in his way, take care, as much as you can, that no body check this inclination in him, or mislead it by captious or fallacious ways of talking with him. For when all is done, this is the highest and most important faculty of our minds, deserves the greatest care and attention in cultivating it: the right improvement, and exercise of our reason being the highest perfection that a man can attain to in his life.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 122
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

Life, Way, Exercises, Perfection

“The untrapped mind is open enough to see many possibilities, humble enough to learn from anyone and anything, forbearing enough to forgive all, perceptive enough to see things as they really are, and reasonable enough to judge their true value.”

Matsushita Konosuke (1894–1989) Japanese businessman

Kōnosuke Matsushita (1989) Nurturing Dreams My Path in Life. Quoted in: Tony Kippenberger (2002), Leadership Styles: Leading 08.04. p. 73

Forgiveness, Learning

“Reason tells us that creation never can be perfectly happy. So long as it is incomplete it must put up with imperfection and sorrow. It can only be perfect when it ceases to be creation, and is God. Do our prayers dare go so far?”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Glimpses of Bengal http://www.spiritualbee.com/tagore-book-of-letters/ (1921)

God, Happiness, Perfection

“He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Truth

“[Serafin was] an extraordinary coach, sharp as a vecchio lupo [old wolfe]. He opened a world to me, showed me there was a reason for everything, that even fiorature and trills… have a reason in the composer's mind, that they are the expression of the stato d'animo [state of mind] of the character — that is, the way he feels at the moment, the passing emotions that take hold of him. He would coach us for every little detail, every movement, every word, every breath. One of the things he told me — and this is the basis of bel canto — is never to attack a note from underneath or from above, but always to prepare it in the face. He taught me that pauses are often more important than the music. He explained that there was a rhythm — these are the things you get only from that man! — a measure for the human ear, and that if a note was too long, it was no good after a while. A fermata always must be measured, and if there are two fermate close to one another in the score, you ignore one of them. He taught me the proportions of recitative — how it is elastic, the proportions altering so slightly that only you can understand it…. But in performance he left you on your own. "When I am in the pit, I am there to serve you, because I have to save my performance." he would say. We would look down and feel we had a friend there. He was helping you all the way. He would mouth all the words. If you were not well, he would speed up the tempo, and if you were in top form, he would slow it down to let you breathe, to give you room. He was breathing with you, living the music with you, loving it with you. It was elastic, growing, living.”

Maria Callas (1923–1977) American-born Greek operatic soprano

Callas : The Art and the Life (1974)

Love, World, Music, Way

“Once socialism replaces capitalism, reason will determine the policies of states.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter V, Some Implications Of The Second Image, p. 150

“I continue to believe that Mr. Trump will not be president. And the reason is because I have a lot of faith in the American people.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Speaking at the Asean economic summit in California, as quoted in "Donald Trump will not be president, says Barack Obama" http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-35592948, BBC (17 February 2016) 2016

People, Faith

“The provision of a whole new system of electric generation emancipated industry from the leather belt and line shaft, for it eventually became possible to provide each tool with its own electric motor. This may seem only a detail of minor importance. In fact, modern industry could not be carried out with the belt and line shaft for a number of reasons. The motor enabled machinery to be arranged in the order of the work, and that alone has probably doubled the efficiency of industry, for it has cut out a tremendous amount of useless handling and hauling. The belt and line shaft were also tremendously wasteful – so wasteful indeed that no factory could be really large, for even the longest line shaft was small according to modern requirements. Also high speed tools were impossible under the old conditions – neither the pulleys nor the belts could stand modern speeds. Without high speed tools and the finer steels which they brought about, there could be nothing of what we call modern industry.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther (1930). Edison as I Know Him. Cosmopolitan Book Company. p. 15

Speed

“But for Socrates, tragedy did not even seem to "tell what's true", quite apart from the fact that it addresses "those without much wit", not the philosopher: another reason for giving it a wide berth. Like Plato, he numbered it among the flattering arts which represent only the agreeable, not the useful, and therefore required that his disciples abstain most rigidly from such unphilosophical stimuli — with such success that the young tragedian, Plato, burnt his writings in order to become a pupil of Socrates.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy

Nun aber schien Sokrates die tragische Kunst nicht einmal "die Wahrheit zu sagen": abgesehen davon, dass sie sich an den wendet, der "nicht viel Verstand besitzt", also nicht an den Philosophen: ein zweifacher Grund, von ihr fern zu bleiben. Wie Plato, rechnete er sie zu den schmeichlerischen Künsten, die nur das Angenehme, nicht das Nützliche darstellen und verlangte deshalb bei seinen Jüngern Enthaltsamkeit und strenge Absonderung von solchen unphilosophischen Reizungen; mit solchem Erfolge, dass der jugendliche Tragödiendichter Plato zu allererst seine Dichtungen verbrannte, um Schüler des Sokrates werden zu können.
Source: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), p. 68

Art, Success

“Reason and emotion counsel and supplement each other. Whoever heeds only the one, and puts aside the other, recklessly deprives himself of a portion of the aid granted us for the regulation of our conduct.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 173.

“(On the idea of being offended): “The majority of people are very reasonable I’ve found, but ya know what, they don’t write letters when something offends them on TV, because reasonable people know IT’S JUST FUCKIN’ TELEVISION! Not only that, reasonable people have a life! They’re not sittin’ in some trailer with some fuckin’ crayon in their hand, some chicken scrawl goin’ ‘I saw a guy talk about Jesus on the tube! I ain’t gone tune in no more!’And also reasonable people know ultimately they’re just fuckin’ jokes! Are you so afraid of a guy tellin’ jokes!””

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

Relentless (1992)

Life, People, Guy, Idea

“General disarmament being for the present entirely out of question, a proportionate reduction might be recommended. The safety of any country and of the world's commerce depending not on the absolute, but relative amount of war material, this would be evidently the first reasonable step to take towards universal economy and peace. But it would be a hopeless task to establish an equitable basis of adjustment. Population, naval strength, force of army, commercial importance, water-power, or any other natural resource, actual or prospective, are equally unsatisfactory standards to consider.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

War, World, Peace, Question

“Why have stockholders?… What contribution do they make, entitling them to heirship of half the profits of the industrial system, receivable partly in the form of dividends, and partly in the form of increased market values resulting from undistributed corporate gains? Stockholders toil not, neither do they spin, to earn that reward. They are beneficiaries by position only. Justification for their inheritance must be sought outside classic economic reasoning…. [and] can be founded only upon social grounds… that justification turns on the distribution as well as the existence of wealth. Its force exists only in direct ratio to the number of individuals who hold such wealth. Justification for the stockholder's existence thus depends on increasing distribution within the American population. Ideally the stockholder's position will be impregnable only when every American family has its fragment of that position and of the wealth by which the opportunity to develop individuality becomes fully actualized.”

Adolf A. Berle (1895–1971) American diplomat

1967, p. xxiii
The Modern Corporation and Private Property. 1932/1967

Family, Dependency, Wealth

“Whether you’re a vegan or not, there are endless reasons why we should all be delighted that the movement has grown so fast in the last few years. … Through adapting their diets to make sure they get all the vitamins they need, to pressuring big corporations and governments for more ethical products, vegans are giving food the focus it deserves. They are also doing their bit to reduce food miles and emissions … They’re teaching us a thing or two as well. My vegan and vegetarian friends have cooked me some fantastic meals, many of which I now make regularly. It’s saving me money, encouraging me to eat more vegetables, and reducing my meat intake. While I have no plans to give up meat, I recognise that it shouldn’t be the focus of my diet. I am now vegetarian every other day – not consciously, but because lots of my favourite meals are meat-free. I have also learnt lots of new techniques as I work around the limits of reducing dairy and meat products. I make cakes without eggs, burgers without beef, and pastry without butter. I … refuse to buy any animal product that doesn’t have a guarantee of quality such as Freedom Food, free range or organic status.”

Jamie Oliver (1975) British chef and media personality

"World Vegan Month is good for everyone" https://www.jamieoliver.com/news-and-features/features/world-vegan-month-is-good-for-everyone/, JamieOliver.com (November 3, 2014).

Money, Food, Freedom, Animals

“The reason that I call my doctrine logical atomism is because the atoms that I wish to arrive at as the sort of last residue in analysis are logical atoms and not physical atoms. Some of them will be what I call "particulars" – such things as little patches of color or sounds, momentary things – and some of them will be predicates or relations and so on.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1910s, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918)

Color

“Reason nevertheless prevails in world history.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Comments on the North American Events (1862)

World, History

“What's the enemy? It's the snake. Fair enough. That's good if you're a tree dwelling primate. But for a sophisticated human being with six million years of additional evolution, and you're really trying to solve the problem of what it is that's the great enemy of mankind, well it's the human propensity for evil… as such. Well, that's the figure of Satan. That's what that figure means. Just like there's a Logos that's the Truth that speaks order out of chaos at the beginning of time, there's an antithetical spirit - the hostile brother… that's Cain to Abel - that's doing exactly the opposite. It's motivated by absolutely nothing but malevolence and the willingness to destroy. And it has every reason for doing so. That's what's revealed in the next story in Cain and Abel. In one paragraph, the first glimmerings of that - outside of the strange insistence by the Christian mystics - on the identity of the snake in the Garden of Eden and the author of all evil himself.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Hostility, Truth, Motivation, Problem

“But he whom reason, not anger, animates is a peer of the gods.”
Dis proximus ille est, quem ratio non ira movet.

Claudian (370–404) Roman Latin poet

Dis proximus ille est, quem ratio non ira movet. Panegyricus dictus Manlio Theodoro consuli, lines 227-228 http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Claudian/Manlio_Theodoro*.html#227.

God, Animals, Anger

“Do not discuss God and his reason, does not discuss the motherland and the nation.”

António de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970) Prime Minister of Portugal

Quoted in From myth to romance: a reading of the Gospel according Saramago - Page 76, of Conception Flores - Published by Publisher of UFRN, 2000 - 239 pages

God

“It is more reasonable to conclude that the Great Pyramid of Gizeh as well as the other pyramids thereabout, also the sphinx, were built by the rulers of Egypt and under the direction of Satan the Devil.”

Joseph Franklin Rutherford (1869–1942) American judge

[Watchtower, WTBTS, 1928 November 15, 344]

“If what we are discussing were a point of law or of the humanities, in which neither true nor false exists, one might trust in subtlety of mind and readiness of tongue and in the greater experience of the writers, and expect him who excelled in those things to make his reasoning most plausible, and one might judge it to be the best. But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself. Therefore, Simplicio, give up this idea and this hope of yours that there may be men so much more learned, erudite, and well-read than the rest of us as to be able to make that which is false become true in defiance of nature.”

Galileo Galilei book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

Salviati, p. 61
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)

Men, Truth, Law, Hope

“You call these baubles, well, it is with baubles that men are led… Do you think that you would be able to make men fight by reasoning? Never. That is only good for the scholar in his study. The soldier needs glory, distinctions, and rewards.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

On awards, as quoted in Mémoires sur le Consulat. 1799 à 1804 (1827) by Antoine-Claire, Comte Thibaudeau. Chez Ponthieu, pp. 83–84. Original: "On appelle cela des hochets; eh bien! c'est avec des hochets que l'on mène les hommes… Croyez-vous que vous feríez battre des hommes par l'analyse? Jamais. Elle n'est bonne que pour le savant dans son cabinet. Il faut au soldat de la gloire, des distinctions, des récomponses."
Attributed

Men, Thinking, Study, Fight

“Man is neither unique nor central nor necessarily here to stay. But he is a product of circumstances special to the point of disbelief. And if man in his current predicament seeks a fair mystique to see him through, then I can only suggest that he consider his genes. For they are marked. They are graven by luck beyond explanation. They are stamped by forces that we shall never know. But even so, in the hieroglyph of the human emergence certain symbols must stand for all to read: Change is the elixir of the human circumstance, and acceptance of challenge the way of our kind. We are bad-weather animals, disaster’s fairest children. For the soundest of evolutionary reasons man appears at his best when times are worst.”

Robert Ardrey book African Genesis

African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man (1961)

Children, Way, Appearance, Change

“But what, Phaedrus, is the contrary of a dream if not some other dream?… A dream of vigilance and tension dreamt by Reason herself!—And what would such a Reason dream?—If a Reason were to dream—a Reason hard, erect, eyes armed, mouth closed, as though mistress of her lips—would not the dream she dreamt be what we see now—this world of exact forces and studied illusions?—A dream, a dream, but a dream interpenetrated with symmetries, all order, acts and sequences!”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Socrates, p. 35
L'Âme et la danse (1921)

World, Dreams, Study

“America has a very serious problem. Not only does America have a very serious problem, but our people have a very serious problem. America's problem is us. We're her problem. The only reason she has a problem is she doesn't want us here.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Statement in Detroit, Michigan (10 November 1963).
Attributed

People, Problem

“It is not without reason that this verse [Ps 70:1] has been chosen from the whole of Scripture as a device. It carries within it all the feelings of which human nature is capable…. 'Come to my help, O God; Lord, hurry to my rescue'…. The thought of this verse should be turning unceasingly in your heart. Never cease to recite it in whatever task or service or journey you find yourself. Think upon it as you sleep, as you eat, as you submit to the most basic demands of nature. This heartfelt thought will prove to be a formula of salvation for you. Not only will it protect you against all devilish attack, but it will purify you from the stain of all earthly sin, and will lead you on to the contemplation of the unseen and the heavenly and to that fiery urgency of prayer which is indescribable and which is experienced by very few. Sleep should come upon you as you meditate on this verse until as a result of your habit of resorting to its words you get in the habit of repeating them even in your slumbers.”

John Cassian (360–435) Christian monk and theologian

Conferences X

God, Feeling, Nature, Thinking

“While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most people in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests.”

Robert N. Bellah (1927–2013) American sociologist

The Good Society, ch. 1 (1991)

Children, People, Family

“I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won't go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails — simply in virtue of our mental concepts — that the system is conscious.”

Thomas Nagel (1937) American philosopher

"Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem," Royal Institute of Philosophy annual lecture, given in London on February 18, 1998, published in Philosophy vol. 73 no. 285, July 1998, pp 337-352, Cambridge University Press, p. 337.

“Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6

Fate

“Whether you are a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Nationalist, we all have the same problem. They don’t hang you because you’re a Baptist; they hang you ‘cause you’re black. They don’t attack me because I’m a Muslim; they attack me ‘cause I’m black. They attack all of us for the same reason -- all of us catch hell from the same enemy. We’re all in the same bag, in the same boat. We suffer political oppression, economic exploitation, and social degradation all of them from the same enemy.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Detroit, Michigan (12 April 1964)

Hell, Problem, Suffering

“Everything great glitters, glitter begets ambition, and ambition can easily have caused the inspiration or what we thought to be inspiration. But reason can no longer restrain one who is lured by the fury of ambition. He tumbles where his vehement drive calls him; no longer does he choose his position, but rather chance and luster determine it.
Then we are not called to the position where we can most shine. It is not the one which, in the long succession of years during which we may hold it, will never make us weary, subdue our zeal, or dampen our inspiration. Soon we shall see our wishes unfulfilled and our ideas unsatisfied.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, L. Easton, trans. (1967), p. 36
Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation (1835)

Idea, Chance, Success

“We have been to Rodmell, and as usual I come home depressed – for no reason. Merely moods. Have other people as many as I have? That I shall never now. And sometimes I suppose that even if I came to the end of my incessant search into what people are and feel I should know nothing still.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

23 May 1921
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

People, Feeling, Home, Search

“Out of the unconscious you get ritual, dreams, drama, story, art, music, and that sort of buffers us. We have our little domain of competence, and we're buffered by the domain of fantasy and culture. That's really what you learn about when you come to university if you're lucky and the professors are smart enough to actually teach you something about culture instead of constantly telling you that it's completely reprehensible and that it should be destroyed. Why you would prefer chaos to order is beyond me. The only possible reason is that you haven't read enough history to understand exactly what chaos means. And believe me, if you knew what chaos means, you'd be pretty goddamn careful about tearing down the temple that you live in, unless you want to be a denizen of chaos. And some people do. That's when the impulses you harbor can really come out and shine. And so a little gratitude is in order, and that makes you appreciative of the wise king while being smart enough to know that he's also an evil tyrant. That's a total conception of the world. It's balanced. Yah, we should preserve nature, but it IS trying to kill us. YES our culture is tyrannical and oppresses people, but it IS protecting us from dying. And YES we're reasonably good people, but don't take that theory too far until you've tested yourself. That's wisdom, at least in part, and that's what these stories try to teach you.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

Wisdom, People, World, Dreams

“We live in a sensate age. We are no longer governed by Faith, we are no longer governed by reason. We are governed by feelings.”

Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter

Age, Faith, Feeling

“The soul seems to reside in the judgment, and the judgment would seem to be seated in that part where all the senses meet; and this is called the Common Sense and is not all-pervading throughout the body, as many have thought. Rather is it entirely in one part. Because, if it were all-pervading and the same in every part, there would have been no need to make the instruments of the senses meet in one centre and in one single spot; on the contrary it would have sufficed that the eye should fulfil the function of its sensation on its surface only, and not transmit the image of the things seen, to the sense, by means of the optic nerves, so that the soul — for the reason given above — may perceive it in the surface of the eye.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIV Anatomy, Zoology and Physiology

Soul, Sense, Parting

“Is it against justice or reason to love ourselves? And why is self-love always a vice?”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 183.

Love, Justice

“e achievement and maintenance of the dictatorship of the proletariat is impossible without a party which is strong by reason of its solidarity and iron discipline. But iron discipline in the Party is inconceivable without unity of will, without complete and absolute unity of action on the part of all members of the Party. This does not mean, of course, that the possibility of conflicts of opinion within the Party is thereby precluded. On the contrary, iron discipline does not preclude but presupposes criticism and conflict of opinion within the Party. Least of all does it mean that discipline must be "blind." On the contrary, iron discipline does not preclude but presupposes conscious and voluntary submission, for only conscious discipline can be truly iron discipline. But after a conflict of opinion has been closed, after criticism has been exhausted and a decision has been arrived at, unity of will and unity of action of all Party members are the necessary conditions without which neither Party unity nor iron discipline in the Party is conceivable.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Source: The Foundations of Leninism, Ch.8

Decision, Strong, Parting

“Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart — one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Black Cat

The Black Cat (1843)

Stupidity, Law, Soul, Understanding

“If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

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

Dissenting (footnote #22), Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, 192 L. Ed. 2d 609 (2015) ; decided June 26, 2015.
2010s

Law, Personality

“Smith was being realistic-if you give people something before they are ready [for it] they are going to mess it up. And that has happened. If he had had the opportunity to work with the people [and] help bring them up, Zimbabwe would be a better place now. Smith did make it better during his government. There is no reason why he could not do that if he had been allowed to go on.”

Ian Smith (1919–2007) Prime Minister of Rhodesia

Ian Smith - A Bit Of A Rebel, Ernest Mtunzi, Former UK Representative of Joshua Nkomo

People, Help

“At puberty, the elements of an unsuperstitious sexual morality ought to be taught. Boys and girls should be taught that nothing can justify sexual intercourse unless there is mutual inclination… Boys and girls should be taught respect for each other's liberty; they should be made to feel that nothing gives one human being rights over another, and that jealousy and possessiveness kill love. They should be taught that to bring another human being into the world is a very serious matter, only to be undertaken when the child will have a reasonable prospect of health, good surroundings, and parental care. But they should also be taught methods of birth control, so as to insure that children shall only come when they are wanted. Finally, they should be taught the dangers of venereal disease, and the methods of prevention and cure. The increase of human happiness to be expected from sex education on these lines is immeasurable.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1920s, What I Believe (1925)

Love, Happiness, Children, Health

“Accept only that which stands to your reason. Never accept anything merely because it is preached by some great leader. Test its truth on the touchstone of your intellectual discrimination.”

K. B. Hedgewar (1889–1940) Founding leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

Dr. K.B. Hedgewar, Quoted from Talreja, K. M. (2000). Holy Vedas and holy Bible: A comparative study. New Delhi: Rashtriya Chetana Sangathan.

Truth

“I am sure there never was a people, who had more reason to acknowledge a divine interposition in their affairs, than those of the United States; and I should be pained to believe, that they have forgotten that agency, which was so often manifested during our revolution, or that they failed to consider the omnipotence of that God, who is alone able to protect them.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

Letter to John Armstrong, 11 March 1782, in Ford's Writings of George Washington (1891), vol. XII, p. 111. This is frequently attached to part of a letter to Brigadier-General Nelson of 20 August 1778, as in this 1864 example from B. F. Morris, The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States, pp. 33-34:
I am sure that there never was a people who had more reason to acknowledge a divine interposition in their affairs than those of the United States; and I should be pained to believe that they have forgotten that agency which was so often manifested during the Revolution, or that they failed to consider the omnipotence of that God who is alone able to protect them. He must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more than wicked that has not gratitude enough to acknowledge his obligations.
1780s

God, Pain, People

“My earlier views on the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures have become clearer and stronger with advancing years, and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Letter to Judge J. A. Wakefield, after the death of Lincoln's son Willie in 1862, as cited in Abraham Lincoln: was he a Christian? (1893), p. 292 http://books.google.com/books?id=x8BHAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA292&dq=%22unsoundness+of+the+Christian+scheme%22, by John Eleazer Remsburg. Historian Merrill Daniel Peterson states in Lincoln in American Memory (1994), p. 227 http://books.google.com/books?id=D_FjY_ARcGoC&lpg=PA227&vq=%22Judge%20J.%20A.%20Wakefield%22&pg=PA227, that the letter has never actually been produced to verify the statement and that there's no correspondence with Wakefield noted in the Collected Works. Misattributed

Thinking, Change

“Whether it be generally recognized or not, what we call the civilized world, which for seven hundred years has been moving steadily forward in the spirit of liberalism and toward liberalism s high ideals, has now turned suddenly and violently backward. The guidance of reason and of understanding, of moral principle and of religious faith, has been shockingly and cruelly disslaced by the rule of brute force. Our literally stupendous achievements in literature, in philosophy, in the arts, in the sciences and in the comforts and conveniences of life count for nothing in the control of no national policy and of national conduct, and by far the major portion of the world is now under the rule of brutal compulsion. Such portion of the world as is not in that condition may soon be struggling for its life.”

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

Liberty-Equality-Fraternity (1942)

Life, World, Faith, Art

“As a man's conduct is controlled by public fact, so is her religion ruled by authority. The daughter should follow her mother's religion, the wife her husband's. Were that religion false, the docility which leads mother and daughter to submit to nature's laws would blot out the sin of error in the sight of Goddess. Unable to judge for themselves they should accept the judgment of father and husband as that of the church. While men unaided cannot deduce the rules of their faith, neither can they assign limits to that faith by the evidence of reason; they allow themselves to be driven hither and thither by all sorts of external influences, they are ever above or below the truth. Extreme in everything, they are either altogether reckless or altogether pious; you never find them able to combine virtue and piety. Their natural exaggeration is not wholly to blame; the ill-regulated control exercised over them by men is partly responsible. Loose morals bring religion into contempt; the terrors of remorse make it a tyrant; this is why women have always too much or too little religion. As a woman's religion is controlled by authority it is more important to show her plainly what to believe than to explain the reasons for belief; for faith attached to ideas half-understood is the main source of fanaticism, and faith demanded on behalf of what is absurd leads to madness or unbelief. Whether our catechisms tend to produce impiety rather than fanaticism I cannot say, but I do know that they lead to one or other. In the first place, when you teach religion to little girls never make it gloomy or tiresome, never make it a task or a duty, and therefore never give them anything to learn by heart, not even their prayers. Be content to say your own prayers regularly in their presence, but do not compel them to join you. Let their prayers be short, as Christ himself has taught us. Let them always be said with becoming reverence and respect; remember that if we ask the Almighty to give heed to our words, we should at least give heed to what we mean to say.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau book Emile, or On Education

Emile, or On Education (1762), Book V

Women, Men, Truth, Faith

“My own opinion—which I may as well indicate at the outset—is that pure Anarchism, though it should be the ultimate ideal, to which society should continually approximate, is for the present impossible, and would not survive more than a year or two at most if it were adopted. On the other hand, both Marxian Socialism and Syndicalism, in spite of many drawbacks, seem to me calculated to give rise to a happier and better world than that in which we live. I do not, however, regard either of them as the best practicable system. Marxian Socialism, I fear, would give far too much power to the State, while Syndicalism, which aims at abolishing the State, would, I believe, find itself forced to reconstruct a central authority in order to put an end to the rivalries of different groups of producers. The best practicable system, to my mind, is that of Guild Socialism, which concedes what is valid both in the claims of the State Socialists and in the Syndicalist fear of the State, by adopting a system of federalism among trades for reasons similar to those which are recommending federalism among nations.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Introduction, p. 6
1910s, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918)

World, Fear

“I have to go, but I can't explain the reasons of my choice to you. At this moment things are testifying against me. I fight for cause that can't be understood at this time, but one day people will see that I stood on the side of what is right.”

Matteo Messina Denaro (1962) Italian mob boss

Letter seized in a 1993 raid of his home in Mazara Del Vallo

People, Time, Fight

“Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Alledgedly from a speech to the Illinois House of Representatives (18 December 1840) its called "a remarkable piece of spurious Lincolniana" by Merrill D. Peterson: Lincoln in American Memory. Oxford UP 1995, books.google https://books.google.de/books?id=EADk9ZIMJXEC&q=prohibitory#v=page. Cf.Spurious archive.org https://archive.org/details/abrahamlincolnqulinc_41 and Harry Miller Lydenberg: Lincoln and Prohibition, Blazes on a Zigzag Trail. Proceedings Of The American Antiquarian Society, No. 1/1952 pdf http://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44807229.pdf. Misattributed

Law