Quotes About Rationality

everything human is human because it is brought about through thinking, and for that reason alone."5

So far beyond rational thought is your attitude, that nothing I can say will change it. A lifetime of reasoning with you would not alter your amazing inability to comprehend reality.

From an intuitionistic standpoint, mathematics, when correctly carried on, would not need any justification from without, a buttress from the side or a foundation from below: it would wear its own justification on its face.

Meritocracy is about recreating science's success in the political, social, economic and religious spheres. It's about rational thinking, evidence-based policies and continual experimentation. It's about deliberately creating institutions of thesis, antithesis and synthesis to provide an engine of progress that drives the world relentlessly forward to an omega point of perfection

If you're rational you don't get to believe whatever you want to believe.

When in the evening we are alone with our most existential thoughts, it is then that we come face to face with the most precious truths that we discover in our brief existence in this world. Just before fatigue envelopes us, taking us into sleep. We think of what our lives actually mean. And then we know how lucky we are if we still enjoy consciousness, rationality and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Still more striking is the fact that Kant unites epistemology and ethics specifically through the concept of law.

Even reason is individualized, and becomes merely the reasoning of an individual without power or authority to oblige acceptance by others: to convince a man is not to enjoy a common understanding with him, but to displace his reason by yours.111

Rationality and calm self-determination were one of the great illusions of the universe... in the end, we were all ruled by our passions.

You try to understand human behavior. You try to explain it. Not me. I know we're smaller than gorillas, bigger than chimps, worse than both of them and, for all our rationality, our rules and laws, our baser drives are still straight out of the jungle.

Anarchy is a state of society where the only government is reason.

Whatever its psychological origins, vegetarianism appears to stem less from a rational consideration of the evidence than an emotional rejection of killing animals

There is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. There is only the natural, the normal, and mysteries we have yet to explain.

Rationality is the application of reason to form beliefs based on facts and evidence, instead of guesswork, opinions, and feelings. That is to say, the rational thinker wants to know what is really true and not just what he or she would like to be true.

Our greater capacity for learning is often offset by our greater capacity for magical thinking.

Well, which is the most rational theory about these ten millions of species? Is it most likely that there have been ten millions of special creations? or is it most likely that, by continual modifications due to change of circumstances, ten millions of varieties have been produced, as varieties are being produced still?"4 It's a good question.

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

This process essentially constitutes the construction of a normative point of view as a self-regulating mechanism, arguably the capstone of the ontogeny of uniquely human cognition (normative rationality) and sociality (normative morality).

His son-in-law and daughter hoped—they were even confident—that they could speak to DJT's better self, or at least balance Republican needs with progressive rationality, compassion, and good works.

nunca, en ningún momento de la historia humana, había existido una religión que ganara influencia sobre las masas dirigiéndose únicamente a la razón.

I do not despise believers. I find them neither ridiculous nor pathetic, but I lose all hope when I see that they prefer the comforting fairy tales of children to the cruel hard facts of adults. Better the faith that brings peace of mind than the rationality that brings worry--even at the price of perpetual mental infantilism. What a demonstration of metaphysical sleight of hand--and what a monstrous price!

El hombre, dicen, es un animal racional. No sé por qué no se haya dicho que es un animal afectivo o sentimental. Y acaso lo que de los demás animales le diferencia sea más el sentimiento que no la razón. Más veces he visto razonar a un gato que no reír o llorar. Acaso llore o ría por dentro, pero por dentro acaso también el cangrejo resuelva ecuaciones de segundo grado

Por qué nací, padre? - ?Pregunte más bien para qué nació. La pregunta - ¿por qué? - es la del racionalista que busca ciéntificamente las causas, pero la pregunta importante no es esa, sino la otra - ¿para qué? -, pues en ella anida el sentido que debemos dar a nuestra vida.

In the past few centuries economic rationality has een so successful that we have come to take for granted that the "bottom line" of any human effort is to be measured in dollars and cents. But an exclusively economic approach to life is profoundly irrational; the true bottom line consists in the quality and complexity of experience