"The general character and disposition of the Rationalist are, I think, not difficult to identify. At bottom he stands (he always stands) for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of 'reason'. His circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious: he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic: sceptical, because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his 'reason'; optimistic, because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his 'reason' (when properly applied) to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Historians from EnglandPhilosophers from EnglandNon-fiction authors from EnglandPeople from LondonCritics from England
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Oakeshott
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Michael Oakeshott
Michael Joseph Oakeshott (11 December 1901 – 19 December 1990) was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote on the philosophies of history, religion, aesthetics, education, and law.
22 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Michael Oakeshott →
Related Quotes
"Experience to be experience must be reality; truth to be true must be true of reality. Experience, truth and reality …"
"By one road or another, by conviction, by its supposed inevitability, by its alleged success, or even quite unreflect…"
"By a pardonable abridgment of history, the Rationalist character may be seen springing from the exaggeration of Bacon…"
"Rationalist politics, I have said, are the politics of the felt need, the felt need not qualified by a genuine, concr…"
"Rationalism in politics, as I have interpreted it, involves an identifiable error, a misconception with regard to the…"
"The predicament of our time is that the Rationalists have been at work so long on their project of drawing off the li…"
"To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to myste…"
"Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat."
"In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor …"
"Whatever is satisfactory in experience is true, and it is true because it is satisfactory."