Quotes About Rationality

We phungus never judge guilt or innocence, we judge evidence. The law isn't emotional, you know, it's cold and impersonal.

We all have some screws loose, common sense and intelligence can diminish that

It's impossible to say. Normal motives don't necessarily apply to psychopathic personalities. Jeffrey Dahmer murdered and cannibalized seventeen people, three of whose skulls were found in his refrigerator." "That's perfectly rational behavior," said Desh sarcastically. "He just didn't want them to spoil.

Douglas E. Richards

Economic theory would tell you that a rational person would take the thirty dollars every time. Forget the other party, the decision was simple. You get thirty dollars or you get nothing. With this logic you would take any positive amount.

If life could be reduced to the purely rational, to a solvable equation, there would be no mystery, no excitement. Life would become utterly predictable; a tedious movie that could never surprise. The

another problem is that many of us are addicted to news itself. And this is a drug that can eat away at rationality and happiness both. No matter how much the news alarms someone with this addiction, or depresses them, or makes them absolutely miserable with the unfairness of the world, or puts them in a state of perpetual rage, they can't help but seek out even more news. And this news stokes even more outrage, and exposes them to even more dire warnings of coming catastrophes.

The Rational Optimist: How

There is one other possibility to explain the oddity of the Enlightenment thinkers ending up so prominently in the firing line of our era. And that is this: The European Enlightenments were the greatest leap forward for the concept of objective truth. The project that Hume and others worked away on was to ground an understanding of the world in verifiable fact. Miracles and other phenomena that had been a normal part of the world of ideas before their era suddenly lost all their footholds.

Attaching "produced at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT" to a ridiculous argument immediately makes it cogent to many. That's part of life, but let's not pretend that it's rationality.

We like to see ourselves as rational creatures, but we're often ready to buy into whatever is most comfortable or enjoyable to believe. We like ideas that fit with our existing worldview. We like to believe what our friends believe. And most of us like to believe that the future looks rosy.

Any irrational fears?no, i'm quite a rationalist. i'm not superstitious, i think life is too full of natural wonders and logical complexities to worry about illogical things.

I will follow my logic, no matter where it goes, after it has consulted with my heart. If you ever come to a conclusion without calling the heart in, you will come to a bad conclusion.

Your life must focus on the maximization of objectivity.

A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.

But emotionalism (i.e., decision making based on emotions) is bad, can be controlled, and should be avoided. So instead of examining each of the many individual emotions, this chapter will focus on the entity that epitomizes emotionalism: the crowd.

Never act upon wishful thinking. Act without checking the facts, and chances are that you will be swept away along with the mob.

What is the one thing that you'd never be able to sell in the market? Common sense! Those who have it wouldn't need to buy it. Those who don't have it wouldn't know what to do with it.

Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.

a focus on the "supremacy of reason" as the master trope of colonial critique has displaced the enduring affective work that such rationalities perform.

They went in a spirit of scientific enquiry, but they could not quite manage to be open-minded; for once on the mountain, strange fears began to assail them. Behind their bravely rational and humanist front, they were still men of the Middle Ages, and their climb became a metaphor for the struggle of Renaissance Europe to get past old ghosts.

Papa always makes it clear that he would like to know me as much more rational and lucid than the girls and women he gets to know during his analytic hours.

if we could act a little more according to common sense, and a good deal less according to fashion, we should find many things work easier;

Alexander Hamilton and John Adams] wanted to build democracy in America on the basis of rational debate, reason, and compromise. But they had no illusions about human nature: They knew that men could sometimes succumb to "passions," to use their old-fashioned word. They knew that any political system built on logic and rationality was always at risk from an outburst of the irrational.