Reason Quotes

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The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.

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

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.'

We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

George Santayana

With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.

William Lloyd Garrison

One important reason to stay calm is that calm parents hear more. Low-key, accepting parents are the ones whose children keep talking.

While control is needed, and perfectly warranted, our bias should be clear up front: Monopolies are not justified by theory; they should be permitted only when justified by facts. If there is no solid basis for extending a certain monopoly protection, then we should not extend that protection. This does not mean that every copyright must prove its value initially. That would be a far too cumbersome system of control. But it does mean that every system or category of copyright or patent should prove its worth. Before the monopoly should be permitted, there must be reason to believe it will do some good — for society, and not just for monopoly holders.

Lawrence Lessig

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

James Russell Lowell

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Look, this is simple. The good old days are now. OK? The human condition today is better than it's ever been, and technology is one of the reasons for that.

The power of the people and the power of reason are one.

China has The Bomb. [...] Sometime in the future—25, 50, 75 years hence—what will the situation be like then? By that time the Chinese will have the capability of delivery too. That's the reason some schools of thinking don't rule out a destruction of the Chinese military potential before the situation grows worse than it is today. It's bad enough now.

Once my heart was captured, reason was shown the door, deliberately and with a sort of frantic joy. I accepted everything, I believed everything, without struggle, without suffering, without regret, without false shame. How can one blush for what one adores?

The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there.

Joseph Stiglitz

The world has always gone through periods of madness so as to advance a bit on the road to reason.

The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand.

Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason.... The law, which is perfection of reason.

I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him against the liberty of his fellow-men.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

The habit of breaking up one's colour to make it brilliant dates from further back than Impressionism—Couture advocates it in a little book called 'Causeries d'Atelier' written about 1860—it is part of the technique of Impressionism but used for quite a different reason.

John Singer Sargent

Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

John Harington (writer)

A rise in wages, from an alteration in the value of money, produces a general effect on price, and for that reason it produces no real effect whatever on profits.

If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.

Alexander Hamilton