top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Nobody does anything for one reason."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Reason quotes
"As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning."
"Behind every effect there is a cause. You can never eliminate an effect without first understanding its cause."
"Religion is a distraction from true education."
"The power of reason is thought small in these days, but I remain an unrepentant rationalist. Reason may be a small force, but it is constant, and works always in one direction, while the forces of unreason destroy one another in futile strife. Therefore every orgy of unreason in the end strengthens the friends of reason, and shows afresh that they are the only true friends of humanity."
"It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition."
"It is certainly true that reason is the most important and the highest rank among all things and, in comparison with other things of this life, the best and something divine. It is the inventor and mentor of all the arts, medicines, laws, and of whatever wisdom, power, virtue, and glory men possess in this life."
"Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being-not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement-not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason."
"Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason."
Explore more quotes by Russell Banks
"A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties."
"Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe. It's one that I embrace wholeheartedly and have been fortunate enough to be rewarded for."
"If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work."
"What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get older, which is a very good thing as you know - you don't want them to get older as you get older."
"I don't want it to be all that self-conscious or artificial, but it really grows out of my having invented myself as a listener so that I could hear her voice."
"The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing."
"First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated."
"One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons."
"Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves."
bottom of page