To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.

[Obituary of atheist philosopher Richard Robinson]An Atheist’s Values is one of the best short accounts of liberalism (a term Robinson accepted) and humanism (a term he ignored) produced during the present century, all the more...

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...

You can either control yourself by simple two lines of bitter truth ,OR by confusing yourself in long stories to comfort with a lie

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

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven’t a chance of getting.

Of course, I rationalize the fear. I realize it’s not real, that my house isn’t burning down, that the deer aren’t going to kill me.

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,...

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

[…] rationalism is a form of intellectual bigotry which, in thinking about reality, tries to take it into account as little as possible.

Notwithstanding the fact that infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice, we are constantly charged by the church...

The inconsistencies that haunt our relationships with animals also result from the quirks of human cognition. We like to think of ourselves as the rational species. But research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics shows...

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Nothing is required for this enlightenment except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use with and publicly...

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all...

It is a mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the world some day and then every rational satisfaction your nature that you...

The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body,...

The clothes have no emperor.

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

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the...

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...

Once out of your cradle, you don’t focus on the world in the abstract, perceiving things for the first time, but in synchrony with your accumulated knowledge, which enriches and helps define your experience, as...

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

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.

Church leaders raised on rationalism lead ministries where the supernatural, the Vertical, is suppressed and where God Himself is at best an observer and certainly seldom, if ever, and obvious participant in church.

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....

Rationality and common sense never goes out of fashion.

All things can be achieved but not through all means, some means are not proper

Our time prides itself on having finally achieved the freedom from censorship for which libertarians in all ages have struggled…The credit for these great achievements is claimed by the new spirit of rationalism, a rationalism...

Logic is like the sword–those who appeal to it shall perish by it.

The teachings of Buddha are eternal, but even then Buddha did not proclaim them to be infallible. The religion of Buddha has the capacity to change according to times, a quality which no other religion...

All things can be achieved but not by all means, for some means are not proper

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.

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

knowledge” of angels, and he devoted far more of his massive Summa Theologica to them than to physics.

Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men. The Resurgence of Authority stands opposed to the...

Careful. When you dabble too much with reason life becomes nothing but a process of dying.

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...

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are...

Let’s say I have a mystical soul and a rational brain, and, like Montaigne, I am incapable of choosing between them. I don’t know if I believe in God, but I am often tempted to...

The author compares rationalism and much of organized religion do a dictator who paves over natural springs in order to dispense water in a more organized fashion. The pushback of the world hungry for wonder...

The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.

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...