Quotes About Rationality

it is through sentiment and sympathy, not through rationality and universalistic moral discourse, that democratic advances take place. This is why he considers books like Uncle Tom's Cabin to have played a more important role than philosophical treatises in securing moral progress."12

To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.

Logic is boring because it works. Being unreasonable is exciting.

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

History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.

Any conversation with Smith turned up at least one bit of human behavior which could not be justified logically, at least in terms that Smith could understand, and attempts to do so were endlessly time-consuming.

That night he wrote in his diary, Challenge a remaining taboo. It was that simple. He had always wanted to understand genius, and now he had the formula. Freud, living in an age that prized its own seeming rationality, had found one of the remaining taboos and dared to think beyond it: he discovered infant sexuality and the unconscious, among other things. Galileo had gone beyond the taboo Thou shalt not question Aristotle. Every great discovery had been the breaking of a taboo.

Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.

As long as the Cold War exists, the New Irrationality will have its own kind of rationality, just as Establishment-salaried Rationality has its own irrationalism.

Proudhon was a great communication analyst, bom 100 years too soon to be understood. His system of voluntary association (anarchy) is based on the simple communication principles that an authoritarian system means one-way communication, or stupidity, and a libertarian system means two-way communication, or rationality.

What the skeptic really seems to be claiming is that he knows what the subject feels better than the subject knows – i.e., that the subject doesn't feel what he feels but feels something else. This is the kind of verbal metaphysics that made the medieval theologians become the laughing-stocks of Voltaire and other rationalist critics.

psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised.

I've seen what rational thought leads to. Dumbest people I ever met were intellectuals.

It is not much good being wise among fools and sane among lunatics.

The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality.

was terrified, and logic meant nothing when you were scared.

But to some people home was home, a complex of feeling far beyond rationality, a sort of grid or gravitational field in which the personality itself took its geometrical shape. While for others, a place was just a place, and the self free of all that, the same no matter where it was. One kind lived in the Einsteinian curved space of home, the other in the Newtonian absolute space of the free self.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

You cannot expect any rational thought from a religious man. He is like a rocking log in water.

Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that.

If you study carefully, you will see that Buddhism is based on reason. There is an element of flexibility inherent in it, which is not found in any other religion.

It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.

One can't logically argue that because something highly improbable happens, some occult force had to make it happen that way.

We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.