A Quote by Michael Shermer
Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.
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Skepticism's bad rap arises from the impression that, however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a negative removal of false claims. Not so... Proper debunking is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation, not as a nihilistic exercise. The alternate model is rationality itself, tied to moral decency--the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.
The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.
I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how people work. So I think most moral philosophy is disconnected from the species that we happen to be. In fact, they like it that way. Many moral philosophers insist that morality grows out of our rationality, that it applies to any rational being anywhere in the universe, and that it is not based on contingent or coincidental facts about our evolution.
We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This refusal, indeed, is literature's most moral act. At a time when meanings are manifold, disparate, and always changing, the rich possibility of interpretation--the happy resistance of the text to ever be fully known and mastered--is one of the most exhilarating products of human culture.
As a people of faith, we know that prayer is a powerful instrument. And as one Nation under God, we know that many times our most powerful tool is prayer.
Our intellect, our awareness, and our consciousness is the most powerful form of life on this planet.
Moral stimulation is good but moral complacency is the most dangerous habit of mind we can develop, and that danger is serious and ever-present.
While The United States is the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, it is also the most detested nation that the world has ever known.
Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.
This truth: that he, the avatar of light, Supreme Master of the Jedi Order, the fiercest, most impeccable, most devastatingly powerful foe the darkness had ever known... just- didn't- have it.
Imagination is the most marvelous, miraculous, inconceivably powerful force the world has ever known.
The world petroleum story is one of the most inhuman known to man: in it, elementary moral and social principles are jeered at. If powerful oil trusts no longer despoil and humiliate our country it is not because these predators have become human, but because we have won a hard-fought battle which has been going on since the beginning of the century.
But what of the voice and judgment of conscience? The difficulty is that we have a conscience behind our conscience, an intellectual one behind the moral. ... We can see quite well that our opinions of what is noble and good, our moral valuations, are powerful levers where action is concerned; but we must begin by refining these opinions and independently creating for ourselves new tables of values.
The fork is your most powerful tool to change your health and the planet; food is the most powerful medicine to heal chronic illness.
The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.
This is the single most powerful investment we can ever make in life—investment in ourselves, in the only instrument we have with which to deal with life and to contribute.
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