Rationality Quotes

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Quotes About Rationality

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Over the past decades, students who have blindly followed their passion, without rational analysis of whether their choice of career truly was wise, have been more unhappy with their job choices than those who coupled passion with rationality. ~ Barbara Oakley
Rationality quotes by Barbara Oakley
Your moral values & ability to rationalize; not your religious beliefs or political affiliations define what you should stand for in society. ~ Mamur Mustapha
Rationality quotes by Mamur Mustapha
It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say 'if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,' we might believe them; but were they to cry 'if I pronounce this spell over your beer it will go flat,' we should remain incredulous and Paracelsus, the Alchemists, Aleister Crowley and all the Magi have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific. ~ Cyril Connolly
Rationality quotes by Cyril Connolly
The problem with today's world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it.
The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense! ~ Brian Cox
Rationality quotes by Brian Cox
You have to disentangle the details. You have to hold up every one independently, and ask, "How do we know *this* detail?" Someone sketches out a picture of humanity's descent into nanotechnological warfare, where China refuses to abide by an international control agreement, followed by an arms race ... Wait a minute - how do you know it will be China? Is that a crystal ball in your pocket or are you just happy to be a futurist? Where are all these details coming from?
Where did *that specific* detail come from? ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky
Rationality quotes by Eliezer Yudkowsky
But I guess the thing about fear is that it defies the laws of rationality. It creates its own laws instead. ~ David Levithan
Rationality quotes by David Levithan
So few of us really think. What we do is rearrange our prejudges. ~ George Vincent
Rationality quotes by George Vincent
It is crucial that a healthy scepticism be applied when interpreting potentially miraculous events, lest the integrity and rationality of the religious perspective be brought into question. The only thing that will kill the possibility of miracles more quickly than a committed materialism is the claiming of miracle status for everyday events for which natural explanations are readily at hand.4 ~ John C. Lennox
Rationality quotes by John C. Lennox
Assume the world offers safety and rationality when of course it does not. ~ Anthony Doerr
Rationality quotes by Anthony Doerr
The willingness to change one's mind in the light of new evidence is a sign of rationality not weakness. ~ Stuart Sutherland
Rationality quotes by Stuart Sutherland
We may convince ourselves that something is true, but that doesn't make it true. ~ Petros Scientia
Rationality quotes by Petros Scientia
Business is essentially applied rationality:
a systematic process of thinking that produces a real-world result. Instead of mortgaging your life to go to business school, it's possible to dramatically increase your knowledge of business on your own time and with little cost - without setting foot inside a classroom. ~ Josh Kaufman
Rationality quotes by Josh Kaufman
The type of journalism that relies on the reporter's notion of what does or doesn't "seem" correct or controversial is self-indulgent and irresponsible. It gives credence to the belief that we can intuit our way through all the various decisions we need to make in our lives and it validates the notion that our feelings are a more reliable barometer of reality than the facts. ~ Seth Mnookin
Rationality quotes by Seth Mnookin
The only kind of appeal that wins any instinctive response in party politics is an appeal to hostile feeling; the men who perceive the need of cooperation are powerless. Until education has been directed for a generation into new channels, and the Press has abandoned incitements to hatred, only harmful policies have any chance of being adopted in practice by our present political methods. But there is no obvious means of altering education and the Press until our political system is altered. From this dilemma there is no issue by means of ordinary action, at any rate for a long time to come. The best that can be hoped, it seems to me, is that we should, as many of us as possible, become political skeptics, rigidly abstaining from belief in the various attractive party programmes that are put before us from time to time. ~ Bertrand Russell
Rationality quotes by Bertrand Russell
I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science. ~ Wernher Von Braun
Rationality quotes by Wernher Von Braun
It will happen instantly, by the way, when you see the years on her and reach for her hand anyway, in a kinetic moment that preludes and rationality whatsoever. You will be afraid of how she interprets this, and you will worry, and the two of you will talk through it, and there will be more moments that defy rationality, more moments than you can imagine, moments that build an entire castle upon an entire world that precludes the very act of thinking. ~ Trevor Dodge
Rationality quotes by Trevor Dodge
Most people never cease to exercise their right to disbelieve something that is obvious, or to believe something that is ridiculous. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Rationality quotes by Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Memories can be vile. Repulsive little brutes, like children I suppose. But can we live without them? Memories are what our reason is based upon. If we can't face them, we deny reason itself! Although, why not? We aren't contractually tied down to rationality. There is no sanity clause. So when you find yourself locked down in an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember: There's always madness. You can just step outside and close the door, and all those dreadful things that happened, you can lock them away. Madness ... is an emergency exit. ~ Alan Moore
Rationality quotes by Alan Moore
Logic stays true, wherever you may go,
So logic never tells you where you live. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky
Rationality quotes by Eliezer Yudkowsky
I thought back to the counselling sessions, how we'd talked about thinking things through rationally, recognizing unhelpful patterns of behaviour and being brave enough to try doing things differently. ~ Gail Honeyman
Rationality quotes by Gail Honeyman
One of my colleagues in Duke, Ralph Keeney, noted that America's top killer isn't cancer or heart disease, nor is it smoking or obesity. It's our inability to make smart choices and overcome our own self-destructive behaviours. Ralph estimates that about half of us will make a lifestyle decision that will ultimately lead us to an early grave. And as if this were not bad enough, it seems that the rate at which we make these deadly decisions is increasing at an alarming pace.

I suspect that over the next few decades, real improvements in life expectancy and quality are less likely to be driven by medical technology than by improved decision making. Since focusing on long-term benefits is not our natural tendency, we need to more carefully examine the cases in which we repeatedly fail, and try to come up with some remedies for these situations. For an overweight movie loved, the key might be to enjoy watching a film while walking on the treadmill. The trick is to find the right behavioural antidote for each problem. By pairing something that we love with something that we dislike but that is good for us, we might be able to harness desire with outcome - and thus overcome some of the problems with self-control we face every day. ~ Dan Ariely
Rationality quotes by Dan Ariely
Men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality. ~ Ayn Rand
Rationality quotes by Ayn Rand
Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery
Rationality quotes by Antoine De Saint Exupery
There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling - absolutely essential to mental health and happiness. ~ Dan Barker
Rationality quotes by Dan Barker
It is not rational to assume, without evidence, that rationality can disclose everything about the world, just because it can disclose some things. Our intuition in favour of rationality, where we are inclined to use it, is just that - an intuition. Reason is founded in intuition and ends in intuition, like a pair of massive bookends. ~ Iain McGilchrist
Rationality quotes by Iain McGilchrist
It considered trying to explain their error to them, but what would be the use? They would only go away with hurt feelings. You can't always expect people, or squirrels, to be rational. ~ Thomas M. Disch
Rationality quotes by Thomas M. Disch
Critical discussions of Western colonialism and imperialism and of what the term postcolonialism could mean, require, and enable first became acceptable in literature and cultural studies departments in the United States some three decades ago. Yet it has been much harder to create such discussions of sciences and technologies. Especially resistant are those departments where the West's scientific rationality and technical expertise have long been lovingly explained and "served up" for use in corporate and nationalist policies: sociology, philosophy, economics, and international relations, as well as the natural sciences themselves. ~ Sandra G. Harding
Rationality quotes by Sandra G. Harding
The inversion of external compulsion into the compulsion of conscience ... produces the machine-like assiduity and pliable allegiance required by the new rationality. ~ Max Horkheimer
Rationality quotes by Max Horkheimer
Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process. ~ Brian Eno
Rationality quotes by Brian Eno
Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political, and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility - for incompetence or worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. ~ Carl Sagan
Rationality quotes by Carl Sagan
None of us want to see portents and omens, no matter how much we like our ghost stories and the spooky films. None of us want to really see a Star in the East or a pillar of fire by night. We want peace and rationality and routine. If we have to see God in the black face of an old woman, it's bound to remind us that there's a devil for every god - and our devil may be closer than we like to think. ~ Stephen King
Rationality quotes by Stephen King
One could be forgiven for supposing that rationality (or, more softly, 'reasonableness') is irrelevant – and even possibly opposed – to being a good lover. This is perhaps because we tend to think of love as a feeling, rather than as an achievement of intelligence. A reasonable or rational person is not one who is only interested in logic, or someone who tries in a cold, robotic fashion to substitute calculation and analysis for kindness or yearning. We are reasonable when we are moved by accurate explanation. Thus a reasonable person is slow to anger; they do not jump to conclusions ~ Alain De Botton
Rationality quotes by Alain De Botton
Hell, rationality itself - the exalted Human ability to reason - hadn't evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will. ~ Peter Watts
Rationality quotes by Peter Watts
If I had to bring the whole conspiracy in all its forms into one area, it would be to manipulate people into left-brain reality. That's the key. Once they are in left-brain reality-it's the area that decodes everything as apart, everything in terms of individuals, structure and language, rationality as we call it. Then you are parking them in the droplet. The left brain is great if it's used to translate higher awareness into a form that we can work with here. ~ David Icke
Rationality quotes by David Icke
Superstition and sensation are always so much more appealing than truth and rationality. The ~ Diana Gabaldon
Rationality quotes by Diana Gabaldon
A Christian telling an atheist they're going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they're not getting any presents from Santa. ~ Ricky Gervais
Rationality quotes by Ricky Gervais
Be rational' is what they tell you when you are having a sane reaction to an insane situation, and the rationale behind their conception of reason is FUCKED. Be rational. What it really means is assume your position in the status quo. Assume the position. ~ Tricia Sullivan
Rationality quotes by Tricia Sullivan
What is remarkable in Burke's first performance," wrote his great nineteenth-century biographer John Morley, "is his discernment of the important fact that behind the intellectual disturbances in the sphere of philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of theology, there silently stalked a force that might shake the whole fabric of civil society itself."4 A caustic and simplistic skepticism of all traditional institutions, supposedly grounded in a scientific rationality that took nothing for granted but in fact willfully ignored the true complexity of social life, seemed to Burke poorly suited for the study of society, and even dangerous when applied to it. Burke would warn of, and contend with, this force for the rest of his life. ~ Yuval Levin
Rationality quotes by Yuval Levin
To deal with future we have to deal with possibilities. Analysis will only tell us what is. ~ Edward De Bono
Rationality quotes by Edward De Bono
He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): "Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart." Mr. Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: "No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers
Rationality quotes by Dorothy L. Sayers
The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat. ~ Robert M. Pirsig
Rationality quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
We have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age. ~ Bertrand Russell
Rationality quotes by Bertrand Russell
A man goes to a foreign country and kills somebody who's not aggressing against him; in a Hawaiian shirt he's a criminal, in a green costume he's a hero who gets a parade and a pension. So that, as a culture, we remain in a state of moral insanity. To point out these contradictions to people in society is to be labeled insane. This is how insane society remains, that anybody who points out logical opposites in the most essential human topic of ethics, is considered to be insane. ~ Stefan Molyneux
Rationality quotes by Stefan Molyneux
*Only if you reject all the other paths can you discover your own path. ~ U.G. Krishnamurti
Rationality quotes by U.G. Krishnamurti
But it was important to be rational at all times, not just when calm. ~ Brandon Sanderson
Rationality quotes by Brandon Sanderson
It is a wonderful thing to see a first-rate philosopher at prayer. Tough-minded thinking and tenderhearted reverence are friends, not enemies. We have for too long separated the head from the heart, and we are the lesser for it. We love God with the mind and we love God with the heart. In reality, we are descending with the mind into the heart and there standing before God in ceaseless wonder and endless praise. As the mind and the heart work in concert, a kind of loving rationality pervades all we say and do. This brings unity to us and glory to God. ~ Soren Kierkegaard
Rationality quotes by Soren Kierkegaard
If you are engaging rationality, you are already engaging a place that makes you unavailable. Only when I recognize that inspiration has announced itself to my availability will I then say I need to use my mind to calculate exposure, my emotions to position myself and arrange a configuration of shapes that need to come into being, my body to put it all in place because we have been given a message and it has come through inspiration through being available.' ~ Paul Caponigro
Rationality quotes by Paul Caponigro
In the past, when people criticized me for asking unexpected questions, I felt ashamed. Now I realize that normal people are acting in a superficial and often false manner. So rather than let them make me feel bad, I express my annoyance. It's my way of trying to strike a blow for logic and rationality. ~ John Elder Robison
Rationality quotes by John Elder Robison
The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers. ~ Zygmunt Bauman
Rationality quotes by Zygmunt Bauman
What's emerging from the pattern of my own life is the for belief that the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can't be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem. The only ones who're solving it are solving it at a personal level by abandoning 'square' rationality altogether and going by feelings alone. Like John and Sylvia here. And millions of others like them. And that seems like a wrong direction too. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the solution to the problem isn't that you abandon rationality but that you expand the nature of rationality so that it's capable of coming up with a solution. ~ Robert M. Pirsig
Rationality quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
It is important to reclaim for humanity the ground that has been taken from it by various arbitrarily narrow formulations of the demands of rationality
~ Amartya Sen
Rationality quotes by Amartya Sen
To leave a man's ego bigger, retweet him. To leave his faculty of reasoning better, challenge his tweet. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Rationality quotes by Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me. ~ Joan Didion
Rationality quotes by Joan Didion
In love, there is no criticism. In love, there is no rationality ~ Antonia Michaelis
Rationality quotes by Antonia Michaelis
Rationality is not one of this industry's attributes. ~ Scott Hamilton
Rationality quotes by Scott Hamilton
Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: 'Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It's not that I terribly sympathize with them or anything - it's just that the Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.' At the time I thought this a rather naïve statement, even perhaps a slightly contemptible one, but by then I had been in parts of the Middle East where it could come as a blessed relief to meet a consecrated Moscow-line atheist-dogmatist, if only for the comparatively rational humanism that he evinced amid so much religious barking and mania. It was only later to occur to me that Edward's pronounced dislike of George Orwell was something to which I ought to have paid more attention. ~ Christopher Hitchens
Rationality quotes by Christopher Hitchens
The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to It. ~ Herbert Marcuse
Rationality quotes by Herbert Marcuse
Rationality was returning to deal with the mess that emotions had created. ~ Graeme Simsion
Rationality quotes by Graeme Simsion
Our understanding of what the mind is matters deeply. Our most basic philosophical beliefs are tied inextricably to our view of reason. Reason has been taken for over two millennia as the defining characteristic of human beings. Reason includes not only our capacity for logical inference, but also our ability to conduct inquiry, to solve problems, to evaluate, to criticize, to deliberate about how we should act, and to reach an understanding of ourselves, other people, and the world. A radical change in our understanding of reason is therefore a radical change in our understanding of ourselves. It is surprising to discover, on the basis of empirical research, that human rationality is not at all what the Western philosophical tradition has held it to be. But it is shocking to discover that we are very different from what our philosophical tradition has told us we are. ~ George Lakoff
Rationality quotes by George Lakoff
In a state which is really articulated rationally all the laws and organizations are nothing but a realization of freedom in its essential characteristics. When this is the case, the individual's reason finds in these institutions, only the actuality of his own essence, and if he obeys these laws, he coincides, not with something alien to himself, but simply with what is his own. Freedom of choice, of course, is often equally called 'freedom'; but freedom of choice is only non-rational freedom, choice and self-determination issuing not from the rationality of the will but from fortuitous impulses and their dependence on sense and the external world. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Rationality quotes by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
I've seen people severely messed up by their own knowledge of biases. They have more ammunition with which to argue against anything they don't like. And that problem - too much ready ammunition - is one of the primary ways that people with high mental agility end up stupid, in Stanovich's "dysrationalia" sense of stupidity. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky
Rationality quotes by Eliezer Yudkowsky
A mother is an individual who'd go to any length for someone else, beyond rationality, beyond her physical body, her social bindings of state, country, her kind. That's the most horrifying individual you'll ever meet. ~ E.J. Koh
Rationality quotes by E.J. Koh
The cultural forces that help politically sustain both the militaristic and the corporate function of the Deep State, however, are growing more irrational and antiscience. A military tradition that glories in force and appeals to self-sacrifice is the polar opposite of the Enlightenment heritate of rationality, the search for peace, and a belief in the common destiny of mankind. The warrior-leader, like the witch doctor, ultimately appeals to irrational emotionalism; and the cultural psychology that produces the bravest and most loyal warriors is a mind-set that is usually hostile to the sort of free inquiry of which scientific progress depends. This dynamic is observable in Afghanistan: no outside power has been able to conquer and pacify that society for millennia because of the tenacity of its warrior spirit; yet the country has one of the highest illiteracy rates on earth and is barely out of the Bronze Age in social development. p 260 ~ Mike Lofgren
Rationality quotes by Mike Lofgren
It's fashionable among progressives to wonder why so many "red state" voters don't vote in their own economic interests. This is simply another symptom of 18th-century rationalism, which assumes that everyone is rational and rationality means seeking self-interest. [...] People are not 18th-century reason machines. Real reason works differently. Reason matters, and we have to understand how it really works. ~ George Lakoff
Rationality quotes by George Lakoff
I'm not a masochist. I don't want to be hurt. Or injured. Just... pushed. I want that sort of... effacement, I guess... where my rationality is dissolved by sensation, emotion, adrenaline, all that. Like when you bike or run, and you think you've hit the wall and have to stop because your lungs don't seem to be able to suck in enough air, your heart is pounding so hard it hurts, and your legs feel soft, like you're just going to fall down. But you keep going, and after a while, it's almost like floating. Like you're apart from your body, but at the same time you feel, hear, see everything with this unfamiliar intensity. Or when you eat too much chili pepper or wasabe, and you feel your body respond, it's not a thought process. Your veins throb, you sweat, there's a weird euphoria. And there's pain, too. You can't stop it. You just have to wait for it to pass, and while you do, you, your reality is subsumed in the... transcendence of the pain.

Krylov, Varian (2008-05-19). Abduction (Kindle Locations 9214-9221). eXcessica. Kindle Edition. ~ Krylov Varian 20080519 . Abduction
Rationality quotes by Krylov Varian 20080519 . Abduction
Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are ... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition. ~ Paul Feyerabend
Rationality quotes by Paul Feyerabend
One of chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring rationalists is "Don't try to be clever." And, "Listen to those quiet, nagging doubts." If you don't know, you don't know what you don't know, you don't know how much you don't know, and you don't know how much you needed to know. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky
Rationality quotes by Eliezer Yudkowsky
If you're anything like me, you don't make up your mind about important issues by doing original research, pounding over primary sources and coming to your own conclusions; you listen to people who claim to know what they're talking about - "experts" - and try to determine which of them is more credible. You do your best to gauge who's authentically well-informed and unbiased, who has an agenda and what it is - who's a corporate flack, a partisan hack, or a wacko. I believe that global warming is real and anthropogenic not because I've personally studied Antarctic ice core samples or run my own computer climate models, but because all the people who support the theory are climatologists with no evident investment in the issue, and all the people who dismiss it as alarmist claptrap are shills of the petro-chemical industry or just seem to like debunking things, from the Holocaust to the moon landing. We put our trust - our votes, our money, sometimes our lives - in someone else's authority. In other words, most of us decide not what to believe but whom to believe. And I say believe because for most people, such decisions are matters of faith rather than reason. ~ Tim Kreider
Rationality quotes by Tim Kreider
Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teachers that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question. ~ Stephen King
Rationality quotes by Stephen King
P.C. Hodgell said - That which can be destroyed by the truth should be. Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say - If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky
Rationality quotes by Eliezer Yudkowsky
And Habermas: mutual understanding in unrestrained communicative action unfolded by rationality is the omega point of individual and social evolution itself. ~ Ken Wilber
Rationality quotes by Ken Wilber
... there is an inherent rationality to life that makes it intelligible at a much deeper level than functional utility ... ~ Brian Goodwin
Rationality quotes by Brian Goodwin
Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans - language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce. ~ Paul Bloom
Rationality quotes by Paul Bloom
I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research. ~ Richard Dawkins
Rationality quotes by Richard Dawkins
Anger may bring extra energy, but it eclipses the best part of our brain: its rationality. The energy of anger is almost always unreliable. ~ Dalai Lama
Rationality quotes by Dalai Lama
Attaching "produced at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT" to a ridiculous argument immediately makes it cogent to many. That's part of life, but let's not pretend that it's rationality. ~ Douglas Wilson
Rationality quotes by Douglas Wilson
The passion for revenge should never blind you to the pragmatics of the situation. There are some people who are so blighted by their past, so warped by experience and the pull of that silken cord, that they never free themselves of the shadows that live in the time machine ...
And if there is a kind thought due them, it may be found contained in the words of the late Gerald Kersh, who wrote: ... there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment. ~ Harlan Ellison
Rationality quotes by Harlan Ellison
There is nothing truthful, wise, humane, or strategic about confusing hostility to injustice and oppression, which is leftist, with hostility to science and rationality, which is nonsense. ~ Michael Albert
Rationality quotes by Michael Albert
Aristotle drew a distinction between essential and accidental properties. The way he put it is that essential properties are those without which a thing wouldn't be what it is, and accidental properties are those that determine how a thing is, but not what it is. For example, Aristotle thought that rationality was essential to being a human being and, since Socrates was a human being, Socrates's rationality was essential to his being Socrates. Without the property of rationality, Socrates simply wouldn't be Socrates. He wouldn't even be a human being, so how could he be Socrates? On the other hand, Aristotle thought that Socrates's property of being snub-nosed was merely accidental; snub-nosed was part of how Socrates was, but it wasn't essential to what or who he was. To put it another way, take away Socrates's rationality, and he's no longer Socrates, but give him plastic surgery, and he's Socrates with a nose job. ~ Thomas Cathcart
Rationality quotes by Thomas Cathcart
Rationality plays a crucial role in decision making, but without the moral compass of emotions and the steady guide of empathy we would just be cold psychopaths. ~ Nikolaos Dimitriadis
Rationality quotes by Nikolaos Dimitriadis
The ontological concept of truth is in the centre of a logic which may serve as a model of pre- technological rationality. It is the rationality of a two-dimensional universe of discourse which, contrasts with the of thought and behavior that develop in the execution of the technological project. ~ Herbert Marcuse
Rationality quotes by Herbert Marcuse
There is no rationality in the Nazi hatred: it is hate that is not in us, it is outside of man.. We cannot understand it, but we must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again. Consciences can be seduced and obscured again - even our consciences. For this reason, it is everyone duty to reflect on what happened. Everybody must know, or remember, that when Hitler and Mussolini spoke in public, they were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. They were "charismatic leaders" ; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the soundness of things they said but from the suggestive way in which they said them, from their eloquence, from their histrionic art, perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently learned and practised. The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general, aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannas and followed to the death by millions of the faithful. ~ Primo Levi
Rationality quotes by Primo Levi
Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice - and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man - by choice; he has to hold his life as a value - by choice; he has to learn to sustain it - by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues - by choice.
A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality. ~ Ayn Rand
Rationality quotes by Ayn Rand
Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny - and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do). ~ Stephen Jay Gould
Rationality quotes by Stephen Jay Gould
To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions. ~ Robert M. Pirsig
Rationality quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
Eye-rolling is not exactly the pinnacle of socratic investigation. ~ Stefan Molyneux
Rationality quotes by Stefan Molyneux
I am beyond logic and rationality. ~ Imelda Marcos
Rationality quotes by Imelda Marcos
The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'. ~ Richard Dawkins
Rationality quotes by Richard Dawkins
When we talk about values, I think of rationality in solving problems. That's something I value. [Values are things like] Fairness, kindness, generosity, tolerance. When they [Conservative right wing Republicans] talk about values, they're talking about things like going to church, voting for Bush, being loyal to Jesus, praying. These are not values. ~ Bill Maher
Rationality quotes by Bill Maher
The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr
Rationality quotes by Reinhold Niebuhr
One of the most pressing questions faced by capitalist societies now, at the pinnacle of their productive capacities, is the question of what should be done with the time being saved by these gains in productivity. What meaning and content will we, as a society, choose to give this new-found free-time?
Will we use it to enhance our lives outside work, nourish our relationships and pursue our own self-development, or will economic rationality dictate that we spend just as much time and energy on work as we did before? [ch.one] ~ David Frayne
Rationality quotes by David Frayne
Writing my own novels in the '90s ... I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor. ~ Mary Doria Russell
Rationality quotes by Mary Doria Russell
A man's "interests" depend on the kind of goals he chooses to pursue, his choice of goals depends on his desires, his desires depend on his values - and, for a rational man, his values depend on the judgment of his mind. ~ Ayn Rand
Rationality quotes by Ayn Rand
Inference is essentially rationality or logic, that which our current formal education system teaches and valorizes; however, direct perception is a level/avenue of knowledge above inference and accessible only through specialized forms of training or unique and rare forms of spontaneous awakening (for example, the "satori" of Zen). Similarly, the ~ Layli Phillips Maparyan
Rationality quotes by Layli Phillips Maparyan
If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves ... There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. - ROBERT PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ~ Donella H. Meadows
Rationality quotes by Donella H. Meadows
No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality. ~ Alfred North Whitehead
Rationality quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
Newtonian physics runs into problems at the subatomic level. Down there--in the land of hadrons, quarks, and Schrödinger's cat--things gent freaky. The cool rationality of Isaac Newton gives way to the bizarre unpredictability of Lewis Carroll. ~ Daniel H. Pink
Rationality quotes by Daniel H. Pink
There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky.
But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US! ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky
Rationality quotes by Eliezer Yudkowsky
"We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it instead into an assertion of rationality. The scientific mind of Franklin drew on the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of David Hume and Gottfried Leibniz. In what became known as "Hume's Fork" the latters' theory distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact, and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition. ~ Benjamin Franklin
Rationality quotes by Benjamin Franklin
Rationality is not just something you do so that you can make more money, it is a binding principle. Rationality is a really good idea. You must avoid the nonsense that is conventional in one's own time. It requires developing systems of thought that improve your batting average over time. ~ Charlie Munger
Rationality quotes by Charlie Munger
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