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'Truth', written 'in capital letters', is an orphan in this world, without power and influence... ['Reason'] cannot stand diverging opinions - it calls them 'lies'; it puts itself 'above' the real lives of human beings, demanding, in a way characteristic of all totalitarian ideologies, the right to rebuild the world from the height of 'what it should be', i.e. in accordance with its own 'invincible' precepts. It refuses to recognize the many ideas, actions, feelings, laws, institutions, racial features which separate one nation (culture, civilization) from another... The reason of ordinary people trying to create a better and safer world for themselves and their children (which is reason with a small 'r' and not Reason 'written in capital letters') has very little in common with these ignorant dreams of domination.
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pg 102

 

Paul Karl Feyerabend

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It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depend. Historically this has been achieved by the influence of the various religious creeds and by traditions and superstitions which made men submit to those forces by an appeal to his emotions rather than to his reason. The most dangerous stage in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the powers of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them. This may well prove a hurdle which man will repeatedly reach, only to be thrown back into barbarism … Common acceptance of formal rules is indeed the only alternative to direction by a single will man has yet discovered.

 

Friedrich Hayek

 

Even if there never have been actions arising from such pure sources, what is at issue here is not whether this or that happened; that, instead, reason by itself and independently of all appearances commands what ought to happen; that, accordingly, actions of which the world has perhaps so far given no example, and whose very practicability might be very much doubted by one who bases everything on experience, are still inflexibly commanded by reason ... because ... duty ... lies, prior to all experience, in the idea of a reason determing the will by means of apriori grounds.

 

Immanuel Kant

 

There will be and can be no rest till we admit, what cannot be denied, that there is in man a third faculty, which I call simply the faculty of apprehending the Infinite, not only in religion, but in all things; a power independent of sense and reason, a power in a certain sense contradicted by sense and reason; but yet, I suppose, a very real power, if we see how it has held its own from the beginning of the world — how neither sense nor reason has been able to overcome it, while it alone is able to overcome both reason and sense.

 

Max Muller

 

The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working people submit to a handful of idlers who control their labour and their very lives is always and everywhere the same — whether the oppressors and oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the oppressors are of a different nation. This phenomenon seems particularly strange in India, for there more than two hundred million people, highly gifted both physically and mentally, find themselves in the power of a small group of people quite alien to them in thought, and immeasurably inferior to them in religious morality. ... the reason lies in the lack of a reasonable religious teaching which, by explaining the meaning of life would supply a supreme law for the guidance of conduct, and would replace the more than dubious precepts of pseudo­religion and pseudo­science and the immoral conclusions deduced from them, commonly called "civilization."

 

Leo Tolstoy

 

A real atheist, needless to say, will disregard what the dervishes think it expedient to say about the "New Testament" when they make their pitch to the ignorant. He will read the myths for himself and objectively consider and appraise them as a whole, including the social gospel that is, indeed, the most important and operative part of them. And he will shudder at the Judaic malevolence that inspires them, the vicious hatred of culture and civilization. They were designed to create a foul and squalid world in which every instinctive value of our race is negated and aborted--a world in which the natural ties of family and property have been severed, leaving only rootless and helpless individuals, isolated and lost in the terrible loneliness of crowds--a world without history, without philosophy, without science, without reason--a world without beauty of any kind, without art, without literature, without culture--a world without real love, the love that unites men and women, and without even the Aryan's instinctive feeling for the beauty of women and physical health.

 

Revilo P. Oliver