Rational Quotes - Page 35

• Even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in the people. An insurrection has consequently begun of science talents and courage against rank and birth, which have fallen into contempt. It has failed in its first effort, because the mobs of the cities, the instrument used for its accomplishment, debased by ignorance, poverty and vice, could not be restrained to rational action. But the world will soon recover from the panic of this first catastrophe.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Change, Taken, Ignorance

  Thomas Jefferson (1977). “The Portable Thomas Jefferson”, p.426, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• God forgive me for having thought it possible that a schoolmaster could be out and out a rational being.

  Walter Scott

  Education, Teaching, Forgive Me

  Sir Walter Scott (1833). “The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott: With a Biography, and His Last Additions and Illustrations”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Mean, Discipline, Use

  Charles Horton Cooley (1992). “Human Nature and the Social Order”, p.426, Transaction Publishers

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The will to be totally rational is the will to be made out of glass and steel: and to use others as if they were glass and steel.

  Marge Piercy

  Glasses, Steel, Use

  Marge Piercy (2013). “Circles on the Water”, p.86, Knopf

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Good fellowship and friendship are lasting, rational and manly pleasures.

  William Wycherley

  Fellowship, Pleasure, Lasting

  William Wycherley (1751). “The Country Wife: A Comedy, as it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal. Written by Mr. Wycherley”, p.10

  50 Copy quote

  Show source

• Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law cannot be found in a rational state of society.

  Robert Owen

  Law, Ears, States

  22 Copy quote

• Respect for sovereignity, for privacy, for total independence. Gentle alliances against loneliness, they were, cool rational love-affairs without the love.

  Richard Bach

  Love, Respect, Loneliness

  4 Copy quote

• 'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose them, but push the same geometry and chemistry up into the invisible plane of social and rational life, so that, look where we will, in a boy's game, or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Eye, Science, Boys

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt McLaughlin (2010). “The Laws of Nature: Excerpts from the Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.73, North Atlantic Books

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• To unfold the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matured, is a object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind.

  George Boole

  Knowledge, Science, Law

  George Boole (1854). “An Investigation of the Laws of Thought: On which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities”, p.3

  26 Copy quote

  Show source

• There prevails among men of letters, an opinion, that all appearance of science is particularly hateful to Women; and that therefore whoever desires to be well received in female assemblies, must qualify himself by a total rejection of all that is serious, rational, or important; must consider argument or criticism as perpetually interdicted; and devote all his attention to trifles, and all his eloquence to compliment.

  Samuel Johnson

  Science, Men, Rejection

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”, p.297

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• [I]t is truth alone-scientific, established, proved, and rational truth-which is capable of satisfying nowadays the awakened minds of all classes. We may still say perhaps, 'faith governs the world,'-but the faith of the present is no longer in revelation or in the priest-it is in reason and in science.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Faith, Science, Class

  5 Copy quote

• The air of caricature never fails to show itself in the products of reason applied relentlessly and without correction. The observation of clinical facts would seem to be a pursuit of the physician as harmless as it is indispensable. [But] it seemed irresistibly rational to certain minds that diseases should be as fully classifiable as are beetles and butterflies. This doctrine ... bore perhaps its richest fruit in the hands of Boissier de Sauvauges. In his Nosologia Methodica published in 1768 ... this Linnaeus of the bedside grouped diseases into ten classes, 295 genera, and 2400 species.

  Wilfred Trotter

  Butterfly, Air, Hands

  7 Copy quote

• Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds

  John Stuart Mill

  Truth, Feelings, Prejudice

  John Stuart Mill (1859). “On Liberty”, p.95

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The church at the time was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Faithful, Religion, Atheism

  11 Copy quote

• We were made to be neither cerebral men nor visceral men, but Men. Not beasts nor angels but Men - things at once rational and animal.

  C. S. Lewis

  Angel, Animal, Men

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “The Pilgrim's Regress: The Wade Annotated Edition”, p.215, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest - but if devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

  Ayn Rand

  Cheating, Truth, Responsibility

  Ayn Rand (2005). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.961, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• While the constitution continues to be read, and its principles known, the states, must, by every rational man, be considered as essential component parts of the union; and therefore the idea of sacrificing the former to the latter is totally inadmissible.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Sacrifice, Men, Ideas

  Alexander Hamilton, John Church Hamilton (1850). “The Works of Alexander Hamilton: Miscellanies, 1774-1789: A full vindication; The farmer refuted; Quebec bill; Resolutions in Congress; Letters from Phocion; New-York Legislature, etc”, p.449

  37 Copy quote

  Show source

• The proposed Constitution, so far from implying an abolition of the State governments, makes them constituent parts of the national sovereignty, by allowing them a direct representation in the Senate, and leaves in their possession certain exclusive and very important portions of sovereign power. This fully corresponds, in every rational import of the terms, with the idea of a federal government.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Ideas, Government, Important

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Quentin P. Taylor, John Jay (1998). “The Essential Federalist: A New Reading of the Federalist Papers”, p.85, Rowman & Littlefield

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The truth is, after all the declamations we have heard, that the Constitution is itself, in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, A BILL OF RIGHTS.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Rights, Purpose, Bills

  James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay (2016). “The Federalist Papers: The Making of the US Constitution”, p.137, Arcturus Publishing

  28 Copy quote

  Show source

• A rational army would run away.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Running, War, Army

  7 Copy quote

• We led with our conviction rather than rational, because rational said it was impossible.

  Daniel Ek

  Inspiring, Entrepreneur, Impossible

  48 Copy quote

• Gratitude is the first sign of a thinking, rational creature.

  Solanus Casey

  Gratitude, Smart, Grateful

  116 Copy quote

• I consider the differences between man and animals in propensities, feelings, and intellectual faculties, to be the result of the same cause as that which we assign for the variations in other functions, viz. difference of organization; and that the superiority of man in rational endowments is not greater than the more exquisite, complicated, and perfectly developed structure of his brain, and particularly of his ample cerebral hemispheres, to which the rest of the animal kingdom offers no parallel, nor even any near approximation, is sufficient to account for.

  Sir William Lawrence, 1st Baronet

  Animal, Men, Organization

  18 Copy quote

• Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course. Despite all deficiencies not only is the death-blow dealt here for the first time to 'teleology' in the natural sciences, but their rational meaning is empirically explained.

  Karl Marx

  Struggle, Book, Science

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1942). “Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: selected correspondence, 1846-1895: with explanatory notes”

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am willing to allow that smoking is a moral weakness, but on the other hand, we must beware of the man without weaknesses. He is not to be trusted. He is apt to be always sober and he cannot make a single mistake. His habits are likely to be regular, his existence more mechanical and his head always maintains its supremacy over his heart. Much as I like reasonable persons, I hate completely rational beings.

  Lin Yutang

  Mistake, Hate, Heart

  Lin Yutang (1937). “The Importance of Living”

  14 Copy quote

  Show source