Top 100 Quotes About Rationality
#1. A man demonstrates his rationality, not by a commitment to fixed ideas, stereotyped procedures, or immutable concepts, but by the manner in which, and the occasions on which, he changes those ideas, procedures, and concepts.
Stephen Toulmin
#2. 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
#3. ... there is an inherent rationality to life that makes it intelligible at a much deeper level than functional utility ...
Brian Goodwin
#5. Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment.
Leo Tolstoy
#6. ... Science... denude(s) all religious beliefs... denigrating them as irrational forms of superstition or myth regardless of their intrinsic rationality or value.
Nicholas Gane
#7. Just as the moon derives the light it reflects from the sun, so the rational human mind derives a created ability to know from its origin, God.
Ronald H. Nash
#8. 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
#9. Love was for dummies, soulmates were the creation of pulp-fiction writers; romance was craved by ageing, lonely cat owners. Successful relationships were built on rationality and compromise.
Karan Bajaj
#10. Even the most well-adjusted person is holding on to his or her sanity by a greased rope. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.
Stephen King
#11. Experts who acknowledge the full extent of their ignorance may expect to be replaced by more confident competitors, who are better able to gain the trust of clients. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality - but it is not what people and organizations want.
Daniel Kahneman
#12. Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos.
John Forbes Nash
#13. I am an atheist, a rationalist and a humanist.
Pierre Berton
#14. If you want to get men to act reasonably, you must set about persuading them in a maniacal manner.
Aldous Huxley
#15. 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
#16. Much of the Western world emphasizes rationality and reason, but overlooks or ignores the enormous value of intuition and instinctive wisdom.
Shakti Gawain
#17. Engaging irrational people with rational arguments is irrational.
Grant McLachlan
#18. A Christian telling an atheist they're going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they're not getting any presents from Santa.
Ricky Gervais
#19. Somewhere deep inside his mind, somewhere beyond the event horizon of rationality, the sheer pressure of insanity had hammered his madness into something harder than diamond.
Terry Pratchett
#20. Superstition and sensation are always so much more appealing than truth and rationality. The
Diana Gabaldon
#21. To leave a man's ego bigger, retweet him. To leave his faculty of reasoning better, challenge his tweet.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#22. Lies don't make you happy. They just make you lie about being happy.
Stefan Molyneux
#23. Write drunk (on emotion); edit sober (on rationality and intention).
Faulkner, reimagined by me.
Christina Cooke
#24. Mature art, I think, emerges when there's a certain balance
of tensions, when there's neither neurotic prostration nor
cold rationality, but an aura of energy and a drive to grasp
personal "truths" still emerging into perception.
To grasp and to shape them.
Earle Birney
#25. Like many another materialist, that is, he lied cleverly on the basis of insufficient knowledge, because the knowledge supplied seemed to his own particular intelligence inadmissible.
("The Wendigo")
Algernon Blackwood
#27. 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
#28. The true self is that which is in touch with reality.
The false self is the aspects of your personality that are adapted to threats and no longer consciously recognizes either the adaptation or the threat.
Stefan Molyneux
#29. In healthy individuals, emotions don't distort rationality, they enhance it!
Andy Hargreaves
#30. Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.
Bertrand Russell
#31. [S]cience has contributed a great deal to war and violence, and people well trained in science are sometimes not entirely rational and are even dogmatic. We have to find a way to teach reflectively, not just scientifically.
Nel Noddings
#32. That which does not come by logic, does not leave by logic.
Raheel Farooq
#33. The Apparent is the Bridge to the Real
Idries Shah
#34. The willingness to change one's mind in the light of new evidence is a sign of rationality not weakness.
Stuart Sutherland
#36. 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
#39. almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one's habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the "analytic management of knowledge.
Neil Postman
#40. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to It.
Herbert Marcuse
#41. Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.
David Hume
#42. 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
#43. The Bible is clear: Truth exists. It can be known. And when we ground our beliefs in it, we are rational.
Patty Houser
#44. 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
#45. Writing my own novels in the '90s ... I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor.
Mary Doria Russell
#46. Sociologists keep the rationality hypothesis of the consumer away and replace it in the heart of social relations and strengths in which it is taken.
David Abikzir
#47. All I knew was I had to talk to someone. I had to try to steal someone's rationality.
Catherine McKenzie
#48. In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
#50. Attaching "produced at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT" to a ridiculous argument immediately makes it cogent to many. That's part of life, but let's not pretend that it's rationality.
Douglas Wilson
#51. No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.
Alfred North Whitehead
#52. If man was a logical creature: his last suspect - namely, his mouth - was going to be the first; whenever he thinks that someone, or, something is smelly.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#53. This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#54. Myth is mecessary because reality is so much larger than rationality.
Rolland Hein
#55. The often-used phrase "pay attention" is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.
Daniel Kahneman
#56. Careful. When you dabble too much with reason life becomes nothing but a process of dying.
Lucas Mascotto-Carbone
#57. The trans-rational spiritual approach is a simple concept with wide-ranging practical implications. There are three major components involved: (1) not denying rationality, (2) pursuing the experience of a peaceful internal state, and (3) allowing that inner peace to guide behavior.
Gudjon Bergmann
#58. Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Salman Rushdie
#59. 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
#60. We very often fail to think as carefully about helping others as we could, mistakenly believing that applying data and rationality to a charitable endeavor robs the act of virtue. And that means we pass up opportunities to make a tremendous difference.
William MacAskill
#61. To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.
Ayn Rand
#62. Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
Euripides
#63. We need to get some rationality on the Second Amendment. This is crazy what we allow ourselves.
George Takei
#64. Undoubtedly, modern Science is rational and the scientific method is based on rationality. But rationality is a wider concept, and it can explore what is beyond the scope of Science and its method.
Corrado Ghinamo
#65. The Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature and Evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the seeming Force or Weakness of the Evidence.
Anthony Collins
#66. A ghost which calls itself rationality but whose appearance is that of incoherence and meaninglessness, which causes the most normal of everyday acts to seem slightly mad because of their irrelevance to anything else.
Robert M. Pirsig
#67. Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truely totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.
Herbert Marcuse
#68. A narrow hallway is all that separates rational from irrational, creativity from insanity, and intelligence from stupidity.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#69. [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
#70. Stating a truth in an emotional way does not make what we say irrational; our beliefs being severed from truth and reality do.
Patty Houser
#71. Dismissing without further investigation something that conflicts with what is already known is the very heart of rationality.
Barry Stroud
#72. The essence of extended rationality is to know when you are being irrational.
Paul Gibbons
#73. Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#74. [I]t is rather the case that we desire something because we believe it to be good than that we believe a thing to be good because we desire it. It is the thought that starts things off.
Aristotle.
#75. 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
#76. The mock rationality of the debate conceals the arbitrariness of the will and power at work in its resolution. It
Alasdair MacIntyre
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable.
J.G. Ballard
#80. Fear was like poison to mortals; it killed their rationality.
N.K. Jemisin
#82. People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.
Simon Blackburn
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. I think that we must find some way to get more common sense, more rationality, in our decisions and less emotion.
David Packard
#86. Assume the world offers safety and rationality when of course it does not.
Anthony Doerr
#87. Humans were eventually irrational creatures gifted with the power of rationality.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#88. Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.
Ayn Rand
#89. Don't trust thoughts because you think them, but because they obey specific trustworthy rules.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#90. 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
#91. Fisher just stood there lost in thought, without saying anything. There is always a rational explanation for everything in this world - whether it's the true one or not. Maybe it is better so. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")
Cornell Woolrich
#92. The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning.
Rodolfo R. Llinas
#93. Rationality was returning to deal with the mess that emotions had created.
Graeme Simsion
#94. Historical definition of a country's borders ... ... here's where my murder geography ends and your murder geography begins, at least until I get more murderers to expand my murder-fest.
Stefan Molyneux
#95. A call for revolution wrapped in the clothing of rationality.
Veronica Roth
#96. 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
#97. In the face of madness, rationality was powerless.
Liu Cixin
#98. There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling - absolutely essential to mental health and happiness.
Dan Barker
#99. And Habermas: mutual understanding in unrestrained communicative action unfolded by rationality is the omega point of individual and social evolution itself.
Ken Wilber
#100. The secret to Hitler's power is ... that his unconscious has exceptional access to his conscious and ... that he allows himself to be moved by it. [Others] have too much rationality, too much cerebrum to obey it [but] Hitler listens.
Carl Jung
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
