Sydney J. Harris Quotes

My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two.

I think that there's a strain in journalism that believes that anyone who surrenders him- or herself to faith and to belief necessarily checks reason and rationality at the door.

If superstition enters, the brain is gone.

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse.

Superstition sets the whole world in flames, but philosophy douses them.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

Science stands for rational thought, faith for superstition and unreason.

I'm completely lacking any sense of religious belief, but I am superstitious.

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

If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.

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.

Gods are fragile things, they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

I'm disturbed when people let superstition, magical thinking, extreme conspiracy theories and so on blur their minds.

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.

Faith is not the opposite of reason.

Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.

Reason is the first victim of strong emotion.

Fear is the enemy of logic.

Faith never goes contrary to reason -- faith simply ignores reason and rises above it.

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.

Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.

For ages, a deadly conflict has been waged between a few brave men and women of thought and genius upon the one side, and the great ignorant religious mass on the other. This is the war between Science and Faith. The few have appealed to reason, to honor, to law, to freedom, to the known, and to happiness here in this world. The many have appealed to prejudice, to fear, to miracle, to slavery, to the unknown, and to misery hereafter. The few have said "Think" The many have said "Believe!"