Philosophy & Thought: Reason & Logic Quotes

"For since it is impossible for a created monad to have a physical influence on the inner nature of another, this is the only way in which one can be dependent on another"

Gottfried Leibniz, Philosopher

"Finally there are simple ideas of which no definition can be given; there are also axioms or postulates, or in a word primary principles, which cannot be proved and have no need of proof"

Gottfried Leibniz, Philosopher

"It is the work of fancy to enlarge, but of judgment to shorten and contract; and therefore this must be as far above the other as judgment is a greater and nobler faculty than fancy or imagination"

Robert South, Clergyman

"Not that I wish by any means to deny, that the mental life of individuals and peoples is also in conformity with law, as is the object of philosophical, philological, historical, moral, and social sciences to establish"

Hermann von Helmholtz, Physicist

"Reason we call that faculty innate in us, of discovering laws and applying them with thought"

Hermann von Helmholtz, Physicist

"Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic"

Edward de Bono, Psychologist

"Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument"

Robert South, Clergyman

"I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive"

Nora Ephron, Author

"As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason"

Thomas Browne, Scientist

"Theology is the logic of the Devil"

Jose Bergamin, Writer

"Dealing with complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention and mental energy. There is never any justification for things being complex when they could be simple!"

Edward de Bono, Psychologist

"I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason"

Roger Ebert, Critic

"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"

Walter Bagehot, Author

"They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we behold in this world talk very absurdly; for can anything be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive of intelligent beings?"

Charles de Secondat, Philosopher

"There are three species of government: republican, monarchical, and despotic"

Charles de Secondat, Philosopher

"Very dangerous things, theories"

Dorothy L. Sayers, Author

"There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited"

Dorothy L. Sayers, Author

"It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there's no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic"

Jeremy Rifkin, Economist

"Credulity is belief in slight evidence, with no evidence, or against evidence"

Tryon Edwards, Theologian

"He that speaketh against his own reason speaks against his own conscience, and therefore it is certain that no man serves God with a good conscience who serves him against his reason"

Jeremy Taylor, Clergyman

"Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason is applied"

Charles de Secondat, Philosopher

"The explanations for the things we do in life are many and complex. Supposedly mature adults should live by logic, listen to their reason. Think things out before they act. But maybe they never heard what Dr. London told me one, Freud said that for the little things in life we should react according to our reason. But for really big decisions, we should heed what our unconscious tells us"

Erich Segal, Novelist

"There are two ways to slice easily thorugh life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking"

Alfred Korzybski, Scientist

"Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open"

Clive Bell, Critic

"I assert that nothing ever comes to pass without a cause"

Jonathan Edwards, Clergyman

"In a way, one gets stability from being able to order the rational mind"

Richard Gere, Actor

"Reason is the servant of instinct"

Clarence Day, Author

"What is the source of all this trouble? I'm saying that the source is basically in thought. Many people would think that such a statement is crazy, because thought is the one thing we have with which to solve our problems. That's part of our tradition"

David Bohm, Scientist

"And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call 'sustained incoherence'"

David Bohm, Scientist

"Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium"

John B. S. Haldane, Scientist

"A man from a primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was powered by the wind or by an antelope hidden under the car, but when he opens up the hood and sees the engine he immediately realizes that it was designed"

Michael Behe, Scientist

"Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!"

Marvin Minsky, Scientist

"The speculative part of my work is that these particular cognitive tasks - ways of thinking analytically - are tied to nature's laws"

Edward Tufte, Educator

"The rehabilitation of order as a universal principle, however, suggested at the same time that orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"Furthermore, order is a necessary condition for making a structure function. A physical mechanism, be it a team of laborers, the body of an animal, or a machine, can work only if it is in physical order"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially"

Jacques Lacan, Psychologist

"The absurd consequences of neglecting structure but using the concept of order just the same are evident if one examines the present terminology of information theory"

Rudolf Arnheim, Artist

"The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views"

Maimonides, Philosopher

"Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty"

Stephen Jay Gould, Scientist

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