{"quotes":[{"text":"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, people still believe in this; the whole Neo-Nazi movement. There is absolutely no sense in this. They do it contrary to everything science tells us. Contrary to human goodness or altruism, contrary to rational thinking. And this is fascinating, why?","author":"Eric Bronson","tags":["neonazis","pseudoscience","racism","rationalism","stieg-larson","sven-ove-hansson","the-millennium-trilogy"],"id":3457,"author_id":"Eric+Bronson"},{"text":"All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.","author":"Immanuel Kant","tags":["empiricism","knowledge","rationalism","reason","senses","understanding"],"id":13381,"author_id":"Immanuel+Kant"},{"text":"The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.","author":"P.D. James","tags":["contentment","happiness","rationalism"],"id":25614,"author_id":"P.D.+James"},{"text":"The clothes have no emperor.","author":"Stewart Elliott Guthrie","tags":["rationalism","religion"],"id":28967,"author_id":"Stewart+Elliott+Guthrie"},{"text":"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.","author":"Michael Oakeshott","tags":["experience","rationalism"],"id":32379,"author_id":"Michael+Oakeshott"},{"text":"A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.","author":"Gilles Deleuze","tags":["anarchy","freedom","inspirational","lateral-thinking","philosophy","rationalism"],"id":36490,"author_id":"Gilles+Deleuze"},{"text":"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.","author":"Philip Zaleski","tags":["counseling","discipleship","rationalism"],"id":50668,"author_id":"Philip+Zaleski"},{"text":"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 scripture, they were effectively promoting a kind of secular rationalism that states that one does not need to have a religious experience of any kind to live a moral life: all one has to do is declare one’s faith in scripture, in the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity and such, and accept the authority of the Holy Catholic Church as God’s representative on Earth.","author":"Daniel Waterman","tags":["ity","catholic-church","disobedience","faith","moral-life","origin-myth","rationalism","religious-experience","scripture","truth"],"id":51076,"author_id":"Daniel+Waterman"},{"text":"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 of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler.","author":"William James","tags":["idealism","philosophy","pragmatism","rationalism","truth"],"id":56654,"author_id":"William+James"},{"text":"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 non-existence of God.The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,'' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'But,' says Man, 'The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.","author":"Douglas Adams","tags":["creation","god","h2g2","hitchhiker-s-guide","logic","man","rationalism"],"id":58273,"author_id":"Douglas+Adams"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":46,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}