A Quote by Max Horkheimer

Now that science has helped us to overcome the awe of the unknown in nature, we are the slaves of social pressures of our own making. When called upon to act independently, we cry for patterns, systems, and authorities. If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate--in short, the emancipation from fear--then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render.

Max Horkheimer

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Act Authorities Awe Belief Blind Cry Currently Demons Emancipation Enlightenment Evil Fairies Fate Fear Forces Freeing Greatest Helped Independently Intellectual Making Man Mean Nature Now Our Overcome Own Patterns Pressures Progress Reason Render Science Service Short Social Social Pressure Social Pressures Superstitious Systems Then Unknown Us

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Max Horkheimer
German - Philosopher
February 14, 1895 - July 7, 1973

I believe in the religion of reason -- the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Blind belief can be comforting, but it can easily cripple reason and productivity, and stop intellectual progress.

James Randi

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.

Christopher Hitchens

People knew there were two ways of coming at truth. One was science, or what the Greeks called Logos, reason, logic. And that was essential that the discourse of science or logic related directed to the external world. The other was mythos, what the Greeks called myth, which didn't mean a fantasy story, but it was a narrative associated with ritual and ethical practice but it helped us to address problems for which there were no easy answers, like mortality, cruelty, the sorrow that overtakes us all that's part of the human condition. And these two were not in opposition, we needed both.

Karen Armstrong

This is a world that defines everything backwards, a world in which good is called bad, brightness is called darkness, up is called down, enlightenment is called abnormal behavior and abnormal behavior is applauded as reason.

Frederick Lenz

I think we are intrinsically prone to being irrational and superstitious. A lot of it comes from our fear of the unknown and the fear of a lack of control over our fate.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Blind fear, that seeing reason leads, finds safer footing than blind reason stumbling without fear: to fear the worst oft cures the worse.

William Shakespeare

Tormented by conflicting feelings, I appealed to reason ; and it is reason which, amid so many dogmatic contradictions, now forces the hypothesis upon me. A priori dogmatism, applying itself to God, has proved fruitless: who knows whither the hypothesis, in its turn, will lead us? I will explain therefore how, studying in the silence of my heart, and far from every human consideration, the mystery of social revolutions, God, the great unknown, has become for me an hypothesis, I mean a necessary dialectical tool.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

IT'S THE EXPRESSION ON THEIR LITTLE FACES I LIKE, said the Hogfather. "You mean sort of fear and awe and not knowing whether to laugh or cry or wet their pants?" YES. NOW THAT IS WHAT I CALL BELIEF.

Terry Pratchett

We are slaves, all of us...Some are slaves to fear. Others are slaves to reason—or base desire. It is our lot to be slaves...and the question must be to what shall we owe our indenture? Will it be to truth or to falsehood, hope or despair, light or darkness? I choose to serve the light, even though that bondage often lies in darkness.

Rick Yancey

The havoc wrought by war, which one compares with the havoc wrought by nature, is not an unavoidable fate before which man stands helpless. The natural forces that are the cause of war are human passions, which it lies in our power to change. What are culture and civilization if not the taming of blind forces within us as well as in nature?

Ellen Key

Fear keeps us rooted in the past. Fear of the unknown, fear of abandonment, fear of rejection, fear of not having enough, fear of not being enough, fear of the future-all these fears and more keep us trapped, repeating the same old patterns and making the same choices over and over again. Fear prevents us from moving outside the comfort-or even the familiar discomfort-of what we know. It's nearly impossible to achieve our highest vision for our lives as long as we are being guided by our fears.

Debbie Ford

Human passions, like the forces of nature, are eternal; it is not a matter of denying their existence, but of assessing them and understanding them. Like the forces of nature, they can be subjected to man's deliberate act of will and be made to work in harmony with reason.

Leon Bourgeois

I think the Bhagavad Gita is about both the forces of light and the forces of darkness that exist within our own self, within our own soul; that our deepest nature is one of ambiguity. We have evolutionary forces there - forces of creativity, and love, and compassion, and understanding. But we also have darkness inside us - the diabolical forces of separation, fear and delusion. And in most of our lives, there is a battle going on within ourselves.

Deepak Chopra

The 'nations,' as they are called, with whom our pretended ambassadors, secretaries, presidents, and senators profess to make treaties, are as much myths as our own. On general principles of law and reason, there are no such 'nations.' ... Our pretended treaties, then, being made with no legitimate or bona fide nations, or representatives of nations, and being made, on our part, by persons who have no legitimate authority to act for us, have intrinsically no more validity than a pretended treaty made by the Man in the Moon with the king of the Pleiades.

Lysander Spooner

Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by biological patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic scientist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language." Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived.

Robert M. Pirsig

A Quote by Max Horkheimer

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