Rationality quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • 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 will not save us. -- Robert McNamara
  • In everything one thing is impossible: rationality. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Rationality is not one of this industry's attributes. -- Scott Hamilton
  • Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating. -- Anne Lamott
  • In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something. -- Krzysztof Kieslowski
  • Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use. -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
  • Rationality went down the drain donkey's years ago and hasn't been seen since. -- Harold Pinter
  • Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known. -- Michael Shermer
  • 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 is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it. -- Ayn Rand
  • 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
  • Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. ... Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think. -- Max Horkheimer
  • Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course. -- Reinhold Niebuhr
  • Rules and models destroy genius and art. -- William Hazlitt
  • Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  • A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational. -- Thomas Aquinas
  • It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality -- Gilles Deleuze
  • Happiness is man's greatest aim in life. Tranquility and rationality are the cornerstones of happiness. -- Epicurus
  • There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
  • The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. -- George Bernard Shaw
  • If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? -- Albert Einstein
  • Many of the things you can count, don't count. Many of the things you can't count, really count. -- Albert Einstein
  • People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. -- William Butler Yeats
  • Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. -- Thomas Huxley
  • If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans! -- Tom Stoppard
  • 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
  • Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present. -- Marcus Aurelius
  • Part of the sexual revolution is bringing rationality to sexuality - because when you don't embrace sexuality in a normal way, you get the twisted kinds, and the kinds that destroy lives. -- Hugh Hefner
  • Workers and their families may starve to death in the New World Order of economic rationality, but diamond necklaces are cheaper in elegant New York shops, thanks to the miracle of the market. -- Noam Chomsky
  • Mr. Edison worked endlessly on a problem, using the method of elimination. If a person asked him if he were discouraged because so many attempts proved unavailing, he would say, "No, I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.". -- Thomas A. Edison
  • 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
  • I don't hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality, and moral choice - and that is precisely why we are under an obligation to recognize and respect the rights of animals. -- Brigid Brophy
  • Unfortunately, addicts don't respond to reason or rationality. -- Jane Velez-Mitchell
  • To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization. -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
  • If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart. -- Lars von Trier
  • The classical theory of omniscient rationality is strikingly simple and beautiful. -- Herbert A. Simon
  • Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration. -- Ayn Rand
  • Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing. -- A. R. Ammons
  • I think that we must find some way to get more common sense, more rationality, in our decisions and less emotion. -- David Packard
  • By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There's no specific line, as you know. -- Leo Ornstein
  • Faith is not a rational thing, and yet to understand the universe, rationality alone will not give it to us. Our understanding of the universe must transcend the rational. -- John Rhys-Davies
  • I think that there's a strain in journalism that believes that anyone who surrenders him- or herself to faith and to belief necessarily checks reason and rationality at the door. -- David Gregory
  • The second advantage claimed for naturalism is that it is equivalent to rationality, because it assumes a model of reality in which all events are in principle accessible to scientific investigation. -- Phillip E. Johnson
  • I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change. -- A. R. Ammons
  • We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it. -- Daniel Kahneman
  • The only shibboleth the West has is science. It is the premise of modernity and it defines itself as a rationality capable of, indeed requiring separation from politics, religion and really, society. Modernisation is to work towards this. -- Bruno Latour
  • If you're going to vote on a television contract, there is a certain rationality to saying that the same structures that are applied to Health Plan participation should be placed on the right to vote on a strike. -- Dick Wolf
  • 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
  • When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind. -- Brian Eno
  • I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality. -- Alan Moore
  • The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. -- Robert M. Pirsig
  • I know that war and mayhem run in our blood. I refuse to believe that they must dominate our lives. We humans are animals, too, but animals with amazing powers of rationality, morality, society. We can use our strength and courage not to savage each other, but to defend our highest purposes. -- Donella Meadows
  • 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
  • Reality trumps rationality. -- Derek R. Audette
  • I am beyond logic and rationality. -- Imelda Marcos
  • Your trust in rationality makes you irrational. -- Orson Scott Card
  • Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. -- Warren Buffett
  • I'm not insane, I'm voluntarily indifferent to conventional rationality. -- Jared Leto
  • If there is no wisdom, rationality can be very dangerous. -- Nirmala Srivastava
  • In healthy individuals, emotions don't distort rationality, they enhance it! -- Andy Hargreaves
  • European policy is always an interplay of rationality and emotion. -- Martin Schulz
  • Humans were eventually irrational creatures gifted with the power of rationality. -- L.E. Modesitt Jr.
  • The end point of rationality is to demonstrate the limits of rationality. -- Blaise Pascal
  • The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers. -- Zygmunt Bauman
  • Hatred is a form of faith, distilled by passion to remove all rationality. -- L.E. Modesitt Jr.
  • The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality. -- Herbert Marcuse
  • Buffett's genius was largely a genius of character"?of patience, discipline, and rationality. -- Roger Lowenstein
  • Fantasies have to remain dirty. Cleanliness, scrupulousness and rationality are poison for eroticism. -- Volkmar Sigusch
  • Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts. -- Aldous Huxley
  • The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence. -- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
  • Men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality. -- Ayn Rand
  • rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos. -- John Forbes Nash
  • To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality. -- Ayn Rand
  • The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral. -- Herbert Marcuse
  • Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included. -- Robert M. Pirsig
  • No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality. -- Alfred North Whitehead
  • Man is a mixture of desires that extend beyond his knowledge and often result in action conflicting with rationality. -- Charles Lindbergh
  • The willingness to change one's mind in the light of new evidence is a sign of rationality not weakness. -- Stuart Sutherland
  • The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason. -- Herbert Marcuse
  • Scientists are not the paragons of rationality, objectivity, openmindedness and humility that many of them might like others to believe. -- Marcello Truzzi
  • Much of the Western world emphasizes rationality and reason, but overlooks or ignores the enormous value of intuition and instinctive wisdom. -- Shakti Gawain
  • The battle for evolution seems never-ending. And the battle is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition. -- Jerry A. Coyne
  • I like [Barak] Obama. I like him. So how far does rationality help to persuade anybody? You know, I'm not so sure. -- George Saunders
  • Believing that there is a conflict between rationality and spirituality is like believing that there is a conflict between knowledge and inspiration. -- Jakub Bo?ydar Wi?niewski
  • 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
  • On your quest to spirituality it is often required to suspend your rationality; but true spirituality asks that you enhance your rationality. -- Steve Maraboli
  • Organizational effectiveness does not lie in that narrow minded concept called rationality. It lies in the blend of clearheaded logic and powerful intuition -- Henry Mintzberg
  • There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling - absolutely essential to mental health and happiness. -- Dan Barker
  • In mathematics we find the primitive source of rationality; and to mathematics must the biologists resort for means to carry out their researches. -- Auguste Comte
  • There's a beauty to forgiveness, especially forgiveness that goes beyond rationality. Unconditional love is an illogical notion, but such a great & powerful one -- A. J. Jacobs
  • A conviction akin to religious feeling of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a high order. -- Albert Einstein
  • The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence. -- George Santayana
  • 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
  • The problem with us EU politicians is that we approach everything with cool rationality, and then wonder why we don't win people over emotionally. -- Martin Schulz
  • The outcome of a non-constant-sum game may be dictated by the individual rationality of the respective players without satisfying a criterion of collective rationality. -- Anatol Rapoport
  • We no longer have the pact from 1997; it was radically amended in 2005 and the Commission is applying this Stability Pact with wisdom and rationality. -- Jean-Claude Juncker
  • Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all. -- Jonathan Haidt
  • Skepticism must go hand in hand with rationality. When theories are shown to be false, the correct thing to do is to move on. -- Brian Cox
  • We look into our hearts and see objectivity; we look into our minds and see rationality; we look into our beliefs and see reality. -- Kathryn Schulz
  • Unrestricted laissez faire capitalism allocates resources in a most efficient way to satisfy human wants without regard to the rationality or morality of those desires. -- Jerry Pournelle
  • The people I know who seem to make unusual efforts at rationality, are unusually honest, or, failing that, at least have unusually bad social skills. -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
  • The absurd, with its rupture of rationality-of conventional ways of seeing the world-is in fact an accurate and a productive way of understanding the world. -- William Kentridge
  • 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
  • Who is the brave man--he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination. -- Geraldine Brooks
  • Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs. -- Roy Blount, Jr.
  • Without a commitment to science and rationality in its proper domain, there can be no solution to the problems that engulf us. Still, the Yahoos never rest. -- Stephen Jay Gould
  • Ideology trumps rationality. Most conservatives cannot abide the solution to global warming - strong government regulations and a government-led effort to accelerate clean-energy technologies in the market. -- Joseph J. Romm
  • Myth is necessary because reality is so much larger than rationality...man is fundamentally mythic...His real health depends upon his knowing and living his metaphysical totality. -- Clyde S. Kilby
  • The single greatest world transformation would simply be the embrace of global reasonableness and pluralistic tolerance the global embrace of egoic-rationality (on the way to centauric vision-logic). -- Ken Wilber
  • I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it? -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
  • The metaphoric mind includes rationality, linearity, and logic - for it created them. But like some children, the rational mind often seems embarrassed by the presence of its parents. -- Bob Samples
  • --
  • Indeed, the highest pleasure of golf may be that on the fairways and far from all the pressures of commerce and rationality, we can feel immortal for a few hours. -- Colman McCarthy
  • I believe that intelligence and rationality will always be primary no matter what shape sentient creatures take. To not think that would be to doubt the value of life itself. -- Peter F. Hamilton
  • The dilemma of Brechtian performance is that, for all of Brecht's emphasis on rationality and the undermining of theatrical illusion, the actor must convincingly portray something that she is not. -- Philip Auslander
  • The magical thinking encouraged by any belief in the supernatural, combined with the vilification of rationality and skepticism, is more conducive to conspiracy theories than it is to productive political debate. -- Wendy Kaminer
  • How much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception, and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerity. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans â?? language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce. -- Paul Bloom
  • A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. -- Robert M. Pirsig
+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share