Irrationality quotes:

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The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful. -- John Burnside
Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism. -- Rodney Stark
I don't think you can rely on Iran. I don't think you can rely on other radicals like the Taliban. They dispatched Al Qaida to bomb New York and Washington. What were they thinking? Were they that stupid? They weren't stupid. There is an irrationality there, and there is madness in this method. -- Benjamin Netanyahu
Irrationality is the square root of all evil -- Douglas Hofstadter
An engineer cannot participate in irrationality ... -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I think irrationality is one of the scariest things in the world. -- Marcia Gay Harden
The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution. -- Max Weber
A miracle entails a degree of irrationality-not because it shocks reason, but because it makes no appeal to it. -- Emmanuel Levinas
The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance - if it is not irrational, you make illustration. -- Francis Bacon
Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things. -- Larry Wall
You get more irrationality within the family and in consumer behavior than you get, say, in the behavior of firms in their purchases. -- Ronald Coase
In daily life, reality gives us material incentives to restrain our irrationality. But what incentive do we have to think rationally about politics? -- Bryan Caplan
Interestingly, human irrationality is a hot topic in economics at the moment. Behavioural economics it's called, on the cusp of economics and psychology. -- Evan Davis
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way. -- Aldous Huxley
I love my early movies, but naturalism is an artist's early style. Now I want to deal with feelings, dreams, an acceptance of irrationality. -- Irvin Kershner
It is important to value intellect and discipline, of course, but it is also important to recognize the power of irrationality, enthusiasm and vast energy. -- Kay Redfield Jamison
Priest is a fisherman and Holy Book is a fishook. We either refuse to be a fish or we burn in the frying pan of irrationality! -- Mehmet Murat ildan
To enlighten people by reminding them the irrationality of their beliefs is an act more honest and more important than the act of praising and respecting people's beliefs! -- Mehmet Murat ildan
We're living through an age of irrationality and religious "fervor" I would call it religious idiocy. It's exhausting to year after year be on the receiving end of this demagoguery. -- Dan Savage
What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense. -- Paul Johnson
Violence and irrationality were so long and thoroughly cultivated among the Irish, and so perfectly ingrained into their nature, that modern civilization has as yet been unable to extract the virus. -- Thomas Mellon
There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality. -- Sam Harris
Most specifically, irrationality means that rational systems are unreasonable systems. By that I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them. -- George Ritzer
I have thought sometimes that the sanest people, the people who are just very balanced, very happy, are probably lower achieving than other people. My kind of irrationality happens to be fear or anxiety. -- Jon Ronson
I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things. -- Richard Dawkins
I like to take certain aspects of genre fiction and modify them in my own way. 'Your Republic Is Calling You' follows the form of a spy novel, but it leads readers into a world of Kafkaesque irrationality. -- Kim Young-ha
The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight. -- Paul Bloom
The point is that religion puts a value on irrationality, which makes it the perfect tool for promoting irrational beliefs like misogyny. Other ideologies can be challenged with evidence and reason, but religion is allowed a pass by most people. And that's why it's especially dangerous. -- Amanda Marcotte
Wherever there is a religious regime, over there there is ignorance, misery and absurdity! No religious state can ever elevate its own people! Sooner or later, the primitiveness of the religious administrations and the irrationality of the religious rules will cause a great collapse of those countries! The downfall is inevitable! -- Mehmet Murat ildan
So let's set the record straight. Faith is not the opposite of reason. The opposite of faith is unbelief. And reason is not the opposite of faith. The opposite of reason is irrationality. Do some Christians have irrational faith? Sure. Do some skeptics have unreasonable unbelief? You bet. It works both ways. -- Greg Koukl
The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles. -- Noam Chomsky
What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful. Its mechanism was incomprehensible, and I could not possibly remain closeted in that windowless, bone-chilling room. Though outside lay the sea of irrationality, it was far more agreeable to swim in its waters until presently I drowned. -- Osamu Dazai
Indeed, my wish is quite simple: if we could learn to recognise and evade the biggest errors in our thinking - in our private lives, at work or in government - we might experience a leap in prosperity. We need no extra cunning, no new ideas, no unnecessary gadgets, no frantic hyperactivity - all we need is less irrationality. -- Rolf Dobelli
To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life. -- George H. Smith
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art. -- Theodor Adorno
If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality. -- Edward Abbey
...following Mrs. Roosevelt in search of irrationality was like following a burning fuse in search of an explosive. -- William F. Buckley, Jr.
Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings. -- Kay Redfield Jamison
Difference of opinion has never been sufficiently appreciated. It is the unexpected, the unknowable, the divine irrationality of life that saves us. -- Florida Scott-Maxwell
The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology. -- J. G. Ballard
A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity, or dishonesty of others. -- Ayn Rand
Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it. -- Anais Nin
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Atheism, which people have tried to for hundreds of years as 'the ways of reason and science,' is proving to be mere irrationality and ignorance. -- Harun Yahya
The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profit -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The idea of Jewish settlements under Palestinian sovereignty, as was suggested by someone in the Prime Minister's office, is very dangerous and reflects an irrationality of values. -- Naftali Bennett
Writing is in fact an entirely outworn, decayed and corrupt convention whose chief & most conspicuous character is its monumental witness to the conservatism, laziness and irrationality of men and women. -- Eric Gill
I have lived lies. I have done it again and again. I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger, and I cannot admit the irrationality of love.-Marius -- Anne Rice
[Burke] emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality. -- Roger Scruton
I no longer idolize reason. I have come to accept that ninety percent of what we do is irrational and that we spend what little rational thought we have in justifying our irrationality. -- Rita Mae Brown
We need to laugh at the irrationality of evil, for in doing so we deny evil's power over us, diminish its influence in the world, and tarnish the allure it has for some people. -- Dean Koontz
Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal. -- Terence McKenna

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