reason

1.

Faith must be enforced by reason. When faith becomes blind it dies.

- Gandhi, Mahatma

2.

People hate as they love, unreasonably.

- Thackeray, William M.

3.

The ideal condition Would be, I admit, that men should be right by instinct; But since we are all likely to go astray, The reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach.

- Sophocles

4.

Intuition isn't the enemy, but the ally, of reason.

- John Kord Lagemann

5.

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.

- Ozick, Cynthia

6.

Prejudice not being funded on reason cannot be removed by argument.

- Johnson, Samuel

7.

INADMISSIBLE, adj. Not competent to be considered. Said of certain kinds of testimony which juries are supposed to be unfit to be entrusted with, and which judges, therefore, rule out, even of proceedings before themselves alone. Hearsay evidence is inadmissible because the person quoted was unsworn and is not before the court for examination; yet most momentous actions, military, political, commercial and of every other kind, are daily undertaken on hearsay evidence. There is no religion in the world that has any other basis than hearsay evidence. Revelation is hearsay evidence; that the Scriptures are the word of God we have only the testimony of men long dead whose identity is not clearly established and who are not known to have been sworn in any sense. Under the rules of evidence as they now exist in this country, no single assertion in the Bible has in its support any evidence admissible in a court of law. It cannot be proved that the battle of Blenheim ever was fought, that there was such as person as Julius Caesar, such an empire as Assyria. But as records of courts of justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges'decisions based on it were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value.

- Ambrose Bierce

8.

Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.

- Richter, Jean Paul

9.

We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.

- Blaise Pascal

10.

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.

- Schopenhauer, Arthur

11.

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

- Jonathan Swift

12.

Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

- James D. Watson

13.

What is the use of this fuss about morality when the issue only involves a horse? The first and most difficult teaching of civilization concerns man's behavior to his inferiors. Make humanity gentle or reasonable toward animals, and strife or injustice between human beings would speedily terminate.

- Mayhew, Dr Edward

14.

I think one of the reasons I'm popular again is because I'm wearing a tie. You have to be different.

- Bennett, Tony

15.

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.

- Thoreau, Henry David

16.

The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the imposing personages of a splendid procession: it is by them the mob are influenced; it is they whom the spectators cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second-rate carriages; no one cares for them or asks after them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendor of those who eclipsed and preceded them.

- Bagehot, Walter

17.

Any appeasement of tyranny is treason to this republic and to the democratic ideal.

- William Allen White

18.

Reason can wrestle and overthrow terror.

- Euripides

19.

Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely-read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.

- Pearson, Hesketh

20.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

- Eliot, George