Rationalism Quotes

... while transparency is a natural associate of liberalism, it falls short of implying rationalism. It is one aspiration, that social and ethical relations should not essentially rest on ignorance and misunderstanding of what they are, and quite another that all the beliefs and principles involved in them should be explicitly stated. That these are two different things is obvious with personal relations, where to hope that they do not rest on deceit and error is merely decent, but to think that their basis can be made totally explicit is idiocy. ~ Bernard Williams

What Facebook stands for in the world is giving people a voice and spreading ideas and rationalism. ~ Mark Zuckerberg

The faith engaged with Platonism in the ancient world, with Aristotle in the medieval world, with nominalism in the Reformation era, and with rationalism in the modern world. Now the church must engage with the emergence of a postmodern, post- Christian, neo-pagan world. ~ Robert E. Webber

Has anyone provided proof of God's inexistence? Not even close. Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here? Not even close. Have our sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life? Not even close. Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought? Close enough. Has rationalism and moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral? Not close enough. Has secularism in the terrible 20th century been a force for good? Not even close, to being close. Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy in the sciences? Close enough. Does anything in the sciences or their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational? Not even in the ball park. Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt? Dead on. ~ David Berlinski

Romanticism is the expression of man's urge to rise above reason and common sense, just as rationalism is the expression of his urge to rise above theology and emotion. ~ Charles Yost

Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism ... What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different sphere which ought not to be confused. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Our greater beastliness lies not in a penchant for brute force,but in our greater corruption, nihilism, and decadence; in our servitude to the
overwhelming systems we create; in the sociopathic rationalism we adopt to master natural forces and to compete with the machines we build;and in the scientistic idolatry that co-opts the religious impulse. Of course the ancients resorted more to brute force: they lacked the infrastructure to punish their enemies and victims in a safer, more
sophisticated fashion, with advanced legal regimes and mass-produced, maximum security prisons; with engineered propaganda for social conditioning; and with economic, cyber, and drone warfare. We channel our aggression with more sophisticated instruments, but the use of those instruments doesn't ennoble us. ~ Benjamin Cain

It is only rather recently that science has begun to make peace with its magical roots. Until a few decades ago, it was common for histories of science either to commence decorously with Copernicus's heliocentric theory or to laud the rationalism of Aristotelian antiquity and then to leap across the Middle Ages as an age of ignorance and superstition. One could, with care and diligence, find occasional things to praise in the works of Avicenna, William of Ockham, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, but these sparse gems had to be thoroughly dusted down and scraped clean of unsightly accretions before being inserted into the corners of a frame fashioned in a much later period. ~ Philip Ball

Rationalism doesn't require "belief," only observation. The real, measurable world doesn't care what you believe. ~ Joe Haldeman

While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim- or arrogation- of power to stifle the autonomy of others. ~ Thomas Sowell

Let us, at least, dig and seek till we have discovered our own opinions. The dogmas we really hold are far more fantastic, and, perhaps, far more beautiful than we think. In the course of these essays I fear that I have spoken from time to time of rationalists and rationalism, and that in a disparaging sense. Being full of that kindliness which should come at the end of everything, even of a book, I apologize to the rationalists even for calling them rationalists. There are no rationalists. We all believe fairy-tales, and live in them. Some, with a sumptuous literary turn, believe in the existence of the lady clothed with the sun. Some, with a more rustic, elvish instinct, like Mr. McCabe, believe merely in the impossible sun itself. Some hold the undemonstrable dogma of the existence of God; some the equally undemonstrable dogma of the existence of the man next door. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave. ~ Ellen Willis

Without the withering criticism by nominalism, medieval Christian philosophy and theology would not have relinquished their claim to the role of knowledge in discovering the nature of things in light of higher principles; instead, it caused them to leave the field of battle without any defense before the onslaught of secularism, rationalism, and empiricism, which were, as a result, able to gain a remarkably easy victory. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

[French Revolution rejected] the sacred foundation both of history and of the state. History was no longer measured on the basis of an idea of God that had preceded it and given it shape. The state came to be understood in purely secular terms, based on rationalism and the will of citizens.
The secular state arose for the first time, abandoning and excluding any divine guarantee or legitimation of the political element as a mythological vision of the world and declaring that God is a private question that does not belong to the public sphere or to the democratic formation of the public will. Public life was now considered the realm of reason alone, which had no place for a seemingly unknowable God. From this perspective, religion and faith in God belonged to the realm of sentiment, not of reason. God and His will therefore ceased to be relevant to public life. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

Berkouwer is to be commended for his careful avoidance of "the polarities of a mindless fideism and a faithless rationalism. ~ Bruce A. Demarest

The recasting of the Origin Myth as a story about the perils of disobedience precipitated a kind of decoupling of scripture from religious experience: when religious authorities began to insist on the literal truth of scripture, they were effectively promoting a kind of secular rationalism that states that one does not need to have a religious experience of any kind to live a moral life: all one has to do is declare one's faith in scripture, in the doctrine of Jesus' divinity and such, and accept the authority of the Holy Catholic Church as God's representative on Earth. ~ Daniel Waterman

What we know here is very little, but what we are ignorant of is immense. ~ Pierre Laplace

Henceforth the Cartesian surgical operation in which spirit and matter become totally separated dominated scientific and philosophic thought The domain of science was matter which was a pure "it" divorced completely from any ontological aspect other than pure quantity. Although there were protests here and there especially among English and German thinkers, this view became the very factor that determined the relationship between man and nature, scientifically and philosophically. Thus seventeenth-century rationalism is the unconscious background of all later scientific thought up to the present day. Whatever discoveries are made in the sciences and whatever changes are brought about in conceptions of time, space, matter and motion, the background of seventeenth-century rationalism remains. For this very reason, other interpretations of nature, especially the symbolic, have never been seriously considered and accepted. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Muhammad Iqbal, who had spent three rewarding years as a student in Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century, now wrote of it in the satirical tradition of the Illahabadi:
The West develops wonderful new skills
In this as in so many other fields
Its submarines are crocodiles
Its bombers rain destruction from the skies
Its gases so obscure the sky
They blind the sun's world-seeing eye
Dispatch this old fool to the West
To learn the art of killing fast- and best
On his previous trips to the West, Liang, like Tagore and Iqbal, had been a qualified admirer. During his longest sojourn there, he began to develop grave doubts about the civilization that had so blithely thrown away the fruits of progress and rationalism and sunk into barbarism. The 'materialist' West had managed to subdue nature through science and technology and created a Darwinian universe of conflict between individuals, classes and nations. But to what effect? Its materialistic people, constantly desiring ever-new things and constantly being frustrated, were worn out by war, were afflicted with insecurity, and were as far from happiness as ever. ~ Pankaj Mishra

Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society. ~ Octavio Paz

The philosophy of rationalism has misunderstood the nature of man, the nature of the social world, and the nature of reason itself. It does not see that man's nature has three dimensions: biological, rational, and spiritual. By neglecting the biological impulses and spiritual aspirations of man, it misconstrues the function reason fulfills within the whole of human existence; it distorts the problem of ethics, especially in the political field; and it perverts the natural sciences into an instrument of social salvation for which neither their own nature nor the nature of the social world fits them. ~ Hans J. Morgenthau

If we wanted to construct a basic philosophical attitude from these scientific utterances of Pauli's, at first we would be inclined to infer from them an extreme rationalism and a fundamentally skeptical point of view. In reality however, behind this outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human mind which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli's analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Nobody has it all figured out, not even me - anybody who thinks otherwise, is an idiot. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The clothes have no emperor. ~ Stewart Elliott Guthrie

Nietzsche wrote, "One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic". Or, as The Dude put it: "You're not wrong, Walter - you're just an asshole". Less quotable, and often overlooked, is Walter's response: "Okay, then." The Walters of the world don't mid being assholes; what matters to them is being right. ~ Tim Kreider

There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb. ~ Albert Schweitzer

For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason, but a revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism. ~ Alister E. McGrath

It's fashionable among progressives to wonder why so many "red state" voters don't vote in their own economic interests. This is simply another symptom of 18th-century rationalism, which assumes that everyone is rational and rationality means seeking self-interest. [...] People are not 18th-century reason machines. Real reason works differently. Reason matters, and we have to understand how it really works. ~ George Lakoff

The rationalism of the creative minds was tempered by abundant fantasies, and the supreme beauty of the monuments was probably spoiled by the circumambient vanities and ugliness; in a few cases the Greeks came as close to perfection as it was possible to do, yet they were human and imperfect. ~ George Sarton

The cold rationalism simply covers for raw, wounded emotion. The more driven people are by the mind, the more they feel and further encode their feelings. The thickness of the tarpaulin cover is as the size of the emotion. ~ Dalit Orbach

I spend the next few days watching Maï die. I can't stand that voice, that protest. Katzenelenbogen shows up and explains in that rational, no-nonsense, doctoral tone that no one has the right to make such a fuss over a cat, while the whole world. . . . . I kick them out, both him and the world.
Maï is no longer a cat. She is a human being in agony. Every living thing that suffers is a human being.
She is cuddled in my arms, a small ball of lackluster fur, which gives her a horrible stuffed air already smacking of taxidermists. Every now and then she raises her head, looks at me inquiringly and miaows a question I understand, but am unable to answer. Our vocal cords are totally inadequate there.
What goings-on about a mere cat, huh? I hate your guts, you antisentimental, antiemotional, hardheaded rationalists. You are the ones who have raised the going rate of sensitivity. You have put all your emphasis on ideas, and ideas without "emotions" and without "sentimentalism," that's the world you have built, your work.
All the pseudo-people who have the Nazi arrogance to be reading this book make my hands ache for a grenade. ~ Romain Gary

P.C. Hodgell said - That which can be destroyed by the truth should be. Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say - If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

He was a convinced but hardworked rationalist, always hard at it re-convincing himself of his convictions. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

Before the scientific rationalism took hold of our minds and before we became succumbed to a materialistic worldview, the Western philosophy was holistic and relational, and even now there are many scientists in the West seeing things totally interconnected. ~ Satish Kumar

I am constantly asked: What can you, with your cold rationalism, offer to the seeker after salvation that is comparable to the cozy homelike comfort of a fenced-in dogmatic creed? To this the answer is many-sided.
First, I do not say that I can offer as much happiness as is to be obtained by the abdication of reason. I do not say that I can offer as much happiness as is to be obtained from drink or drugs or amassing great wealth by swindling widows and orphans. It is not the happiness of the individual convert that concerns me; it is the happiness of mankind. If you genuinely desire the happiness of mankind, certain forms of ignoble personal happiness are not open to you. If your child is ill, and you are a conscientious parent, you accept medical diagnosis, however doubtful and discouraging; if you accept the cheerful opinion of a quack and your child consequently dies, you are not excused by the pleasantness of belief in the quack while it lasted. ~ Bertrand Russell

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Alas, I have studied philosophy, / the law as well as medicine, / and to my sorrow, theology; / studied them well with ardent zeal, / yet here I am, a wretched fool, / no wiser than I was before. ~ Ghadirian

Hellenic science is a victory of rationalism, which appears greater, not smaller, when one is made to realize that it had been won in spite of the irrational beliefs of the Greek people; all in all, it was a triumph of reason in the face of unreason. Some knowledge of Greek superstitions is needed not only for a proper appreciation of that triumph but also for the justification of occasional failures, such as the many Platonic aberrations. ~ George Sarton

Religion knew the truth of metaphor and symbol for almost all of history until the past few hundred years, and especially until the wrongly named Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Then we started confusing rational and provable with real. We actually regressed and went backward. In trying to defend its ground in the face of rationalism and scientism, religion tried to become "rational" itself and lost its alternative consciousness, which many of us call contemplation. It's as though we tried to deal with Mystery with the entirely wrong "software". We lost access to the higher levels of consciousness, the transrational, the transpersonal, the transcendent itself. Most tragic, we lost most inner experience of our own outer belief systems. That is the heart of religion's problem today, and it is indeed a deep and serious problem for upcoming generations. My generation took the symbols to literally, and now the following generation is just throwing them all out as useless. We are both losing. It might surprise you, but both religious fundamentalism and atheism are similar in that they are self-contained rational systems. Such a system works if you stay inside its chosen logic and territory. ~ Richard Rohr

The great ideas of the West - rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, thought, and expression, human rights, and liberal democracy- quite an achievement, surely, for any civilization- - remain the best, and perhaps the only, means for all people, no matter of what race or creed, to reach their full potential and live in freedom. ~ Ibn Warraq

In the domain of primitive spirituality, that is, supernatural spirituality, the mind loses all its sanity in the name of non-conformity and takes nonsense to be a form of higher sense and supernatural insanity and fallacy to be spiritual sanity and truth. In an attempt to break free from the chains of religious orthodoxy as well as radical rationalism, these mysticism-obsessed beings, who pompously prefer to call themselves "lightworkers", "yogis", "mystics" and so on, end up bound in yet another form of orthodoxy or extremism, replete with the primal psychological germs of supernaturalism. ~ Abhijit Naskar

How to be in harmony with the cosmos? It seems that certain preliminaries are indispensable: Rid yourself of all beliefs; leave metaphysics to the sectarians of the absurd; understand that hope is fear gone bad; confront reality directly; stop upholding the romantic dream of realization; forget sentimental neurosis; play with your own limits; look at your confusion; confront life without the bric-a-brac of the religious and the spiritual - without, for all that, becoming a narrow-minded materialist who would make a new God out of rationalism; dare to be alone; do not oppose Essence against reality; give yourself over to the pleasures of pure subjectivity; understand that everything is real; and finally, one day, know exhilarating silence. ~ Daniel Odier

Since the Enlightenment, in the great tension between rationalism (how we would like things to be so they make sense to us) and empiricism (how things are), we have been blaming the world for not fitting the beds of "rational" models, have tried to change humans to fit technology, fudged our ethics to fit our needs for employment, asked economic life to fit the theories of economists, and asked human life to squeeze into some narrative. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Modern technology easily becomes the servant of this or that want and need. In modern economy, a completely irrational consumption conforms to a totally rationalized production. A marvelously rational mechanism serves one or another demand, always with the same earnestness and precision, be it for a silk blouse or poison gas or anything whatsoever. Economic rationalism has accustomed itself to deal only with certain needs and to acknowledge only those it can "satisfy." In the modern metropolis, it has erected an edifice wherein everything runs strictly according to plan - everything is calculable. A devout Catholic, precisely following his own rationality, might well be horrified by this system of irresistible materiality. ~ Carl Schmitt

I believe it " announced Tafe complacently.
"That my dear " said Ambrose "is because you grew up in a rough and violent world here just managing to live from day to day is easily considered a miracle. You are able to accept the truth no matter how astonishing its guise. Whereas our friend Hocker here is steeped in the overweening rationalism of his time and could mentally dismiss a mastodon in front of him if it happened to be wearing the wrong school tie. ~ K.W. Jeter

Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience. ~ Michael Oakeshott

Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves. ~ Richard Feynman

Our estrangement from nature and the unconscious became entrenched roughly two thousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of the Great God Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychological shift that ensued left European civilization staring into two millennia of religious mania and persecution, warfare, materialism, and rationalism.
The monstrous forces of scientific industrialism and global politics that have been born into modern times were conceived at the time of the shattering of the symbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to nature from our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened, guilt-burdened, and alone. Existential man was born. ~ Terence McKenna

Science is not sacrosanct. The mere fact that it exists, is admired, has results is not sufficient for making it a measure of excellence. Modern science arose from global objections against earlier views and rationalism itself, the idea that there are general rules and standards for conducting our affairs, affairs of knowledge included, arose from global objections to common sense. ~ Paul Feyerabend

I want to say a word to the Brahmins: In the name of God, religion, sastras you have duped us. We were the ruling people. Stop this life of cheating us from this year. Give room for rationalism and humanism. ~ Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

Whenever politicians start talking in mystical terms, beware. They might be trying to disguise and excuse real suffering by wrapping it up in big incomprehensible words. Be particularly careful about the following four words: sacrifice, eternity, purity, redemption. If you hear any of these, sound the alarm. And if you happen to live in a country whose leader routinely says things like 'Their sacrifice will redeem the purity of our eternal nation' – know that you are in deep trouble. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The incommensurability between the modern economic system and the people who staff it explains why modern workers have so often been depicted as 'cogs' in the larger 'machinery' of industrial civilization; for while the practical rationalization of enterprise does require workers to be consistent, predictable, precise, uniform, and even to a certain extent creative, it does not really require them to be persons, that is, to live examined lives, to grow, to develop character, to search for truth, to know themselves, etc. ~ Craig M. Gay

The metaphysical mutation that gave rise to materialism and modern science in turn spawned two great trends: rationalism and individualism. Huxley's mistake was in having poorly evaluated the balance of power between these two. Specifically, he underestimated the growth of individualism brought about by an increased consciousness of death. Individualism gives rise to freedom, the sense of self, the need to distinguish oneself and to be superior to others. A rational society like the one he describes in Brave New World can defuse the struggle. Economic rivalry - a metaphor for mastery over space - has no more reason to exist in a society of plenty, where the economy is strictly regulated. Sexual rivalry - a metaphor for mastery over time through reproduction - has no more reason to exist in a society where the connection between sex and procreation has been broken. But Huxley forgets about individualism. He doesn't understand that sex, even stripped of its link with reproduction, still exists - not as a pleasure principle, but as a form of narcissistic differentiation. The same is true of the desire for wealth. Why has the Swedish model of social democracy never triumphed over liberalism? Why has it never been applied to sexual satisfaction? Because the metaphysical mutation brought about by modern science leads to individuation, vanity, malice and desire. Any philosopher, not just Buddhist or Christian, but any philosopher worthy of the name, knows that, in itself, desire - u ~ Michel Houellebecq

If anything, the genesis of colleges in the Islamic world seems to have been a way to organise those scholars who were opposed to philosophy and rationalism. Knowledge and science in ancient times were supported by individual patrons and when these patrons changed their priorities, or when they died, any institutions that they might have built often died with them. This is a major reason why no observatory lasted more than 30 years in any of the Islamic empires. ~ Ehsan Masood

Doing worse with more knowledge means you are doing something very wrong. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

Love gives life, so should faith. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The very essence of rationalism is that it assumes that the reason is the highest faculty in man and the lord of all the rest. ~ Lyman Abbott

In his very first encyclical Pius X had uttered a warning: ... We shall take the greatest care to see that the members of the clergy do not allow themselves to be taken in by the insidious maneuvers of a certain new science which dons the mask of truth and from which one does not discern the fragrance of Jesus Christ; it is a mendacious science which, using fallacious and perfidious arguments, tries to beat a path to the errors of rationalism and semi-rationalism, and against which the Apostle was already warning his beloved Timothy when he wrote: Guard the deposit, avoiding profane novelties in language as well as in the arguments of a knowledge falsely so-called, whose enthusiasts, with all their promises, have failed in the faith.19 ~ Anonymous

He made the rest of us look complacent, lazy, indulgent, and apathetic, in the same way that vegans' conscientious diets can't help but indict carnivores' as callous. The impulse is to write such people off as self-righteous and shrill (which, conveniently, they often are) so that you can stop thinking about slaughterhouses and keep eating scrapple. ~ Tim Kreider

There were no scruples, no feelings of respect or loyal affection that would stop us from making up our minds by the pure light of reason - and of our own desires. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

If you take an objection in the 'relative', it is intellectual rationalism. 'We' don't have intellectual rationalism. 'We' are abuddha (do not have intellect) in the 'relative', and we are a Gnani [the enlightened one] in the 'real'. ~ Dada Bhagwan

An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns. ~ Terry Eagleton

Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations. ~ Susan Jacoby

Education levels are highly and negatively correlated to religious belief. In other words, ignorance is bliss. ~ Cesar Nascimento

It is true that the modern Christian is less robust, but that is not thanks to Christianity; it is thanks to the generations of freethinkers, who from the Renaissance to the present day, have made Christians ashamed of many of their traditional beliefs. It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians. ~ Bertrand Russell

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting. ~ P.D. James

Reason quite properly rejects contradiction, but rationalism abhors mystery, which every heresy attempts in its own way to resolve. ~ Michael S. Horton

Racism watching is a puzzle solving activity and often involves debunking pseudo-science. The investigator must try to figure out what makes people believe in weird ideas. As Stieg said in an interview, 'Fifty years later, people still believe in this; the whole Neo-Nazi movement. There is absolutely no sense in this. They do it contrary to everything science tells us. Contrary to human goodness or altruism, contrary to rational thinking. And this is fascinating, why? ~ Eric Bronson

To be rational is not the same as to be reasonable. ~ William Barrett

Wisdom lies in thinking. The spear-head of thinking is rationalism ~ Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

Love is the only rational act. ~ Mitch Albom

Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition. ~ Richard Dawkins

My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two. ~ David Almond

I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth ~ Karl Popper

[Concerning postmodernism:] The aim of this experimental history is to disturb the ontological security of modern identity and hence to provoke the possibility of otherness through exposition of the cultural difference concealed by, and within, the order of modern rationalism. ~ Nicholas Gane

In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker - the inventor of analytic geometry, no less - a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense. ~ Russell Shorto

Any opposition not based on rationalism or science or experience will one day or other, reveal the fraud, selfishness, lies and conspiracies. ~ Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

There is no imam but the mind, who guides by day and night. ~ Abū Al-ʿAlāʾ Al-Maʿarrī

Let it be stated clearly that mysticism is an a-rational type of experience, and in some degree common to all men.

It is an intuitive, self-evident, self-recognized knowledge which comes fitfully to man. It should not be confounded with the instinctive and immediate knowledge possessed by animals and used by them in their adaptations to environment.

The average man seldom pays enough attention to his slight mystical experiences to profit or learn from them. Yet his need for them is evidenced by his incessant seeking for the thrills, sensations, uplifts, and so on, which he organizes for himself in so many ways--the religious way being only one of them. In fact, the failure of religion--in the West, at any rate--to teach true mysticism, and its overlaying of the deeply mystic nature of its teachings with a pseudo-rationalism and an unsound historicity may be the root cause for driving people to seek for things greater than they feel their individual selves to be in the many sensation-giving activities in the world today. ~ Paul Brunton

The real desire [of feminism] is to break away from rationalism, androcentrisim and all forms of philosophy and practices that discriminate against women. The objective is to recover the use of senses, desire, taste, pleasure, pain and the mystery of life. It is a point of view which seeks to reflet with the body, that is, with sensitivity, with sexuality and, finally, with the story of the body itself. ~ Valmar Da Silva in Reading Other-Wise p. 125 ~ Gerald O. West

Human logic may be rationally adequate, but it is also existentially deficient. Faith declares that there is more than this - not contradicting, but transcending reason. ~ Alister E. McGrath

Christianity is not rationalism, but faith in God's revelation. A conspicuous, all-important item in that revelation is the resurrection of the body. ~ Edward McKendree Bounds

And while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the prevailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamental experience itself, that primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn. ~ Robert Musil

Stock was a rationalist and an atheist. Most of the time she saw the world as a big machine where things just played themselves out. Anonymous forces, impersonal powers, action and reaction, cause and effect. It would be comforting to live in a world that had order and purpose in it, which she supposed was why so many people pretended they did. ~ M.R. Carey

Rationalism is an attitude of readiness to listen to contrary arguments and to learn from experience ... of admitting that "I may be wrong and you may be right and, by an effort, we may get nearer the truth." ~ Karl Popper

If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Dostoevsky believed that the gods of rationalism and materialist utilitarianism had joined in conspiracy against all other ethical systems ... The accumulation of capital, or the acquisition of money, are endeavors par excellence which establish a quantifiable goal: hence they are directly amenable to maximization formulae. ~ John Carroll

As the power of Christianity declined through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased. ~ Ralph Adams Cram

For the modern world will accept no dogmas upon any authority; but it will accept any dogmas on no authority. Say that a thing is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be dismissed as a superstition without examination. But preface your remark merely with "they say" or "don't you know that?" or try (and fail) to rememver the name of some professor mentioned in some newspaper; and the keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Rationalism, which is the feeling that everything is subject to and completely explicable by Reason, consequently rejects everything not visible and calculable. ~ Francis Parker Yockey

To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them. ~ Francis Parker Yockey

But no matte what kind of an understanding is adopted, whether associated with positivism, which asserts that the truth can only be reached by trial and error, or rationalism, which asserts that everything can be explained and grasped by reason, whether the perspective of romanticism, which overemphasizes imagination and sensitivity, or an approach based on ardent naturalism, whether based on realism, which aims to describe everything as it is including its shortcomings, or a curiosity-raising approach such as surrealism, whether idealism, which asserts that there is nothing real but ideas, or cubism, which asserts that there is nothing real but instead of direct description, or some other such current or perspective, that is not true poetry. ~ M. Fethullah Gulen

There is more to life than both cold facts and blind faith. ~ Abhijit Naskar

See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler. ~ William James

I was born into a working class Irish Catholic family at the brutal bottom of the Great Depression. I suppose this early imprinting and conditioning made me a life-long radical. My education was mostly scientific, majoring in electrical engineering and applied math. Those imprints made me a life-long rationalist. I have become increasingly skeptical about, or detached from, the assumption that radicalism and rationalism are the only correct perspectives with which to view life, but they remain my favorite perspectives. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

I've often wondered what people mean when they talk about an experience. I'm a technologist and accustomed to seeing things as they are. I see everything they are talking about very clearly; after all, I'm not blind. I see the moon over the Tamaulipas desert--it is more distinct than at other times, perhaps, but still a calculable mass circling around our planet, an example of gravitation, interesting, but in what way an experience? I see the jagged rocks, standing out black against the moonlight; perhaps they do look like the jagged backs of prehistoric monsters, but I know they are rocks, stone, probably volcanic, one should have to examine them to be sure of this. Why should I feel afraid? There aren't any prehistoric monsters any more. Why should I imagine them? I'm sorry, but I don't see any stone angels either; nor demons; I see what I see--the usual shapes due to erosion and also my long shadow on the sand, but no ghosts. Why get womanish? I don't see any Flood either, but sand lit up by the moon and made undulating, like water, by the wind, which doesn't surprise me; I don't find it fantastic, but perfectly explicable. I don't know what the souls of the damned look like; perhaps like black agaves in the desert at night. What I see are agaves, a plant that blossoms once only and dies. Furthermore, I know (however I may look at the moment) that I am not the last or the first man on earth; and I can't be moved by the mere idea that I am the last man, because it isn't tru ~ Max Frisch

A true rationalist ought to be effective in the real world. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

In its use of this method natural science has shown a curious mixture
of rationalism and irrationalism. Its prevalent tone of thought has been
ardently rationalistic within its own borders, and dogmatically irrational
beyond those borders. In practice such an attitude tends to become a dog-
matic denial that there are any factors in the world not fully expressible in terms of its own primary notions devoid of further generalization. Such
a denial is the self-denial of thought. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

My interpretation of scientific knowledge, for example, was a triviality for physicists like Mach, Boltzmann, Einstein and Bohr. But the ideas of these great thinkers were distorted beyond recognition by the rodents of neopositivism and the competing rodents of the church of 'critical' rationalism. ~ Paul Feyerbend

We honor the Greeks because in their art, literature, philosophy and civic history we discern the early stirrings of our own ideals - rationalism, humanism, democracy - which first took firm root in Athenian soil. ~ Caroline Alexander