Man is a rational animal. So at least we have been told. Throughout a long life I have searched diligently for evidence in favor of this statement. So far, I have not had the good fortune to come across it.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

The intelligent man, who exploits available resources for knowledge of the needs and wants of his fellows, will be more inclined to adjust his conduct to their needs than those who are less intelligent.

govern his actions according to the dictates of the law of reason which God had implanted in him.

Man, the rational animal, can put up with anything except what seems to him irrational; whatever is rational is tolerable.

Men are not rational beings, as commonly supposed. A man is a bundle of instincts, feelings, sentiments, which severally seek their gratification, and those which are in power get hold of reason and use it to their own ends, and exclude all other sentiments and feelings from power.

Every man's Reason is sufficient for his guidance, if used.

In the center of an irrational universe governed by an irrational Mind stands rational man.

The general intelligence which is the faculty of arranging concepts “reasonably” and handling words suitably, must therefore aid in the social life just as intelligence in the narrower sense of the word, which is the mathematical function of the mind, presides over the knowledge of matter. It is the first of these we have in mind when we say of a man that he is intelligent. By that we mean that he has the ability and the facility for combining the ordinary concepts and for drawing probable conclusions from them. One can hardly take issue with him on that account, as long as he confines himself to things of every-day life, for which the concepts were made. But one would hardly admit of a man who was merely intelligent undertaking to speak with authority on scientific questions seeing that the intellect, made precise in science, becomes a mathematical, physical and biological attitude of mind, and substitutes for words more appropriate signs. All the more should one forbid him to meddle in philosophy when the questions raised are no longer in the domain of the intelligence alone. But no, it is agreed that the intelligent man is on this point a competent man. Against this I protest most vigorously. I hold the intelligence in high esteem, but I have a very mediocre opinion of the “intelligent man,” whose cleverness consists in talking about all things with a show of truth.

Reason in man is rather like God in the world.

Men's views of things are the result of their understanding alone. Their conduct is regulated by their understanding, their temper, and their passions.

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.

It is fair, therefore, to assume that growing rationality is a guarantee of man's growing morality.