As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Thought is what makes humans human ... It's the luminous spark of reason that grants us lordship over the animals, endows us with cell phones, and offers hope, even in our darkest hours, that our species will somehow calculate the way forward to a brighter tomorrow.
BRUNO MADDOX, Discover magazine, May 2006
Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.
ERICH FROMM, The Sane Society
Our reason is always disappointed by the inconstancy of appearances.
Prejudice is not bigotry or superstition, although prejudice sometimes may degenerate into these. Prejudice is pre-judgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason.
RUSSELL KIRK, The Conservative Mind
A display of reason rather than a threat of force should be the determining factor in the intercourse among nations.
CALVIN COOLIDGE, inaugural address, Mar. 4, 1925
Reasons are not like garments, the worse for wearing.
ROBERT DEVEREUX, To Lord Willoughby, 4 Jan. 1598
There are so many kinds of madness, so many ways in which the human brain may go wrong; and so often it happens that what we call madness is both reasonable and just. It is so. Yes. A little reason is good for us, a little more makes wise men of some of us--but when our reason over-grows us and we reach too far, something breaks and we go insane.
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD, "The Case of Beauvais," Back to God's Country and Other Stories
Never get angry. Never make a threat. Reason with people.
MARIO PUZO, The Godfather
Passion and prejudice govern the world; only under the name of reason.
JOHN WESLEY, letter to Joseph Benson, Oct. 5, 1770
