Quotes About Rationality

The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die...His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such. He gives way without reserve to his most powerful passion and the wishes it engenders.

The essence of philosophy is the abandonment of all authority in favor of individual human reason.

Universality and rationality were the hallmarks of all these teachings. But very quickly culturewhich was for Kant and, speaking anachronistically, for Rousseau, singularbecame cultures.

Only exceptionally rational men can afford to be absurd.

Happiness, for Rand, is not mere pleasure or desire-satisfaction. It is that state of "non-contradictory joy" (Atlas 1022) that is the concomitant of achieving what one has rationally identified as objectively good.

porque no hay fe inalterable sino la que puede mirar frente a frente a la razón en todas las edades de la humanidad".

Reason is the power or capacity whereby we see or detect logical relationships among propositions.

De jure objections are arguments of claims to the effect that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or irrational, or not intellectually respectable, or contrary to sound morality, or without sufficient evidence, or in some other way rationally unacceptable, not up to snuff from an intellectual point of view.

The natural theologian does not, typically, offer his arguments in order to convince people of God's existence; and in fact few who accept theistic belief do so because they find such an argument compelling. Instead the typical function of natural theology has been to show that religious belief is rationally acceptable.

Argument is not needed for rational justification. The believer is entirely within his epistemic right in believing, for example, that God has created the world, even if he has no argument at all for that conclusion..

If my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God.

The Reformed epistemologist may concur with Calvin in holding that God has implanted in us a natural tendency to see his hand in the world around us; the same cannot be said for the Great Pumpkin, there being no Great Pumpkin and no natural tendency to accept beliefs about the Great Pumpkin.

Accordingly, criteria for proper basicality must be reached from below rather than above; they should not be presented ex cathedra but argued to and tested by a relevant set of examples.

Para mí, un loco es un ser cuyo comportamiento resulta inexplicable. El mío, en cambio, puedo explicarlo

Common sense says that if something possessed the ability to create itself from nothing, then that something wasn't nothing, it was something - a very intelligent creative power of some sort.

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

Great creativity is astonishingly, absurdly, rationally, irrationally powerful.

What has struck me about the political world, as opposed to the business world, is that rational discourse has become all but impossible. All too often, arguments are conducted not on the basis of facts but on the basis of emotion - and, honestly, it is no fun being abused in the pages of tabloid newspapers or online.

He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

Yet we had fingered the prefrontal cortex. This region was considered the seat of human reason, the locus of forethought and wisdom and rationality and other cognitive functions that distinguish us from "lower" animals. But we were saying it rules our emotions, too—and that the barricade that psychology had erected between reason and emotion has no basis in fact.

Respect for the dignity of others includes treating them as rational creatures capable of being persuadad by rational argument, even in the face of frequent evidence to the contrary.

There are people who want to achieve--and then there are sane people.

When there are two possible solutions, favor the one that is simpler and based on concrete need rather than the more intricate one that boasts of generality.

The theory and practice of socialism, and its offshoot, communism, postulate that all the existing ways of humanity are irrational and that it is the mission of those in the know to make out of them something radically different: mankind's entire past is but a long detour on the road to its true destiny.