#reasonin

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) ↗

— Carl Sagan

#truth #persistence

There are three people one can never reason with: a drunk, a crazy person, and a fool. ↗

— R. Alan Woods

#reason #reasonable #reasoning #r-alan-woods

Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning. ↗

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#amount #any #audiences #better #epigram

As I have said, you have no reason to trust me, and an excellent reason not to. ↗

— Robin McKinley

#beauty #beauty-and-the-beast #love #reasoning #trust

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately. Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court. ↗

— Mark Twain

#cats #dogs #doves #foxes #geese

It frequently happens that two persons, reasoning right on a mechanical subject, think alike and invent the same thing without any communication with each other. ↗

— Oliver Evans

#any #communication #each #frequently #happens

Reasoning at every step he treads, Man yet mistakes his way, Whilst meaner things, whom instinct leads, Are rarely known to stray. ↗

— William Cowper

#every step #his #his way #instinct #known

There is no reasoning, no process of inference or comparison; there is no thinking about things, no putting two and two together; there are no ideas - the animal does not think of the box or of the food or of the act he is to perform. ↗

— Edward Thorndike

#act #animal #box #comparison #does

All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention. ↗

— Rudolf Arnheim

#intuition #invention #observation #perceiving #reasoning

This idea was also brought out very clearly by Wallace, who emphasized that apparently reasonable activities of man might very well have developed without an actual application of reasoning. ↗

— Franz Boas

#actual #also #apparently #application #brought