Top 100 Quotes About Irrationality
#1. 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
#2. Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
Stanislaw Lem
#4. 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
#5. The idea that we should dismantle the core protections of our political system to erect a ubiquitous surveillance state for the sake of this risk is the height of irrationality. Yet exaggeration of the threat is repeated over and over.
Glenn Greenwald
#6. The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.
Christopher Hitchens
#7. Just as no significant work of art can be created without the element of irrationality that is in fact the artist's talent." p.179
"He wondered if there was a greater distance than the one between two people in the same bed pretending to sleep." p.213
Henning Mankell
#8. No rational response was possible. Her irrationality made it so. The terrible power, he thought, of illogic.
Philip K. Dick
#9. The only factor that poses a genuine challenge to the current order is the willingness of human beings to reject the injustice and irrationality of this economy, and stand up for something better. Capitalism will not fall-rather, it must be pushed.
Jim Stanford
#10. 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
#11. The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.
Max Weber
#12. I think irrationality is one of the scariest things in the world.
Marcia Gay Harden
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Irrationality is part of everyday rationale
Elif Shafak
#16. 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
#17. Nationalism does nothing but teach you to hate people you never met, and to take pride in accomplishments you had no part in.
Doug Stanhope
#18. 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
#19. In fact, violence as a symbol of our growing irrationality has had an increasing role in activity for its own sake, when no possible justification could be made that the activity was seeking to resolve a problem.
Carroll Quigley
#20. When I hear theists and atheists pontificating on how they know God does or does not exist, I can only smile at the irrationality and, yes, vanity of the notion.
Vincent Bugliosi
#21. The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#23. A narrow hallway is all that separates rational from irrational, creativity from insanity, and intelligence from stupidity.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#24. To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.
Christopher Hitchens
#25. Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.
Austin O'Malley
#26. Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely.
Iain Pears
#27. I know I have nothing to worry about and I'm being irrational, but let me have my irrationality.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#28. Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
Madeleine L'Engle
#29. Many great ideas, great love stories, and great achievements are born from a healthy irrationality.
Steve Maraboli
#30. 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
#31. Today, intelligence is neither recognized nor rewarded, but is being systematically extinguished in a growing flood of brazenly flaunted irrationality.
Ayn Rand
#33. [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
#34. You see, I'd behaved pretty badly. Losing my head about someone I didn't really love and hurting someone I did. Why is one so stupid?"
"The heart has its reasons," said Will, "and the endocrines have theirs.
Aldous Huxley
#35. 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
#36. The all-encompassing cure for cancer, heartbreak, irrationality, drug addiction, and every other ailment that plagues humanity?
Fire.
V.K. McAllister
#37. If the world is irrational, we can never know it
either it or its irrationality.
Edward Abbey
#38. The northern ocean is beautiful, ... and beautiful the delicate intricacy of the snowflake before it melts and perishes, but such beauties are as nothing to him who delights in numbers, spurning alike the wild irrationality of life and baffling complexity of nature's laws.
John Lighton Synge
#39. But when reason and the study of history began revealing the irrationality, the limitations, and the merely transitory nature of the capitalist order, bourgeois ideology as a whole and with it bourgeois economics began abandoning both reason and history.
Paul A. Baran
#40. reasonable people often have difficulty anticipating irrationality from unreasonable people.
Bobby Adair
#41. 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
#42. The chief danger of adopting a credible pose of irrationality is that to succeed in the pretense you have to be very good. After a while, you get used to it. It becomes pretense no longer.
Carl Sagan
#43. Following Mrs. Roosevelt in search of irrationality was like following a burning fuse in search of an explosive.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. our irrationality happens the same way, again and again. Whether we are acting as consumers, businesspeople, or policy makers, understanding how we are predictably irrational provides a starting point for improving our decision making and changing the way we live for the better.
Dan Ariely
#52. 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
#53. These occasions always took him by surprise. He was shocked anew each time the crisply surveyed, neatly kept world he so cherished rose up to confront him with all its essential sloppiness, irrationality, and bad business sense.
T.C. Boyle
#54. 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
#55. We must fight for the freedom of religion; because that is the only way we can stand against irrationality.
M.F. Moonzajer
#56. The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
Theodor W. Adorno
#57. Freedom of religion is the only and only way towards universal peace. As long there is irrationality peace is impossible.
M.F. Moonzajer
#58. Good intentions are ubiquitous in politics; what is scarce is accurate beliefs.
Bryan Caplan
#59. 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
#60. Intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls ... The genius of the irrational ... This is the body's intelligence, not the mind's. Every living cell possess it ... [the] indomitable will to survive.
David Marusek
#61. The hated man is the result of his hater's pride rather than his hater's conscience.
Criss Jami
#62. Never argue with the surreal; there's no winning against irrationality.
Kate Griffin
#63. 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
#65. Wouldn't economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave?
Dan Ariely
#66. For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument and the rest of the old stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau.
Bertrand Russell
#67. For twenty years and more the whole planet had been bombed, raped, ravaged, and gouged by people whose fury had so exceeded their judgment that the only thing they could think of to do to express their discontent was to kill somebody.
Frederik Pohl
#68. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
Martin Amis
#69. It is of the essence of any party to gain its orientation not from truths but from illusions which usually correspond to the irrational mass structure. Scientific truths only interfered with the habit of the party politicians of avoiding difficulties with the aid of illusions.
Wilhelm Reich
#70. Irrationality is the exclusive preserve of humans as among all creatures only we have the power to rationalise, that being the art of packaging patently irrational as apparently rational.
R.N. Prasher
#71. Sometimes I'm irrational, I know I am, but even irrational thought feels very, very real when you're in the middle of shit.
Kim Holden
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. [S]cience, to [Walter] Lippmann, embodied a deep awareness of the irrationality and partiality of all human beings, which led its possessors to oppose the will to dominate wherever it appeared.
Andrew Jewett
#75. 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
#76. It is better to make an irrational noise in a bush than in a desert.
Duop Chak Wuol
#77. Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
Bertrand Russell
#78. What a mathematical proof actually does is show that certain conclusions, such as the irrationality of , follow from certain premises, such as the principle of mathematical induction. The validity of these premises is an entirely independent matter which can safely be left to philosophers.
Timothy Gowers
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. People who want to study religion usually have an ax to grind. They either want to defend their favorite religion from its critics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion, and this tends to infect their methods with bias.
Daniel C. Dennett
#82. 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
#83. Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful.
John Burnside
#84. Who can explain life? Who can understand it? Like cats, we just do what we do.
Marty Rubin
#85. The real protagonist of scientifiction was science itself, conquering the dark forces of irrationality and ignorance.
Steve Silberman
#86. Paradoxes only stump sane people. Nuts have irrational on our side.
Brian Spellman
#87. The unthinking embrace of irrationality is literally madness. But embracing rationality while denying the existence of any mystery to life and its meaning - that is no less a form of madness than is eager devotion to unreason.
Dean Koontz
#88. Sanity is not about confrontation. It's about filtering. Having a stable and happy life is about saying "no" to crazy people, not about inviting them in and then hoping that confrontations are going to make them sane.
Stefan Molyneux
#89. 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
#90. 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
#92. 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
#93. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuitio
Dona Budd
#94. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.
Sam Harris
#96. Fear in the absence of knowledge breeds irrationality.
We should always seek knowledge, even in the face of fear.
Biz Stone
#97. A miracle entails a degree of irrationality-not because it shocks reason, but because it makes no appeal to it.
Emmanuel Levinas
#98. The problem is that most people, most of the time, are desperate to believe ridiculous and divisive ideas for patently emotional reasons,and while rarely explicit what they're really worried about is death
Sam Harris
#99. There are three things admiration affirms; the lack of autonomy, the senility of the mind, and the strength of desperation. Irrationality and inferiority are the progenitors of admiration.
Lionel Suggs
#100. If you can't define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.
Robert M. Pirsig
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