Quotes About Rationality

To understand why sludge matters, let's begin with the assumption that people are fully rational and that in deciding whether to wade through sludge, they make some calculation about costs and benefits. Even if the benefits of that wading are high, the costs might prove overwhelming.

Anachron's Law: There is no myth which is so irrational that no one will believe it. Anachron's Corollary: There is no truth which is so obvious that everyone will accept it.

Seeing may be believing, but, in order to understand what you are seeing, logic is necessary.

Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality.

Critical theory upends the universal values of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationality, science, equality and freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which dominant groups subjugate other groups. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power.

Vanity is the quicksand of reason.

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited.

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably.

To oversimplify, we overwhelmingly search out opportunities to play Stag Hunts rather than outsmart each other in Prisoner's Dilemmas.

Who is the brave man--he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't.

When a man begins to reason, he ceases to feel.

We do not wish ardently for what we desire only through reason.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.

A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.

As Spinoza, or someone very much like him, once said . . .

Passions unguided are for the most part mere madness.

Reason is also choice.

All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

Reason is the mistress and queen of all things.

If I go to heaven I want to take my reason with me.