Be Rational Quotes

#1. From a rational standpoint, it might be expected that man should be far more willing to express financial confidence in his skills rather than risking his earnings on the mindless meanderings of chance. Experience, however, has strongly indicated the reverse proposition to hold true.

Richard Arnold Epstein

#2. Responsible: (1) Liable to be held to account for discharging one's duty; (2) Able to make moral or rational decisions on one's own and therefore answerable for one's behavior; (3) Able to be trusted or depended upon; reliable.

Erika Andersen

#3. A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.

Walter Lippmann

#4. Men tend to try to struggle to be more rational and reduce things to simplicity more and are more impatient with ambiguity than women are.

John Crowley

#5. Emotions generally led to irrational and stupid actions. In this game, they were likely to be fatal. He regained his composure and became logical, rational, disconnected.

Roger Weston

#6. Strings of coincidence can strengthen us in the determination to follow our deepest intuitions even when they run counter to conventional wisdom and logic and cannot be subjected to rational explanation.

Robert Moss

#7. Your first mistake might be assuming that people are rational.
Your second mistake could be assuming that people are eager for change.
And the marketer's third mistake is assuming that once someone knows things the way you know them, they will choose what you chose.

Seth Godin

#8. Everything must be organized in the most rational way. The state won't accept excessive prices.

Vladimir Putin

#9. Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.

Horace Mann

#10. Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers - in a word, better citizens

Mary Wollstonecraft

#11. It is far more rational to suppose that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority.

Alexander Hamilton

#12. I consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity - you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.

Ze Frank

#13. You cannot be a rational subject without veto-control on the level of mental action.

Thomas Metzinger

#14. Rational egoism is the only morality that is for human life; thus, it is the only morality that is actually moral. Those who choose to be rationally self-interested thereby make the most of their life - and they are morally good because of it.

Craig Biddle

#15. In times of crisis human beings don't have it in them to be rational.

Larry McMurtry

#16. Love wasn't meant to be rational. It was meant to be experienced and felt.

S.L. Naeole

#17. Man, and in general every rational being, exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means for arbitrary use by this or that will: he must in all his actions, whether they are directed to himself or to other rational beings, always be viewed at the same time as an end.

Immanuel Kant

#18. Discernment can be described as the ability to find the root of the matter, and it relies on intuition as well as rational thought.

John C. Maxwell

#19. If there be such a distinguishing excellency in divine things, tis rational to suppose that there may be such a thing as seeing it.

Jonathan Edwards

#20. Human decision-making is complex. On our own, our tendency to yield to short-term temptations, and even to addictions, may be too strong for our rational, long-term planning.

Peter Singer

#21. In questions of law or of fact conscience is very often confounded with opinion. No man's conscience can tell him the rights of another man; they must be known by rational investigation or historical inquiry.

Samuel Johnson

#22. The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.

Jane Hirshfield

#23. Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?

Jon Ronson

#24. ...we'd be okay. Not perfect, not entirely healthy, not even rational where our love for one another was concerned. Just okay. Merely sufficient, at best. But there'd be only acceptance - never shame - in being two divine failures as we emerged from slumber, perfectly flawed, and wide awake.

AngstGoddess003

#25. Division may be rational or irrational. Dominance either seems or is justified. Difference is.

Catharine A. MacKinnon

#26. If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?

Gloria Steinem

#27. We have a high moral responsibility to be rational

Charlie Munger

#28. Man is said to be a rational creature; but should it not rather be said, that man is a creature capable of being rational, as we say a parrot is a creature capable of speech?

Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

#29. what was rational about a midlife crisis? Weren't they always a little absurd? They were beginning the next phase of their lives together. She was not afraid of it. Let it come, she thought. He'll be in good hands.

Matthew Thomas

#30. It is hate that makes people kill, Mr Catchpool, not love. Never love. Please be rational.

Sophie Hannah

#31. Man is a rational animal. But that does not mean that he is a reasonable animal. It means only that he has reason, and therefore can misuse it. If he had not reason, he could not be unreasonable. But he has, and is.

Frank Sheed

#32. Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.

Aldous Huxley

#33. The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of inventions are still mysterious. They are rational but not logical, that is to say, not deductive.

Dennis Gabor

#34. That rational voice was right to be frightened. There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt a faint, morbid urge to jump.

Stephen King

#35. But it is strange how many rational beings believe the ultimate truths of the universe to be reducible to patterns on a blackboard.

Frederick Pollock

#36. Even rational, data-driven scientists could be sent into prolonged states of hysteria when presented with evidence that their favorite foods might be killing them.

T. Colin Campbell

#37. We were made to be neither cerebral men nor visceral men, but Men. Not beasts nor angels but Men - things at once rational and animal.

C.S. Lewis

#38. A man may be hard to persuade by rational argument while he is easily swayed by a display of passion, even if it is feigned.

Yukio Mishima

#39. Rational optimism is required of anyone who hopes to be a survivor,

Dean Koontz

#40. For they have no conception how a rational creature can be compelled, but only advised, or exhorted; because no person can disobey reason, without giving up his claim to be a rational creature.

Jonathan Swift

#41. I believe, or sense, that the universe has not been constructed from a purely mechanical, logical, rational point of view, but there is a magic afoot in the universe, that God can be looked at as a kind of a magician in which we get to perform tricks ourselves, without knowing that we're doing so.

Fred Alan Wolf

#42. To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.

Anne Lamott

#43. What's really great about Buddhism is its rational, informal quality. Coming from my experience of growing up a Catholic, I found Buddhism to be refreshingly easygoing and forgiving.

Matt Dillon

#44. We are so accustomed to the apparently rational nature of our world that we can scarcely imagine anything happening that cannot be explained by common sense. The primitive man confronted by a shock of this kind would not doubt his sanity; he would think of fetishes, spirits or gods

Carl Jung

#45. You're damn right we need a rational code of morality and ethics. But not much progress can be made in that direction while we've still got a majority ranting about gods, devils, souls, and absolute morality, and using an ancient book written by ignorant nomads as a guide.

Doug Graham

#46. This tendency to defend a belief structure is true in all cases, even the rational. Never underestimate our ability to convince ourselves of what we wish to be true, especially if we have invested time and money in our beliefs.

Gudjon Bergmann

#47. If you don't act now, the day is not far, that this beautiful planet of yours, which you call home, shall be turned into a dry barren wasteland by the blood-sucking fundamentalists.

Abhijit Naskar

#48. It wasn't idealism that made me, from the beginning, want a more secure and rational society. It was an intellectual judgment, to which I still hold. When I was young its name was socialism. We can be deflected by names. But the need was absolute, and is still absolute.

Raymond Williams

#49. Why was the judgement of the disapproving so valuable? Who said that their good opinions tended to be any more rational than those of generally pleasant people?

Shannon Hale

#50. Beauty is an ultimate value - something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.

Roger Scruton

#51. Every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.

Robert Boswell

#52. I think we're going back to the way things use to be, before a bunch of European intellectuals in tights decided to draw a line between what's rational and what's not. I don't think our ancestors thought the distinction was necessary.
(pg 370)

G. Willow Wilson

#53. No crime can ever be defended on rational grounds.

Livy

#54. While the constitution continues to be read, and its principles known, the states, must, by every rational man, be considered as essential component parts of the union; and therefore the idea of sacrificing the former to the latter is totally inadmissible.

Alexander Hamilton

#55. Those who think themselves to be civilized are not always particularly intelligent, or rational.

Sara Donati

#56. Intellectual men who quickly wolf down whatever nourishment is necessary for their bodies with a kind of disdain, may be very rational and have a noble intelligence, but they are not men of taste.

Charles-Augustin De Coulomb

#57. Analytic and romantic understanding should be united at a basic level. Reassimilate the passions from which the rational mind fled.

Robert M. Pirsig

#58. We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.

T. S. Eliot

#59. Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they don't bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they don't rattle your windows and nerves with indiscriminate sonic booms just because they can?

Rabih Alameddine

#60. Nonsense which it would be shameful for a reasonable being to write, speak or hear spoken can be sung or listened to by that same rational being with pleasure and even with a kind of intellectual conviction.

Aldous Huxley

#61. A god or revelation capable of proof or rational verification by an autonomous man would be worthless.

Greg L. Bahnsen

#62. Even the most brilliant and rational person, in the heat of passion, seems to be absolutely and completely divorced from the person he thought he was.

Dan Ariely

#63. Most men either compromise or drop their greatest talents and start running after, what they perceive to be, a more reasonable success, and somewhere in between they end up with a discontented settlement. Safety is indeed stability, but it is not progression.

Criss Jami

#64. Poor thing. If she wasn't being thrown into trees or attacked by his kin, she was being mystically flung to the ground by his old, terrifying great-great-aunt.
It was really going to be impossible to talk to Braith in a rational, calm manner after all this.

G.A. Aiken

#65. The Bible is clear: Truth exists. It can be known. And when we ground our beliefs in it, we are rational.

Patty Houser

#66. North Korea. Not only does North Korean have nuclear weapons, but their leadership appears to not be rational.

Ted Lieu

#67. For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones

Oliver Burkeman

#68. A rational human being of the civilized world would be like the swan that can draw the milk from a mixture of milk and water, leaving aside the water.

Abhijit Naskar

#69. At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to consider when we make our decisions.

John Rawls

#70. Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law cannot be found in a rational state of society.

Robert Owen

#71. The paralyzing fear of being lost is fed solely by the irrational fear that we will never be found.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#72. Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#73. Perhaps the nearest one could get to a common characteristic of poststructuralism would be a radical suspicion of reason, order and certainty as governing principles of knowledge and existence...the absurd and the irrational can no longer be distinguished from the real and the rational

Margaret Maclure

#74. Though adversity is the fertile soil in which the human spirit best grows, we loathe it still. I do not see how it can be otherwise, for no rational being seeks out pain and misfortune. Still, I cannot help but wonder if it is not somehow wrong to enjoy the fruit but curse the tree.

Richard Paul Evans

#75. A society built entirely out of rational individuals who come together on the basis of a social contract for the sake of the satisfaction of their wants cannot form a society that would be viable over any length of time. - FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

Cesar Hidalgo

#76. For a number of people, church attendance seems to be primarily a social affair, the act of meeting other people outside of the pressures of work. For others it is pure business/politics. I get it. It's important to have access to a community like the one a church provides.

Gudjon Bergmann

#77. That dress was designed to be a kill switch for rational thought.

Kelly Moran

#78. We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful.

Alain De Botton

#79. Today, architecture is invention. It isn't enough to just be rational - It must also be beautiful.

Oscar Niemeyer

#80. Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional form and ceremonies.

Joseph Wood Krutch

#81. Only the pleasure which proceeds from a rational value judgement can be regarded as moral, pleasure, as such, is not a guide to action nor a standard of morality.

Ayn Rand

#82. Answer me this: Is love rational? Is it sane? Can it be tamed and sculpted, like a piece of clay? Of course it can't.

Leigh Hershkovich

#83. Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.

Herbert Simon

#84. I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.

Thomas Merton

#85. But a Broom-stick, perhaps you will say, is an Emblem of a Tree standing on its Head; and pray what is Man but a topsy-turvy Creature? His Animal Faculties perpetually mounted on his Rational; his Head where his Heels should be, groveling on the Earth.

Jonathan Swift

#86. Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart's content.

Will Durant

#87. When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.

Ayn Rand

#88. Of God in my life. I surrender my mind, my heart, my need for safety, and my need for rational explanations and orderly instructions to God's will for me. I trust that all that is in my life is as it should be. I release

Caroline Myss

#89. It is man's vision of a world fit for rational, civilized humanity which leads him to dare and to suffer to build societies free from want and fear. Concepts such as truth, justice and compassion cannot be dismissed as trite when these are often the only bulwarks which stand against ruthless power.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#90. Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations ... "and it is on these that history is built.

Lloyd DeMause

#91. The desire for magic cannot be eradicated. Even the most supposedly rational people attempt to practice magic in love and war. We simultaneously possess the most primitive of brain stems and the most sophisticated of cortices. The imperatives of each coexist uneasily.

Erica Jong

#92. Children must be taught mathematics well in anywhere under every condition at every age and so we can have more rational, more logical societies!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#93. Fundamentalists are less concerned to be systematic and rational than to be humble and faithful, accepting God's commandments because they come from God, not because they proceed from common sense or sophisticated reason.

Israel Shenker

#94. Empathy requires something extremely difficult: accepting the fact that we are not and never will be in the other person's shoes. There's no rational, universal course because individuals have different goals, different worldviews and different experiences.

Seth Godin

#95. The enormity of the universe revealed by science cannot readily be grasped by the human brain, but the music of The Planets enables the mind to acquire some comprehension of the vastness of space where rational understanding fails.

Gustav Holst

#96. There also appears to be another element in the soul, which, though irrational, yet in a manner participates in rational principle.

Aristotle.

#97. Some things in life could not be solved or even contemplated by a rational mind. Roger's mind, however, had ceased being anywhere near rational about half a bottle of Grand Marnier ago.

Andrew Barrett

#98. I fear getting things wrong and messing up, and this makes no rational sense. When I'm mindful and awake, I know mistakes are part of a creative process. But when I become disconnected, I can be incredibly mean and hard on myself.

Jaime Murray

#99. The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

Joyce Carol Oates

#100. I want my books to explore motives which make people think, 'Wow! Imagine the psychological state you'd have to be in for that to be your motive!' Whereas things like blackmail, jealousy - they're rational reasons for committing murder.

Sophie Hannah