Quotes About Rationality

Science, as everyone knows, is responsible, moderate, unsentimental, and otherwise good.

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts.

But the picture of when we reason best that emerges from the research is far away from the classic image of rationality - the wise scholar alone in a study. Rather, we avoid error when we reason in groups - allowing the push and pull of argumentation to get us out of holes that we'd otherwise dig ourselves into.

If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!

How can rational people who have their own best interests at heart fall for charismatic con artists who promise them the impossible while pursuing harmful agendas and corrupt selfish interests?

You don't logic, man. You sheer don't logic.

I am a Socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, Socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality, not because it wants people to be the same but because only through equality in our economic circumstances can our individuality develop properly.

Y ya nadie cree en los seres fantásticos —agregó Jared, pero luego pensó en Lucinda—. Al menos nadie que esté cuerdo.

Grandmother thought for a moment, and then she said that superstitious was when you didn't try to explain things that couldn't be explained.

Tal vez no necesitaríamos la Seguridad Social si la gente corriente fuese de verdad tan perfectamente racional y tuviese tanta visión de futuro como a los economistas les gusta suponer en sus modelos (y a la gente de derechas en su propaganda).

or we don't – and disaster follows. It has become common to laugh at the absurdities of the climate-change deniers, but there is a rationality to their response. They know that climate science destroys their authority, their power and their economic world. In a way, they have grasped that if climate change is real, capitalism is finished.

Men often make up in wrath what they want in reason.

anger based on calculated reason is more dangerous than anger based on blind hate

No passion disturbs the soundness of our judgement as anger does.

Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.

Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument.

I am the eternal optimist. I think that, over time, people respond to civility and -- and rational argument.

What no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.

Fallacious and misleading arguments are most easily detected if set out in correct syllogistic form.

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.

The sounder your argument, the more satisfaction you get out of it.

Rational argument can be defeated by refusing to argue rationally.

The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading