Irrational Man Quotes

#1. Bin Laden does reprehensible activities, and we should surely take care of that by killing him as soon as we can. But he's not an irrational man. He's a very worthy enemy. He's an enemy to worry about.

Michael Scheuer

#2. Only a bet on the impossible makes sense. It is an act of faith and courage requiring an irrational leap over reason. A man wins simply by making such a bet.

William Kennedy

#3. Animals never have recourse to law courts, because they have no will to love; but man, having reason, feels the need of justifying his irrational behavior when he does wrong.

Fulton J. Sheen

#4. If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.

Albert Camus

#5. There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#6. A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo

#7. To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

#8. In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little, before quick reflection.

Ford Madox Ford

#9. They scattered with no melody, no harmony, no rhythm to hold them. If music was emotion and emotion came from thought, then this was the scream of chaos, of the irrational, of the helpless, of man's self-abdication.

Ayn Rand

#10. It is not man who is the enemy of the human species. It is the irrational; it is the spiritual when it is divorced from the material; from the lesson in one beating heart or one bleeding vein.

Anne Rice

#11. Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.

Tsunetomo Yamamoto

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

Epictetus

#13. While the Right of Suffrage is conceded to thousands notoriously ignorant, vicious, and drunken, ... a Constitutional denial to Black men, as such, of Political Rights freely secured to White men, is monstrously unjust and irrational.

Horace Greeley

#14. This crazy, blind beating of wings caused by man-made light ... this irrational connection between spiders, moths and light. If a law appeared without reason, like this, what would one believe in?

Kobo Abe

#15. Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.

Gore Vidal

#16. The problem is that spiritual answers cannot be deduced by human reason alone (1 Cor. 2:14). It's not that spiritual truth is irrational or illogical, but that human wisdom is defective, because it's tainted by man's sinfulness, and unable to perceive the things of God.

John F. MacArthur Jr.

#17. Man: an irrational being who imagines himself to be a rational one.

Marty Rubin

#18. There must occur a time in every man's life when the idea of a sudden, irrational death does not frighten him. This shall suffice to cure a lot of his persistent miseries.

Ashfaq Saraf

#19. The bodies of irrational animals are bent toward the ground, whereas man was made to walk erect with his eyes on heaven, as though to remind him to keep his thoughts on things above.

Augustine Of Hippo

#20. The reasoning man who rejects the superstitions of simpletons necessarily becomes their enemy; he must expect as much and be prepared to laugh at the consequences.

Marquis De Sade

#21. It seems that life, in order to maintain itself, must revolt every so often against man's ceaseless attempts to master its irrational forces with his mind.

Otto Rank

#22. To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

Ayn Rand

#23. Every man builds his world in his own image; he has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence - by his own choice.

Ayn Rand

#24. If the transmigration of a soul takes place into a rational being, it simply becomes the soul of that body. But if the soul migrates into a brute beast, it follows the body outside, as a guardian spirit follows a man. For there could never be a rational soul in an irrational being.

Sallust

#25. Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

Albert Camus

#26. This was a man who'd fought long and hard to keep me, even when I was bent on self-destructing us. This was a man who understood I could be difficult and stubborn and a little bit irrational (okay, maybe a freaking lot irrational), and still loved me.

Samantha Young

#27. [T]he only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim.

Ayn Rand

#28. Looking down at the Chinese officer who was trying to gather his entrails with his hands. Suriyawong had the irrational thought that the man ought really to wash his organs before jamming them back into his abdomen. It was so unsanitary.

Orson Scott Card

#29. To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty ... and ... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's ... all irrational.

William Faulkner

#30. Black(people) hold onto their God just as the drunken man holds on to the street lamp post - for physical support only.

Tai Solarin

#31. When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die ... No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.

Arthur Miller

#32. Racism is not simply about one man's irrational hatred of another but his self-hatred, doubting his own moral goodness and purpose.

Michael R. French

#33. Be free from grief not through insensibility like the irrational animals, nor through want of thought like the foolish, but like a man of virtue by having reason as the consolation of grief.

Epictetus