Amartya Sen Quotes

It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of religion that we shall discover truth, reason and morality.

One has to be realistic. One’s concern for equity and justice in the world must not carry one into the alien territory of unreasoned belief. That’s very important.

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.

It is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

Man is a rational animal – so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents.

Philosophers have done wisely when they have told us to cultivate our reason rather than our feelings, for reason reconciles us to the daily things of existence; our feelings teach us to yearn after the far, the difficult, the unseen.

There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic.

Read good, big important things.

A philosopher is a person who doesn't care which side his bread is buttered on; he knows he eats both sides anyway.

Logic is the art of making truth prevail.

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.

This then is the age of reason.

Whatever else we may say of our own age, for good or evil, nobody is likely to call it an Age of Reason.

Logic is a wonderful invention. It is so wonderful, people often mistake it for reason. Reason, however, requires sense. Logic requires only consistency.

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

How did mankind ever come by the idea of liberty? What a grand thought it was!

For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.

Logic is the science of the laws of thought, as thought,--that is of the necessary conditions to which thought considered in itself is a subject.

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.

Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created

That great philosopher anonymous once said, never argue with a fool. People might not know the difference.

Reason is one thing and faith is another and reason can as little be made a substitute for faith, as faith can be made a substitute for reason.