#rationality

If you want to get men to act reasonably, you must set about persuading them in a maniacal manner. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#rationality #men

The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run. As Lincoln observed, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#reason #nature

Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#religion #religion

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse. ↗

— Norman G. Finkelstein

#christopher-hitchens #conversion #politics #rationality #reason

I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. Although I am prepared to admit that in certain times and places it has had some good effects, I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#rationality #religion #religion

For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power. ↗

— Thomas Hobbes

#belief #catholic-church #fairies #heathen #materialism

You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms. ↗

— Susan Neiman

#religion #superstition #religion

Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal. ↗

— Terence McKenna

#rationality #reality #science #ufos #unreality

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change. ↗

— A. R. Ammons

#appreciate #change #clarity #gradual #here

I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#allowed #back #childhood #fact #frogs