Quotes About Rationality

We are right to be rational and to try to increase our production and so keep manufacturing costs down. But we are also right to cherish those very imperfections we are endeavouring to eliminate. Social life consists in destroying that which gives it its savour.

"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."

To the outside observer, deep thinking may appear methodically compulsive, but it is much more the product of a person's faith in himself and his emotional inclinations than the result of any objective discipline. Hence James' descriptive phrase: "the sentiment of rationality.

He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.

It is not rational to assume, without evidence, that rationality can disclose everything about the world, just because it can disclose some things. Our intuition in favour of rationality, where we are inclined to use it, is just that - an intuition. Reason is founded in intuition and ends in intuition, like a pair of massive bookends.

Personally, I don't see old economics and behavioural economics as opposed. It is useful to assume people are rational as a good approximation to their long term behaviour, but it would be unwise not to think how in practice their behaviour may deviate from that simplifying assumption.

If I were surrounded by angels who were purely rational and had no inclinations at all, I couldn't do anything for them. I couldn't make them happy; I couldn't make them sad, I would be entirely useless as a moral agent.

We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.

WHEN YOU INVEST, your mind has a mind of its own. At the very moment when you are most convinced of your own rationality, you may be feeling rather than thinking your way toward a decision.

I could almost see common sense and denial fighting away at each other within her. In the end, denial won, as it so often does.

Simply put: the easiest and most likely explanation, however mundane, is probably correct.

Patriotism was a great thing but it worked best when it was tempered by common sense.

Why are criminal acts and anomalies imputed to a chemical or biological process, but never virtues and good deeds? It does indeed seem that only Evil has a right to an 'objective' explanation. Which suggests that scientific rationality might itself be merely a deeper form of this principle of Evil.

Something in her brain that still remained calm told her that she was doing a very foolish thing indeed.

Qu'il voie par ses yeux, qu'il sente par son coeur ; qu'aucune autorité ne le gouverne, hors celle de sa propre raison.

From the very fact, indeed, that I am conscious of the motives which solicit my action, these motives are already transcendent objects from my consciousness, they are outside; in vain shall I seek to cling to them: I escape from them through my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the affective and rational motives of my act: I am condemned to be free.

This then is the age of reason.

It is more rational to suspect knavery and folly than to discount, at a stroke, everything that past experience has taught me about the way things actually work

A conviction akin to religious feeling of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a high order.

I possess a strong sense of reason.

If you're going to vote on a television contract, there is a certain rationality to saying that the same structures that are applied to Health Plan participation should be placed on the right to vote on a strike.

Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments.

I am not the opposite of theism. I am right in the middle of those non-believers and believers. It's not even about being agnostic or nastik. Why would I take a name given to me by my opposition? I am just a rationalist.