Reason is overrated. Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our species with weapons of mass destruction? In this way of thinking, it's character and conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. Besides, a human being is not a brain on a stick. My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the fact . Steven Pinker
Some Similar Quotes
  1. I am older than you. Believe me, there is no other way to live on earth. Men are not open to truth or reason. They cannot be reached by a rational argument. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>The mind is powerless against them. Yet we have to deal... - Ayn Rand
  2. The relationship between truth and reason:" Truth cannot be reached by reason alone! - Maurice Blondel
  3. I write Not For the sake of glory Not For the sake of fame Not For the sake of success But for the sake of my soul - Beth Nimmo
  4. The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. - Delos McKown
  5. Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
More Quotes By Steven Pinker
  1. Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You can’t leak your hidden intentions if you don’t think they are your intentions. According to...
  2. The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics...
  3. Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people...
  4. We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naïve to work toward a better one.
  5. Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge–not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of...
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