Man Is A Rational Animal Quotes

#1. Man is a rational animal. So at least we have been told. Throughout a long life I have searched diligently for evidence in favor of this statement. So far, I have not had the good fortune to come across it.

Bertrand Russell

#2. Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe.

Anatole France

#3. It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Bertrand Russell

#4. Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of justice.

Thomas Jefferson

#5. Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Orson Welles

#6. 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

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

Epictetus

#8. Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.

Anatole France

#9. Being the rational animal, man must be capable of thinking if he really wants to. Still, it may be that man wants to think, but cannot.

Martin Heidegger

#10. Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

Robert A. Heinlein

#11. To say that man is a reasoning animal is a very different thing than to say that most of man's decisions are based on his rational process. That I don't believe at all.

Rex Stout

#12. The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.

Emile M. Cioran

#13. Man is a luxury loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.

Eric Hoffer

#14. The only thing rational about man, the rational animal, is his ability to rationalize his own present position.

Allen MacDiarmid

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

Will Durant

#16. 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

#17. What absurd fellows you are, both of you! I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given.

Oscar Wilde

#18. I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

Oscar Wilde