Top 100 Rational Quotes
#1. To believe in only the practical, the rational, the realistic was a kind of glamour as well. But he couldn't enjoy the illusion of order anymore. Monsters aren't real until you meet one.
Victor LaValle
#2. But it was important to be rational at all times, not just when calm.
Brandon Sanderson
#3. Christian faith is not an irrational leap.Examined objectively, the claims of the Bible are rational propositions well supported by reason and evidence.
Lee Strobel
#4. My instincts told me that death would somehow be ... different. But my rational mind reminded me that I had probably tempted fate one too many times. At least, I thought it was my rational mind. It sure seemed like the usual voice inside my head. Thank God there was only one of them.
M.A. George
#5. The reason that truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to have a rational thread running through it in order to be believable, whereas reality may be totally irrational.
Sydney J. Harris
#7. We think we don't deserve love, we think if we let it in we'll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said. Love is the only rational act.
Morrie Schwartz.
#8. The only rational way of educating is to be an example. If one can't help it, a warning example.
Albert Einstein
#9. An external thing that is knowable [is knowable] by means of something internal that is consubstantial [with the rational soul].
Nicholas Of Cusa
#10. It is not enough to have a talented designer; the management must be inspired too. The creative process is very disorganised; the production process has to be very rational.
Bernard Arnault
#11. Asperger's syndrome is associated with organization, focus, innovative thinking, and rational detachment.
Graeme Simsion
#12. ...Act upon a maxim which, at the same time, involves its own universal validity for every rational being.
Immanuel Kant
#13. Cats, as any rational person knows, are solitary, opportunistic, ambush predators, much like spiders, but with fewer legs and a better fan club.
Jonathan L. Howard
#14. It was on the order of coin or stamp collecting; no rational explanation could ever be given. And high prices were being paid by wealthy collectors.
Philip K. Dick
#15. Gratitude is the first sign of a thinking, rational creature.
Solanus Casey
#16. Cheshvan starts tonight," Rixon said, "What are you doing arsing around in a graveyard?"
"Thinking."
"Thinking?"
"A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision.
Becca Fitzpatrick
#17. A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.
Norman Douglas
#19. The rational and peacable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.
Thomas Jefferson
#20. With the death of what Sydney Smith described as rational religon and the proponents of what remains sending out such confusing and uncertain messages, all civilised people have to be ethicists. We must work out our own salvation with diligence based on what we believe.
P.D. James
#21. Man's struggle to be rational about himself, about his relationship to his own society and to other peoples and nations involves a constant search for understanding among all peoples and all cultures-a search that can only be effective when learning is pursued on a worldwide basis.
J. William Fulbright
#22. Speed as a drug disorganizes the personality; speed as the goal of information dissemination commits a subtler crime. People are mainlining our words. We rarely read of the rational alternatives, only of the commands that all must change or else. This is a prescription for public panic.
Gail Sheehy
#23. The method of science is logical and rational; the method of the humanities is one of imagination, sympathetic understanding, 'indwelling.
Andrew Louth
#24. Rational assessments too often led to rational surrenders.
Scott Jurek
#25. Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.
Marilyn French
#26. In understandably wishing to increase freedom and liberty, it paradoxically left massive road kill everywhere on the highway to rational heaven.
Ken Wilber
#27. I no longer idolize reason. I have come to accept that ninety percent of what we do is irrational and that we spend what little rational thought we have in justifying our irrationality.
Rita Mae Brown
#28. Adolescents have a very rocky insecure time. Grown-ups treat them like children and yet expect them to act like adults. They give them orders like little animals, then expect them to react like mature, and always rational, self-assured persons of legal stature.
Beatrice Sparks
#29. I'm not rational enough to be a good journalist.
Jim Harrison
#30. You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false.
Paul Graham
#31. Man can sin against nature in two ways. First, when he sins against his specific rational nature, acting contrary to reason. In this sense, we can say that every sin is a sin against man's nature, because it is against man's right reason ...
Thomas Aquinas
#32. Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
Orson Welles
#33. Bill Brent knew nothing about epistemology; but he knew that man must live by his own rational perception of reality, that he cannot act against it or escape it or find a substitute for it - and that there is no other way for him to live. He
Ayn Rand
#34. What is rational in the practice of thoughtful medicine is impractical for the system.
Melissa Cady
#35. There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#36. The more rational we are, the more emotional we can be.
Nino Gruettke
#37. In the first period religious life appears as a form of discipline which the individual or a whole people must accept as an unconditional command without any rational understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of that command.
Muhammad Iqbal
#38. I'm quite a rational person, but I'm drawn to the irrational. I love coincidences, and I like to question that in fiction: 'Is this random, or is there something working underneath?'
Lisa Tuttle
#39. 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
#40. There is no effective rational answer to the challenge: "But give me a reason why I should love someone who does not deserve it." Love is the highest thing. There can be no higher reason to justify it.
Peter Kreeft
#41. A rational process is a moral process.
Ayn Rand
#42. The corporate state is an immensely powerful machine, ordered, legalistic, rational, yet utterly out of human control, wholly and perfectly indifferent to any human values.
Charles A. Reich
#43. Presenting a rational argument to a person who has forsaken the use of reason is like asking a vegetarian to eat a cheeseburger.
Michel Templet
#44. Everyone always has to have the rational, scientific explanation for something, even if it's so obviously wrong you could scream.
Diana Wynne Jones
#45. No one has yet determined the power of the human species ... what it may
perform by instinct, and what it may accomplish with rational determination.
Brian Herbert
#46. Society is the offspring of leisure; and to acquire this forms the only rational motive for accumulating wealth, notwithstanding the cant that prevails on the subject of labor.
Henry Theodore Tuckerman
#47. Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.
Roland Barthes
#48. Our exclusive dependence on rational thought and language has obscured our natural ability to sense the flow of energy.
Ilchi Lee
#49. Evil people can still keep promises. Many have done just that, girl, though they are usually not promises you 'rational' people wish them to keep.
Tim Reed
#50. God forgive me for having thought it possible that a schoolmaster could be out and out a rational being.
Walter Scott
#51. I believe that through its rational evaluation of truth and indifference to personal belief, science transcends religious and political divisions and so does bind us into a greater, more resilient whole.
Brian Greene
#52. I'm all for rational enjoyment, and so forth, but I think a fellow makes himself conspicuous when he throws soft-boiled eggs at the electric fan
P.G. Wodehouse
#53. Apartment houses, public transportation, and schools tell us something about the technical development of a society. They do not tell us whether the members of that society are suppressed subjects or free workers, whether they are rational or irrational men and women.
Wilhelm Reich
#54. Man, the rational animal, can put up with anything except what seems to him irrational; whatever is rational is tolerable.
Epictetus
#55. The doctrine of the Trinity teaches that God is one in essence and three in person, so He is one in one sense and three in another sense, and that does not violate the categories of rational thought or the law of non-contradiction.
R.C. Sproul
#56. China should be developing through the various foreign investments it receives. I hope for its level-headed and rational understanding that anything to discourage that is a disservice to itself.
Yoshihiko Noda
#57. Refuse any image that could have a rational meaning or any memory or culture
Luis Bunuel
#58. Art forms that appeal to [leftists] tend to focus on ... defeat and despair ... as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation.
Theodore J. Kaczynski
#59. There is the enormous corpus of Islamic law that is very rich. However, law is one rational exercise of reason. Philosophy is very different. Philosophy wants to try to understand everything. It is a better dialogue partner with faith than law.
Francis George
#60. If we don't pray according to the needs of the heart, we repress our deepest longings. Our prayers may not be rational, and we may be quite aware of that, but if we repress our needs, then those unsaid prayers will fester.
Madeleine L'Engle
#61. Drinking is in reality an occupation which employs a considerable portion of the time of many people; and to conduct it in the most rational and agreeable manner is one of the great arts of living.
James Boswell
#62. The religious guilt cycle interferes with learning and change. Rather than learning who he is as a sexual being, he measures himself against an impossible religious sexual standard and always comes up short. Absent religion, many unrestricted people can deal with their behavior in a rational manner.
Darrel Ray
#63. The true fountains of evidence [are] the head and heart of every rational and honest man. It is there nature has written her moral laws, and where every man may read them for himself.
Thomas Jefferson
#64. Social values in general are incrementally variable: neither safety, diversity, rational articulation, nor morality is categorically a good thing to have more of, without limits. All are subject to diminishing returns, and ultimately negative returns.
Thomas Sowell
#65. When you teach your students that it's "economically rational" to commit crimes where the fines for misconduct are lower than the expected return on the crime, you instill a professional ethic that has no room for morals.
Cory Doctorow
#66. I think the Democratic Party has picked a lot of the wrong candidates, the kind that Middle America, or people who are more down the middle and more rational, can't side with. I think that's been the problem.
Glenn Danzig
#67. Illegal immigrants make a rational choice when they decide to violate our immigration laws. They weigh the costs, including the risks of getting caught, against the benefits of a better life.
Jan C. Ting
#68. The consequences are not trivial: It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance. Much of what rational thinking seems to do is rationalize one's actions by fitting some logic to them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#69. [There can be no] rational administration of government when good men are held in the same esteem as bad ones.
Polybius
#70. In one dancing saloon I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice: 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'
Oscar Wilde
#71. As a general rule, highly rational writers (like Nabokov) write most comfortably in the morning, and mainly intuitive writers write most comfortably at night.
John Gardner
#72. While we somehow understand revenge on an intuitive level between individuals, I do suspect that companies, assuming that people are rational, completely miss and underestimate the motivation people have for revenge.
Dan Ariely
#73. In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#74. [I]n Great-Britain it is said that their constitution relies on the house of commons for honesty, and the lords for wisdom; whichwould be a rational reliance if honesty were to be bought with money, and if wisdom were hereditary.
Thomas Jefferson
#75. I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up Scotty, there's no rational life here.
Robert Anton Wilson
#76. Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments. They must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe ...
Ludwig Von Mises
#77. Can any rational person believe that the Bible is anything but a human document?
Clarence Darrow
#78. The oceans are the planet's last great living wilderness, man's only remaining frontier on earth, and perhaps his last chance to produce himself a rational species.
John Culliney
#79. When we're rational about rule-breaking we set a limit. You don't get 30 years in prison for a traffic ticket. But sometimes you sentence yourself to months or years of emotional pain over minor offenses.
David D. Burns
#80. No, no, no - you don't argue with concepts. You have to claim Dogma, and therefore leave no room for rational thought.
Kevin J. Anderson
#81. We're not interested in anyone saying the sky's falling, but David Nabhan is a rational man who has studied earthquakes seriously and has intelligent, useful information to offer.
Whitley Strieber
#82. If you want to feel good, be rational.
Ayn Rand
#83. In a rational society we would want our presidents to be teachers. In our actual society we insist they be cheerleaders.
Steve Allen
#84. The word 'human' refers to something more than the bodily form or even the rational mind. It refers also to that community of blood and experience which unites all men and women on the Earth.
C.S. Lewis
#85. 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
#86. I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking
Albert Einstein
#87. If you were a sane woman, I would, of course, behave in a more rational fashion. Since you are a lunatic, however, this is the only way.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
#88. The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.
William Hazlitt
#89. A mutual fund can do for you what you would do for yourself if you had sufficient time, training, and money to diversify, plus the temperament to stand back from your money and make rational decisions.
Venita VanCaspel
#90. Religion is either something we scorn because we are too rational or it's the realm of the fanatic who insists that their God and their religion is the only way and everyone else is dammed.
Frederick Lenz
#91. The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.
Erich Fromm
#92. We are irrational animals trained to be rational.
Ben Tolosa
#93. Driven by a concern with institutions, we re-enter the world of the behavioralists. But we do so not in protest against the notion of rational choice, but rather in an effort to understand how rationality on the part of individuals leads to coherence at the level of society. (Bates 1988, p. 399)
Elinor Ostrom
#94. ...[W]e must admit that... law must be valid, not merely for men, but for all rational creatures generally, not merely under certain contingent conditions or with exceptions, but with absolute necessity...
Immanuel Kant
#95. Fie these gods! What beings are these who would play so cruelly with the sensibilities of rational, conscientious mortals?
R.A. Salvatore
#96. If I have been given any gift in this life, it's my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination.
Tom Robbins
#97. I have always been a friend to hero-worship; it is the only rational one, and has always been in use amongst civilized people - the worship of spirits is synonymous with barbarism - it is mere fetish ... There is something philosophic in the worship of the heroes of the human race.
George Henry Borrow
#98. No tin-hat brigade of goose-stepping vigilantes or bibble-babbling mob of blackguarding and corporation paid scoundrels will prevent the onward march of labor, or divert its purpose to play its natural and rational part in the development of the economic, political and social life of our nation.
John L. Lewis
#99. What is surprising, even deeply disturbing, is the way that many individuals who consider themselves democratic, even-handed, rational, and free of prejudice, hold on tenaciously to a standard language ideology which attempts to justify restriction of individuality and rejection of the Other
Rosina Lippi-Green
#100. I don't think I'm being harassed by little green stalkers. I don't know what's really going on, but I'd rather try to eliminate all rational excuses before blaming intergalactic monkeys from the fourth dimension who are somehow interested in this really boring town.
Thomm Quackenbush
