Rational Action Quotes

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

Thomas Metzinger

#2. There is a rationale for every action.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#3. Just as music comes alive in the performance of it, the same is true of mathematics. The symbols on the page have no more to do with mathematics than the notes on a page of music. They simply represent the experience.

Keith Devlin

#4. Can't you see? It's incredibly interesting. Aren't you struck by how much action occurred simply because something went wrong with one man's brain? It's as if the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter's brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere." The

Jon Ronson

#5. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.

John Stuart Mill

#6. No, I don't know why Bobby and Peter Farrelly bothered with a 'Three Stooges' movie, either. But if they're anything like some men I know, their love for Moe, Larry, and Curly (and an assortment of fourth bananas) is deep, abiding, and unembarrassable. In other words: How could the Farrellys not?

Wesley Morris

#7. Sometimes knowing what's right isn't a rational decision, or even what works on paper. Sometimes leaving is the best course of action after all.

Jodi Picoult

#8. Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death.

Ayn Rand

#9. 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

#10. A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated - as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

Ayn Rand

#11. For what is most dreaded is not the agony of dying, nor yet the strange impossibility that when we do not exist we should suffer for not existing. What is dreaded is the defeat of a present will directed upon life and its various undertakings.

George Santanyana

#12. All I hope for is one moment of rational thought and a shot at action before I'm lost to a great saddening madness, pithed at the hands of my own stumbling biology.

[Johnny Truant]

Mark Z. Danielewski

#13. First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one.

Aaron Sorkin

#14. Psychologically speaking, the rational, healthy response to climate change is to say to oneself, "What can I do about this?" But that question is often answered through individual action.

Margaret D. Klein

#15. The true expression of nonviolence is compassion, which is not just a passive emotional response, but a rational stimulus to action.

Mark Kurlansky

#16. Reason ... contradicts the established order of men and things on behalf of existing societal forces that reveal the irrational character of this order for "rational" is a mode of thought and action which is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression.

Herbert Marcuse

#17. All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.

Ludwig Von Mises

#18. The world could use more love. Why deny it to others?

DaShanne Stokes

#19. In psychiatry, Doctor -unlike, perhaps, the world of sexually transmitted disease clinics- there is no such thing as a cure. There is only adjustment.

Neil Gaiman

#20. He who desires to become a spiritual man must not be ever taking note of others, and above all of their sins, lest he fall into wrath and bitterness, and a judging spirit towards his neighbors.

Johannes Tauler

#21. Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good had been aptly described as that at which everything aims.

Aristotle.

#22. Rational behavior requires theory. Reactive behavior requires only reflex action.

W. Edwards Deming

#23. You can put a gardener behind the wheel, but you can't keep her eyes off the landscape.

Janet Macunovich

#24. The will is conceived as a faculty of determining oneself to action in accordance with the conception of certain laws. And such a faculty can be found only in rational beings.

Immanuel Kant

#25. It was a fun job but I'd never claim Busted was anything other than a pop band.

Charlie Simpson

#26. The fog ate his companions slowly, dissolving them from solid beings into nothing more than vague shadows which played at being human. And

William Cook

#27. Goals change, ideas of technology are transformed, but action always remains action. Action always seeks means to realize ends, and it is in this sense always rational and mindful of utility. It is, in a word, human.

Ludwig Von Mises

#28. It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required.

Ivan Goncharov

#29. The Holy Grail of universal coverage in the United States may remain out of reach unless, through rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest, we can reduce per capita costs.

Donald Berwick

#30. In America, we have long stood by the principle that the protections of the law are not meant just for some.

Carolyn Maloney