Quotes About Rationality

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.

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

What the heart most wants, the mind finds reasonable, the will finds doable, and the emotions find desirable.

You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason---if you pick the proper postulates.

People can make arguments from the Bible if they want to. But I want them to see that they should also give arguments that all reasonable citizens might agree to.

There's no logic in how Donald Trump thinks. I don't want someone who's the president who says 3 to 5 million people voted illegally when there's zero proof. It's a crazy person.

I think young people really do care. They want to build their life on something that's solid and makes sense, that's rational, that's not built on mythology, make-believe and wishful thinking.

No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.

Despite all the lunacy of the last century, all the absurdity of war and genocide, we believe that humans being are rational and are made to seek the truth.

I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war... But we have no more urgent task.

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.

The dangers of sophistry and scholasticism are present in the possibility of philosophy itself.

how can human beings behave in ways that so thoroughly violate both reasonable and rational norms?

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.

I've suppressed my aspirations to forget all rationality and let the moment explain everything, for nothing to be said and everything understood. If only I knew how to let these feelings out.

You are a full of beautiful madness, an unreasonable reason, but you make sense in all things senseless.

Love is the opposite of good sense.

The only definition of rationality that I've found that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is the following: what is rational is that which allows for survival. Unlike modern theories by psychosophasters, it maps to the classical way of thinking. Anything that hinders one's survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is, to me, irrational.

Locke's definition of a madman: someone "reasoning correctly from erroneous premises.

bounded rationality: we cannot possibly measure and assess everything as if we were a computer; we therefore produce, under evolutionary pressures, some shortcuts and distortions. Our knowledge of the world is fundamentally incomplete, so we need to avoid getting into unanticipated trouble. And even if our knowledge of the world were complete, it would still be computationally near-impossible to produce a precise, unbiased understanding of reality.

Just as we are not likely to mistake a bear for a stone (but likely to mistake a stone for a bear), it is almost impossible for someone rational, with a clear, uninfected mind, someone who is not drowning in data, to mistake a vital signal, one that matters for his survival, for noise.

Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

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.

This lack of translation is a mental handicap that comes with being a human; and we will only start to attain wisdom or rationality when we make an effort to overcome and break through it.