Quotes About Rationality

For when moral convictions are reduced to arbitrary preferences, then they can no longer be debated rationally.

to define what is rational solely by whether it fits the tenets of your own worldview is an invalid move because it rules out all other truth claims by definition. You do not even have to investigate the evidence. A serious search for truth does not start by stacking the deck.

We must reject the presumption that holding Christian beliefs disqualifies us as "biased," while the philosophical naturalists get a free pass by presenting their position as "unbiased" and "rational." Most of all, we need to liberate Christianity from the two-story division that has reduced it to an upper-story private experience, and learn how to restore it to the status of objective truth.

A reductionistic worldview leads to a lower view of humanity—and thus of the human mind. It reduces human reason to something less than reason. Yet the only way any worldview can argue its own case is by using reason. By discrediting reason, it undermines its own case. It is self-defeating.

The Bible teaches that, without God, people are morally lost. But they are also intellectually lost because they are trying to live within the limits of a worldview that is too cramped and narrow to account for their own humanity. They are forced to place their entire hope for dignity and meaning in an upper-story realm that they themselves regard as irrational and unknowable—nothing but necessary falsehoods.

So, despite the popular view of Stoicism as a philosophy that would strip us of most emotions, the ancient Stoics argue that the very best of us show rational exuberance and desire, and a cautious wariness, lest we be too easily led astray or deceived. We cherish friends and nurture warm and welcoming attitudes toward them. This is what it is to be righteous. Put bluntly, even sages have emotional skin in the game.

There are several ways of looking at this. You could say that mankind is getting smarter, removing itself from superstition and irrationality. Or you could say that human society is denying a basic truth that human beings have verified from the dawn of time, and that in removing themselves from the idea of a Supreme Being, man is moving away from all that is spiritual and moral in the world, all that is spiritual and moral in himself.

The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one's designs to one's means.

When your principles seem to be demanding suicide, clearly it's time to check your premises.

Whenever passion prevails over reason, truth becomes a casualty.

there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with that growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America.

almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one's habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the "analytic management of knowledge.

The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them.

The reader must come armed , in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one'sintellect thrown back on its own resourses. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.

used to think that intelligence came from books and knowledge and rational thought. But that's not intelligence: It's just information and interpretation. Real intelligence is when your mind and your heart connect. That's when you see the truth so clearly and unmistakably that you don't have to think about it. In fact, all thinking will do is lead you away from the truth and soon you'll be back in your head, groping with a penlight in the dark again.

S]cience has contributed a great deal to war and violence, and people well trained in science are sometimes not entirely rational and are even dogmatic. We have to find a way to teach reflectively, not just scientifically.

In the sane world, criminals could be negotiated with, threatened, bought off. For the most part they were rational folks just suffering from poor impulse control, arrogance or lack of moral rectitude. In an insane world, what was negotiable, threatening, legal tender? Where monsters be, monsters' rules are law and only the monster knows what they are.

Classical economists assume that people have rational and stable preferences and that their well-being is greatest when they have the maximum opportunities to satisfy them. So more choice is always better, and more income increases choices, so the way to make life better is to increase people's incomes. This theory is all well and good, but is it in fact true?

Buddhism is reason. Reason will win over your lord.

Science... denude(s) all religious beliefs... denigrating them as irrational forms of superstition or myth regardless of their intrinsic rationality or value.

If people assume that everyone on the Left is good, if they can't tear their eyes from abuses close to home to see the darker world beyond, if they pretend that they are not taking sides when they opt for neutrality and then compound the fault by believing that the irrational has rational causes, then disgrace inevitably follows.

Man, until yesterday, did not deserve to be called a rational animal. The definition was inexact as long as he invented, according to his preference, religious attitudes and ethical behavior, aesthetic tasks and philosophical meditations. Today, on the other hand, man limits himself to being a rational animal, that is to say: an inventor of practical rules at the service of his animality.

With the appearance of "rational" relations among individuals the process of a society's decay begins.