Caleb Carr Quotes

Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason

Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

It is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from other animals. We can be aware of being aware.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

Men need knowledge in order to overpower their passions and master their prejudices.

First, he must hold rational values, and to do this he must be a thinker.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just... I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand.

There is something insane about a lack of doubt. Doubt - to me, anyway - is what makes you human, and without doubt, even the righteous lose their grip, not only on reality but also on their humanity.

Play the role as a human being... human beings are three-dimensional.

The more power that we have, the less human we are.

Hast thou reason? I have. Why then dost not thou use it? For if this does its own work, what else dost thou wish?

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

Knowledge humanizes mankind, and reason inclines to mildness; but prejudices eradicate every tender disposition.

In order to forgive reason for the evil it has wrought on the majority of men, we must imagine for ourselves what man would be without his reason. 'Tis a necessary evil.

I know that war and mayhem run in our blood. I refuse to believe that they must dominate our lives. We humans are animals, too, but animals with amazing powers of rationality, morality, society. We can use our strength and courage not to savage each other, but to defend our highest purposes.

I guess you could say that no matter what the characters are enduring, I try to make them retain their humanity. Their self-absorbed, grouchy, selfish, aggravating humanity.

If we did not have rational souls, we would not be able to believe.

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.

To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

I'm human; that's what people don't realize.

Reason is God's crowning gift to man.

I possess a strong sense of reason.