Quotes About Rationality

A metà strada tra la fede e la critica c'è sempre l'ostello della ragione. La ragione è la fede in ciò che si può comprendere senza fede; ma è anche essa stessa una fede, perchè comprendere implica presupporre che esista qualcosa di comprensibile.

The world belongs to the unfeeling. The essential condition for being a practical man is the absence of any sensitivity

Cuando discutimos de algún asunto la razón no la tiene quien más grita sino el que es capaz de enlazar sus argumentos de modo adecuado.

We apply law to facts. We don't apply feelings to facts.

I care about facts. I don't care about your feelings.

A close friend of mine described me as a radical pragmatist. I embrace this no-nonsense distinction wholeheartedly. It is a character trait that matches the sense of myself I've had from as far back as I can remember. I am not one who goes in much for magical thinking. I don't believe in destiny, fate, or things like divine guidance, either.

It's hard to find logic in things sometimes. That's why I can't analyze things too much, because it often doesn't make much sense.

It is widely accepted and understood that consumer decisions are as much influenced by emotional attachments to a product or service as by factors like price and performance. So why is it that when it comes to most aspects of human transportation, the world still seems to believe people are rational machines?

If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart.

What our leaders and pundits never let slip is that the terrorists - whatever else they might be - might also be rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions.

Engineers are very logical and everything has to be tested so when we fail, we'll know why and how to improve things.

including Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and popularizers such as Archibald Alison, elaborating on sensibility and

All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal, but with a near infinite capacity for folly. . . . He draws blueprints for Utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand--his own part comic, part tragic, part cussed, but part glorious nature.

For love, as he knew it, was an aberration, a form of temporary insanity, a shortlived state of autosuggestion. Love was a state which a wise man would prudently avoid.

These discussions are not just of historic interest. Keynes was the first economist to put uncertainty at the heart of the economic problem, and thus raise the issue of the scope and meaning of rationality in economics. Is rationality possible in an uncertain world, and how is it to be specified?

A person can function normally in a million and one ways and hold the most irrational beliefs imaginable, as long as the irrational beliefs are culturally accepted delusions.

In short, from natural selection's point of view, it's good for you to tell a coherent story about yourself, to depict yourself as a rational, self-aware actor. So whenever your actual motivations aren't accessible to the part of your brain that communicates with the world, it would make sense for that part of your brain to generate stories about your motivation.

I had been outnumbered. Outmaneuvered. They'd withheld information from me. Worse, logic and rationality were on their side.

You are attempting to be logical, I suspect, and logic has little to do with government, and nothing at all to do with military administration.

People who kill themselves generally suffer from severe clinical depression," I said. "Their reasons for choosing suicide are not always rational. It's often a chemical imbalance that leads them to the choice.

If anyone was sane here, he swore it was by accident.

Fear outran its cause

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. ~Galileo Galilei

that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God.