William Penn Quotes

A philosopher goes where the truth leads and has no patience with mere emotion.

The pursuit of truth does not permit violence on one's opponent.

Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.

At the end of the day you have to keep emotions away.

I am a commonsense sort of a person, and I don't get carried away with emotion and fears.

We believe it is bad or dangerous to be carried away by our emotions. We admire the person who is cool, who acts without feeling.

I hope that I am generous and tolerant, but certainly on the intellectual side I think that there are discoverable truths, and some things that are closer approximations to the truth than others.

My father was the most rational and the most dispassionate of men.

Neither truth, reason, nor justice consists in stubbornness of assertion, nor in the repetition of error.

Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has the right to be wrong in his facts.

Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.

The older I get, the more I realize the importance of maintaining an even temperament - not getting too emotional, focusing on the task at hand. You don't want to make a business deal based on your emotions.

Just because you’re offended, it doesn’t mean you’re right.

Let the sap of reason quench the fire of passion.

Do not banish reason for inequality; but let your reason serve to make the truth appear where it seems hid, and hide the false seems true.

I would, like any other scientist, willingly change my mind if the evidence led me to do so. So I care about what's true, I care about evidence, I care about evidence as the reason for knowing what is true. It is true that I come across rather passionate sometimes - and that's because I am passionate about the truth... I do get very impatient with humbug, with cant, with fakery, with charlatans.

Reason wishes that the judgement it gives be just; anger wishes that the judgement it has given seem to be just.

The duty of a philosopher is clear. He must take every pain to ascertain the truth; and, having arrived at a conclusion, he should noise it abroad far and wide, utterly regardless of what opinions he shocks.

The duty of criticism is neither to depreciate nor dignify by partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover; and to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever she shall dictate

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.

In all human affairs, the wisest course is to be passionate about the role of reason and reasonable about the role of passion.

It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth.

The passions of men are commonly more potent than their reason.

We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.

And, speaking generally, passion seems not to be amenable to reason, but only to force.