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"We've got a horrible, bloated, confused, overlapping, wasteful mess; that's our government—mine and your government. Hundreds of agencies, bureaus, boards, commissions sharing the same responsibilities, wasting our money, putting out directives and guidelines, red tape, paperwork. There's no way to go to Washington and get an easy answer to an easy question. When I was Governor of Georgia, I tried to set up a drug treatment program in one department. I had to go to thirteen federal agencies to get answers about drug treatment. And they weren't trying to co-operate with one another. If I'm elected President of this country, and I intend to be, next January we're going to have a complete reorganization of the Executive Branch of government. And make it efficient, economical, purposeful, simple, and manageable for a change. The American people are competent. I see no reason why our government shouldn't be competent. The American people are fair. I see no reason why our government shouldn't be fair. The American people tell the truth. I see no reason why our government should conceal the truth or lie." Jimmy Carter   "Milk allows metabolically greedy mammalian babies to be born small and underdeveloped and to survive their vulnerable infancy by receiving all of their nourishment from their mother while staying warm and expending almost no effort—not even chewing. It allows mammalian babies to thrive in nearly any ecological niche, since they need neither to compete with adults for food nor to find an alternative—and likely inferior—food source. This makes milk a likely reason that so many mammals survived the aftermath of the cataclysmic asteroid strike that killed off the dinosaurs. Milk also allows mammals to sustain unusual and beneficial growth patterns, like disproportionately rapid growth of the head and brain soon after birth. And finally, milk ultimately transformed the social life of the mammals who consume and produce it as well. Consuming milk is no mere luxury for mammalian babies but a necessity, so milk is the reason that mammalian babies remain dependent on and attached to their mothers for weeks or months or years—and the reason that their mothers remain attached to their offspring as well." Abigail Marsh   "A minimum-test of the intrinsic merit of anything written is this, that some non-historical reason can be given why it should be read: a reason, I mean, absolutely independent of the fact that other people have read it. Hume's Dialogues, for example, easily pass this test; so does Lucian; so does Montaigne; so do the pre-Socratic philosophers. But who can supply a reason, of this kind, why anyone should read Kant, or Green, or Bradley?" David Stove   "Only rarely do statutes offer reasons to justify their prescriptions, and then usually out of concern about potential interpretive problems in difficult cases. Typically, drafters of statutes, like sergeants and parents, simply do not see the need to give reasons, and often see a strong need not to: The act of giving a reason is the antithesis of authority. When the voice of authority fails, the voice of reason emerges. Or vice versa. But whatever the hierarchy between reason and authority, reasons are what we typically give to support what we conclude precisely when the mere fact that we have concluded is not enough. And reasons are what we typically avoid when the assertion of authority is thought independently important." Frederick Schauer   "The bitter Babylonian disputes about portents, the bloody and passionate Albigensian and Anabaptist heresies, all seem erroneous to us today. At the time, man was completely involved in them, and by expressing them at the risk of his life he made truth exist through them, because truth never reveals itself directly but appears only through errors. In the dispute over universal, or over the Immaculate Conception or transubstantiation, the fate of human reason was at stake. And the fate of reason was also at stake during those big suits certain American states brought against the professors who taught evolution. In each time it is wholly at stake in relation to doctrines which the following time will reject as false. It is possible that evolutionary thinking will someday seem to be our century's greatest insanity; yet in bearing witness to its truth in opposition to the churches, the American professors lived the truth and lived it passionately and absolutely, at their own risk. Tomorrow they will be wrong; today they are absolutely right: the time is always wrong when it is dead, and always right while it is living. People may condemn it later all they want to, but it has already had its own passionate way of loving itself and tearing itself to pieces, against which future judgments are powerless. It has had its taste which it alone has tasted, and which is just as incomparable, just as irremediable, as the taste of wine in our mouth. A book has its absolute truth in its own time. It is lived through like a riot or a famine." Jean-Paul Sartre   "When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?" John Milton   "'Everyone has the right,' Pound often said, 'to have his ideas examined one at a time.' In a similar way, a man afraid of being told he has cancer might ask for his symptoms to be examined one at a time. But while the symptoms taken one by one might not mean much as a syndrome they could mean cancer. And while Pound's ideas taken one by one might not mean much, as an ideology they could mean murder. Pound was gaoled at about the same time Majdanek was liberated. There is no reason to believe that Pound ever knew anything about what had been going on. There is no reason to believe that Pound had any political imagination whatsoever. He thought Mussolini's speeches were pure Brancusi, when even the most solidly fascist Italian intellectuals knew them to be tenth-rate rhetoric; he believed in a Wall Street-Kremlin counter-axis; he recommended The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a source book. To say he lacked imagination is not, of course, to say he lacked enthusiasm. Unfortunately enthusiasm is not intellect." Clive James   "In their pre-Covid planning strategies for a pandemic, neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the World Health Organization had recommended masking the public—for good reason. Randomized clinical trials involving flu viruses had shown, contrary to popular wisdom in Japan and other Asian countries, that there was 'no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing transmission,' as the WHO summarized the scientific literature. The pandemic planners at the United Kingdom's Department of Health had reached a similar conclusion: 'In line with the scientific evidence, the Government will not stockpile facemasks for general use in the community.' Anthony Fauci acknowledged this evidence early in the pandemic, both in his public comments ('There's no reason to be walking around with masks,' he told 60 Minutes) and in his private emails ('I do not recommend you wear a mask,' he told a colleague, explaining that masks were too porous to block the small Covid virus)." John Tierney   "Obviously you can call a man—it's the twenty-first century! Men and women are sexual equals! It's just that you don't want him to think you're desperate. Be strategic. Remember, men like the thrill of the chase, and if you're chasing him, what reason is there for him to chase you? You have to play hard to get (but not too hard). Don't be needy (but not too independent). Try being more of a bitch (men love it, really). Let him see who you really are—except for the part about reading advice books on how to nab a man while not appearing desperate. If he doesn't call, he doesn't deserve you! But if he does, invent somewhere exciting that you're rushing off to—after all, you have a life too, a great life! In fact, why aren't you rushing off someplace exciting? Maybe you aren't putting yourself out there enough, which is why you're at home waiting for this ambivalent loser to call you and reading advice books. By the way, is he actually into you, or is that wishful thinking? Wasn't that what happened the last time, when you got all goopy over Mr I Need My Independence, who basically treated you like Booty-Call Betty? Not having had a date in a year and a half is no reason to act like a doormat; remember, you're hot!" Laura Kipnis   "To put it schematically, the claim 'Everything is subjective' must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can't be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can't be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false. There may be some subjectivists, perhaps styling themselves as pragmatists, who present subjectivism as applying even to itself. But then it does not call for a reply, since it is just a report of what the subjectivist finds it agreeable to say. If he also invites us to join him, we need not offer any reason for declining, since he has offered us no reason to accept." Thomas Nagel   "No tutor would accept from a pupil the reasons given by Plato for the following quite important doctrines: that the Soul is tri-partite; that if the Soul is tri-partite, the ideal society would be a three-class state; that whatever exists, exists to perform one and only one function; that reason is one such function; that one and only one of the classes should be taught to reason; that membership of a class should normally be determined by pedigree; that empirical science can never be 'real' science; that there are Forms; that only knowledge of Forms is 'real science'; that only those who have this knowledge can have good political judgement; that political institutions must degenerate unless there are rulers who have had the sort of education that Plato describes; that 'justice' consists in doing one's own job; and so on." Gilbert Ryle   "There is no reason to think that there is one community which will serve as ideal for all people and much reason to think that there is not." Robert Nozick   "Nature is obstinate, and will not quit the field, however strongly attacked by reason; and at the same time reason is so clear in the point that there is no possibility of disguising her." David Hume   "'The natural man,' he wrote, 'who lives a truly human life and for whom the opinion of others means nothing, follows solely his inclinations and his reason, without regard for public approval or blame.' Natural man is what he seems, he is at one with himself, whereas social man is divided within himself. This inner break is the cause of his misery, and all the differences between the social man and the natural man in the end reduce themselves to this existential difference. In Rousseau's words, 'The savage lives within himself whereas sociable man, forever outside himself, only knows how to live in the opinion of others, from whose judgment concerning him he receives the sense of his own identity.' As our being is reduced to appearance, we are driven to ask others what we are, never daring to ask ourselves. 'We have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful exterior, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.'" Hans Barth   "Few artists would deliberately choose the 'aristocratic values' and say with Froissart that 'to rob and pill' is the good life; nor would they relish being serfs. When the contemporary abolitionist gives as a reason for destroying the bourgeois world its 'materialism,' hypocrisy, lack of justice and oppressive arrangements, he is in fact giving reason for destroying every civilized society that has ever existed. The notion that materialism is a characteristic of our time alone is fantasy. The Greeks, that supposed people of artists, were traders and imperialists, who built the Acropolis for ostentation and with money stolen from their allies." Jacques Barzun   "Heidegger's champions have long claimed that his anti-Semitism is a later and somewhat equivocal development, a regrettable lapse that the Master himself quickly corrected, with no intrinsic or essential connection to the majesty of his thought. Now that these anti-Semitic transgressions have been acknowledged, we are repeatedly told, we can safely go back to imbibing his portentous pronouncements concerning the ill effects of technology and the forlorn condition of modern man. But the critical point to keep in mind is that Heidegger's radical critique of reason, of subjectivity, of modern technology, and of Western civilization's downfall are all part of a world view—whose individual components are historically and thematically inseparable—that rejected reason, democracy, and individualism." Richard Wolin   "It offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life. In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one's own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority. The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth." Vaclav Havel   "Van Leenhof, holding that reason, and not hereditary principle or tradition, must be the exclusive basis of political legitimacy, maintains that 'everything is good insofar as it accords therewith and can rightly be considered divine, everything else being slavery under the appearance of government.' 'Knowledge of matters' he considers the only light by which we can proceed in debate about politics and the exclusive aid to adjusting our lives to the 'nature of God's order and guidance,' a typical Spinozist usage, later Morelly's l'ordre de la nature, denoting the fixed and rational structure of reality and Man's place in it. Conversely, ignorance and lack of knowledge is in politics, as in everything else, in van Leenhof's opinion, 'the root of all evil.' Reason and 'wisdom,' he adds, again employing the populist Spinozist phraseology he had coined, as well as being the key to assessing everything in politics is the path 'whereby we share in God's nature, the highest human good and happiness.'" Jonathan Israel   "The reason given for usury laws is that they protect the poor from the extortions of the rich. But this reason is a false one—for there is no more extortion in loaning capital to the best bidder than in selling a horse or renting a house to the best bidder. The true and fair price of capital, as of everything else, is that price which it will bring in fair and open market. And those who falsely pretend to be interested to prevent the rich extorting money from the poor, in the shape of interest on capital, are the very men who want nothing but an opportunity for themselves both to extort capital from the rich, and labor from the poor, that they may thus fill their own pockets at the expense of other men's rights." Lysander Spooner   "Even when the order of society seems to require that we should oppose them, we can hardly bring ourselves to do it. That kings are the servants of the people, to be obeyed, resisted, deposed, or punished, as the public conveniency may require, is the doctrine of reason and philosophy; but it is not the doctrine of Nature. Nature would teach us to submit to them for their own sake, to tremble and bow down before their exalted station, to regard their smile as a reward sufficient to compensate any services, and to dread their displeasure, though no other evil were to follow from it, as the severest of all mortifications. To treat them in any respect as men, to reason and dispute with them upon ordinary occasions, requires such resolution, that there are few men whose magnanimity can support them in it, unless they are likewise assisted by familiarity and acquaintance." Adam Smith