Top 100 Quotes About Rationalism
#1. 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
#2. I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.
Isaac Asimov
#3. The Greek conception of a life in harmony with nature found its most complete development in the rationalism of the Renaissance and of the centuries that followed it.
Elie Metchnikoff
#4. War has all the characteristics of socialism most conservatives hate: Centralized power, state planning, false rationalism, restricted liberties, foolish optimism about intended results, and blindness to unintended secondary results.
Joseph Sobran
#5. Rationalism is the idea that we can ever understand anything about the state of being. It's a deathtrip. It always has been ... And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then irrationalism might very well be a lifetrip ... at least until it proves otherwise.
Stephen King
#6. The question rather is how we should do science and theology in light of the impending collapse of Enlightenment rationalism and scientific naturalism. These ideologies are on the way out. They are on the way out.
William A. Dembski
#7. spirit of capitalism is best understood as part of the development of rationalism as a whole,
Max Weber
#8. If the three brothers all ride horses, there are six animals and eighteen legs involved: that is true rationalism, and fairyland is full of it.
G.K. Chesterton
#9. You doom yourselves, Susannah. You seem positively bent on it, and the root is always the same: your faith fails you, and you replace it with rational thought. But there is no love in thought, nothing that lasts in deduction, only death in rationalism.
Stephen King
#10. Rationalism is false not because it seeks to express reality in rational mode, so far as this possible, but because it seeks to embrace the whole of reality in the realm of reason, as if the reason coincides with the very principle of things.
Osman Bakar
#11. What Rob Brezsny does with words is grammarye, the Old English term for magic. With his strange brew of macho feminism and poetic rationalism, Brezsny weaves a yarn crazy enough to be true and real enough to subvert the literalist virus of cynicism now immobilizing the collective mindscape.
Antero Alli
#12. Capitalists control the machineries. They create difficulties to the workers. Consequently rationalism , which has to lead the way for peaceful life to all, has resulted in causing poverty and worries to the people because of dominating forces
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
#13. My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two.
David Almond
#14. With a cloak of naturalized rationalism, scholars can deflect our attention from the power effected in their theory-making.
-- Randall Styers, Making Magic, p. 23
Randall Styers
#15. Rationalism pervades the progressive world. It is one of the reasons progressives have lately been losing to conservatives. Rationalist-based political campaigns miss the symbolic, metaphorical, moral, emotional, and frame-based aspects of political campaigns.
George Lakoff
#16. 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
#17. Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
Emile M. Cioran
#18. The irony is that in our decades, the combination of rationalism, asceticism, and individualism (the so-called Protestant Ethic) has produced precisely the system of boondoggling, luxury-consumption, and status.
Paul Goodman
#19. I say, gentlemen, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#20. Because of the confusion surrounding the term "agnosticism," it would seem better to use the very similar term "rationalism" in its place when referring to the original Huxleyan meaning of the term. The use of "rationalist" for "agnostic" would also seem to be less ambiguous.
Gordon Stein
#21. 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
#22. Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition.
Richard Dawkins
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. All rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life and to decrease the sum total of human happiness.
H.P. Lovecraft
#27. 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.
James MacDonald
#28. 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
#29. 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
#31. Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.
Arthur Erickson
#32. What Facebook stands for in the world is giving people a voice and spreading ideas and rationalism.
Mark Zuckerberg
#33. All that is mere
rationalism; the superstition (that is the unreasoning repugnance
and terror) is in the person who admits there can be angels but
denies there can be devils. The superstition is in the person who
admits there can be devils but denies there can be diabolists.
G.K. Chesterton
#34. 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
#36. The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and ... all forms of rationalism ... was Johann Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method ... was considerable and perhaps crucial.
Isaiah Berlin
#37. 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
#38. To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them.
Francis Parker Yockey
#39. Rationalism ... is a secularized form of the belief in the power of the word of God.
Paul Feyerabend
#40. It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.
Czeslaw Milosz
#41. 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
#42. Berkouwer is to be commended for his careful avoidance of "the polarities of a mindless fideism and a faithless rationalism.
Bruce A. Demarest
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Rationalism doesn't require "belief," only observation. The real, measurable world doesn't care what you believe.
Joe Haldeman
#47. If, as Max Weber contended, science, modernity and rationalism have disenchanted the world and swept it clean of gods, spirits and magic (or, at least, problematised believing in them), then psychedelics offer a potential way out of the ensuing existential impasse. -Andy Letcher
Cameron Adams
#48. Lasker thought that his rationalism rendered him immune from the surprises of chess theory.
Savielly Tartakower
#49. Surrealism was necessary - essential, even - in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early '60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#51. 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
#52. This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.
Susan Jacoby
#53. This is why the conflict between rationalism and irrationalism has become the most important intellectual, and perhaps even moral, issue of our time.
Karl R. Popper
#54. [ ... ] rationalism is a form of intellectual bigotry which, in thinking about reality, tries to take it into account as little as possible.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#55. True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
William James
#56. Liberalism is a most important by-product of Rationalism, and its origins and ideology must be clearly shown.
Francis Parker Yockey
#57. 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
#58. Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us.
Huston Smith
#59. For all our secular rationalism and technological advances, potential for surrender to the charms of magical thinking remains embedded in the human psyche, awaiting only the advertiser to awaken it.
Tim Wu
#60. Today the lack of faith is an expression of profound confusion and despair. Once skepticism and rationalism were progressive forces for the development of thought; now they have become rationalizations for relativism and uncertainty.
Erich Fromm
#61. But when I'm talking about God, I'm talking about the divine being who can't be located tangibly with the kind of evidence that the rationalism of reductionism demands in the same way that you cannot be located in your eyelashes or spine or shoulder.
Rob Bell
#62. [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
#63. Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
Octavio Paz
#64. Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.
Richard Dawkins
#65. In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility.
John Buchan
#66. 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
#67. Can reason be an idol? Certainly. The philosophy of rationalism puts human reason in the place of God as the source and standard of all truth.
Nancy Pearcey
#68. 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
#69. The only condition for such brand of more sophisticated rationalism: to believe and act as if one does not have the full story - to be sophisticated you need to accept that you are not so.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#70. It is significant that it is as difficult to get charity out of piety as to get reasonableness out of rationalism.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#71. In philosophical terms, the opposite of rationalism is not irrationalism but empiricism, that is, a willingness to form beliefs on the basis of experience rather than from a priori deduction. Empirical evidence never yields the dogmatic certainty that accompanies logical deduction.
John Quiggin
#72. Rationalists are admirable beings, rationalism is a hideous monster when it claims for itself omnipotence. Attribution of omnipotence to reason is as bad a piece of idolatry as is worship of stock and stone believing it to be God.
Mahatma Gandhi
#74. Logic is like the sword
those who appeal to it shall perish by it.
Samuel Butler
#75. This is one of the difficulties and pleasures of studying the Inklings; Christians all, they offer, along with the expected 20th-century psychological explanations for behavior, unexpected spiritual ones.
Philip Zaleski
#76. 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
#77. I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth
Karl Popper
#78. What we know here is very little, but what we are ignorant of is immense.
Pierre Laplace
#79. The fact is: our faith is more rational than the most elaborate paradigm of the atheistic foundationalist, more romantic than the wildest dreams of the unbelieving postmodernist. our faith is a dogma that makes you dance.
Reggie M. Kidd
#80. Careful. When you dabble too much with reason life becomes nothing but a process of dying.
Lucas Mascotto-Carbone
#81. 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
#82. Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.
Richard Feynman
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. How can anyone trust scientists? If new evidence comes along, they change their minds.
Terry Pratchett
#86. To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#87. 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.
Terry Eagleton
#88. Good excuses rarely collect dust. We use them, and use them, and use them.
Andy Stanley
#89. 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.
Shannon Celebi
#90. Twice two is four is not life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#91. Education levels are highly and negatively correlated to religious belief. In other words, ignorance is bliss.
Cesar Nascimento
#92. The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#93. A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.
Gilles Deleuze
#94. 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
#95. 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 believe.
Francois Mitterrand
#96. 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
#97. You can either control yourself by simple two lines of bitter truth ,
OR
by confusing yourself in long stories to comfort with a lie
Er.teji
#98. Doing worse with more knowledge means you are doing something very wrong.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#99. 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 almost always held passionately.
Bertrand Russell
#100. 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 deny now will assault like a savage appetite.
George Eliot
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
