Quotes About Rationality

Let reason alone decide

Crazy people don't need an explanayshun for nothing.

This must be insanity. (But I'm as sane as anyone.)

Emotions by their very nature are not reasonable things.

Las emociones, por definición, no son razonables.

Name the nine prime fallacies," he snapped. "Simplification. Generalization. Circularity. Reduction. Analogy. False causality. Semantism. Irrelevancy….

Carlyle was upset because the economists were against slavery. He argued for the reintroduction of slavery in the West Indies and was annoyed that the economists railed against it. Think about this when you're tempted to scorn economists and the cool approach they take to human affairs, and when you hear people equating strong feelings with goodness and cold reason with nastiness. In the real world, as we've seen, the truth is usually the opposite.

The fifth chapter is about evil, looking skeptically at the view that lack of empathy makes people worse. The final chapter steps back to defend human rationality, arguing that we really do have the capacity to use reasoned deliberation to make it through the world. We live in an age of reason.

Populism offers the headless heart; ideology offers the heartless head.

At the higher realms of rationality, even reason can begin to appear irrational.

El propio Spinoza no tuvo ninguna duda sobre la verdad y la certeza de su pensamiento: «No pretendo haber encontrado la mejor filosofía, pero sí sé que pienso la verdadera. Si se me pregunta cómo lo sé, respondo que de la misma manera que se conoce que los tres ángulos de un triángulo suman dos ángulos rectos».

Reason is the presupposition of faith, and faith is the fulfillment of reason.

Once you've condoned faith in general, you've condoned any crazy shit done because of faith.

We can't get our minds around God. I don't think the Christian faith is fundamentally rational, by which I mean it cannot be captured fully by our rational faculties—and in fact, more often than not, confounds them. A God who can be comfortably captured in our minds, with little else for us to find out apart from an occasional adjustment, is no God at all. Expecting faith in God to be rational is often more the problem than the solution.

I believe that intelligence and rationality will always be primary no matter what shape sentient creatures take. To not think that would be to doubt the value of life itself.

The study of reasons for opinions is at the centre of philosophy.

Rationality is simply mysticism misunderstood.

We can't avoid reasoning; we can only avoid doing it well.