Reasonable Quotes - Page 10

• That someone would want another human being to suffer, or would even tolerate the idea, for committing no crime at all but being reasonable, is truly frightening. A religion that breeds such people is a genuine plague upon the earth.

  Richard Carrier

  Ideas, People, Suffering

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• I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament... Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Light, Two, Connections

  "Talks with Edison". Harper's Magazine, Volume 80, February 1890.

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• The ancient man approached God (or even the gods)as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the bench and God is in the dock.

  C. S. Lewis

  War, Men, Should Have

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• By any reasonable criteria, the discipline of economics as a whole, in its present state, is sadly lacking.

  Paul Ormerod

  Discipline, Economics, Criteria

  "The Death of Economics". Book by Paul Ormerod, 1994.

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• I can find lots of examples where a game won't make you rich, but I can't find a reasonable case where a Linux port doesn't have at least a small, positive return on investment.

  Ryan C. Gordon

  Games, Linux, Return

  "Ryan C. Gordon and Michael Simms (2. Ryan C. Gordon)". Interview with Robin Heggelund Hansen, www.tek.no. March 10, 2009.

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• In most cases, to be reasonable means not to be obstinate, which in turn points to conformity with reality as it is. The principle of adjustment is taken for granted. When the idea of reason was conceived, it was intended to achieve more than the mere regulation of the relation between means and ends: it was regarded as the instrument for understanding the ends, for determining them.

  Max Horkheimer

  Taken, Mean, Reality

  Max Horkheimer (2013). “Eclipse of Reason”, p.8, Read Books Ltd

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• We are already well down the road toward a managed-trade regime. It would be far better to acknowledge that reality, and seek a set of reasonable rules, than to pretend that Ricardian trade is the norm and allow mercantilist states to overwhelm U.S. industry and ratchet down wages, in the name of free trade.

  Robert Kuttner

  Reality, Names, Would Be

  Robert Kuttner (1987). “The Economic Illusion: False Choices Between Prosperity and Social Justice”, p.124, University of Pennsylvania Press

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• How can anyone be interested in war? - that glorious pursuit of annihilation with its ceremonious bellowings and trumpetings over the mangling of human bones and muscles and organs and eyes, its inconceivable agonies which could have been prevented by a few well-chosen, reasonable words. How, why, did this unnecessary business begin? Why does anyone want to read about it - this redundant human madness which men accept as inevitable?

  Margaret Caroline Anderson

  War, Eye, Men

  "The Strange Necessity" by Margaret Caroline Anderson, (part 1), 1969.

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• If a man go into the London Docks sober without means of getting drunk, and comes out of one of the cellars very drunk wherein are a million gallons of wine, I think that would be reasonable evidence that he had stolen some of the wine in that cellar, though you could not prove that any wine was stolen, or any wine was missed.

  William Henry Maule

  Wine, Mean, Men

  Reg. v. Burton, Dearsly's C. C. 284, 1854.

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• We were a different kind of Christian, the quiet, reasonable kind, a breed embarrassed by the mention of miracles.

  Karen Thompson Walker

  Christian, Miracle, Different

  Karen Thompson Walker (2014). “The Age of Miracles”, p.62, Simon and Schuster

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• Since it is to the advantage of the wage-payer to pay as little as possible, even well-paid labor will have no more than what is regarded in a particular society as the reasonable level of subsistence. The lower ranks of labor will commonly have less, and if public relief were afforded even up to the wage-level of the lowest ranks of labor, that relief would compete in the labor market; check or dry up the supply of wage-labor. It would tend to render the performance of work by the wage-earner redundant.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Dry Up, Relief, Levels

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• If the world is made to furnish each individual with the means of livelihood and the instruments for his growth and progress, each man has therefore the right to find in the world what is necessary for himself. The recent Council reminded us of this: "God intended the earth and all that it contains for the use of every human being and people. Thus, as all men follow justice and unite in charity, created goods should abound for them on a reasonable basis."

  Pope Paul VI

  Mean, Men, Justice

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• In my books, I never portray violence as a reasonable solution to a problem. If the lead characters in the story are driven to it, it's at the extreme end of their experience.

  Dean Koontz

  Book, Character, Stories

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• If it is to be established that there is a God, then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so. Until and unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing; and in that situation the only reasonable posture must be that of either the negative atheist or the agnostic. So the onus of proof has to rest on the proposition of theism.

  Antony Flew

  Atheist, Believe, Atheism

  Antony Flew, John Shosky (1998). “Philosophical Essays”, p.6, Rowman & Littlefield

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• There is no sphere in which a human being can be supposed to act where one mode of reasoning will not, in every given instance, be more reasonable than any other mode. That mode the being is bound by every principle of justice to pursue.

  William Godwin

  Justice, Atheism, Spheres

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• The skeptic has no illusions about life, nor a vain belief in the promise of immortality. Since this life here and now is all we can know, our most reasonable option is to live it fully.

  Paul Kurtz

  Promise, Atheism, Belief

  Paul Kurtz (1986). “The Transcendental Temptation: A Critique of Religion and the Paranormal”

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• As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital.

  Katha Pollitt

  Christian, Country, Teaching

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• The result of the revolution in Germany has been to establish a democracy in the best sense of the word.  We are steering towards an order of things guaranteeing a process of a natural and reasonable selection in the domain of political leadership, thanks to which that leadership will be entrusted to the most competent, irrespective of their descent, name or fortune.  The memorable words of the great Corsican that every soldier carries a Field Marshal's baton in his knapsack, will find its political complement in Germany.

  Adolf Hitler

  Memorable, Order, Names

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• Our lives are based on what is reasonable and common sense;
  Truth is apt to be neither.

  Christmas Humphreys

  Common Sense, Truth Is, Our Lives

  Christmas Humphreys (2003). “Teach Yourself Zen”, Teach Yourself

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• Is it just or reasonable, that most voices against the main end of government should enslave the less number that would be free? more just it is, doubtless, if it come to force, that a less number compel a greater to retain, which can be no wrong to them, their liberty, than that a greater number, for the pleasure of their baseness, compel a less most injuriously to be their fellow-slaves. They who seek nothing but their own just liberty, have always right to win it and to keep it, whenever they have power, be the voices never so numerous that oppose it.

  John Milton

  Winning, Voice, Numbers

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• There are times when to be reasonable is to be cowardly.

  Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

  Reason, Cowardly

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• Reasonable men are the best dictionaries of conversation.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Men, Conversation, Dictionary

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• What does competency in the long run mean? It means to all reasonable beings, cleanliness of person, decency of dress, courtesy of manners, opportunities for education, the delights of leisure, and the bliss of giving.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Running, Mean, Opportunity

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1875). “Success and Its Conditions”, p.293

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• to be reasonable one should never complain but when one hopes redress.

  Mary Wortley Montagu

  Complaining, Should, Redress

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1856). “The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu”, p.40

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• When we have run through all forms of government, without partiality to that we were born under, we are at a loss with which to side; they are all a compound of good and evil. It is therefore most reasonable and safe to value that of our own country above all others, and to submit to it.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Running, Country, Loss

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