Quotes About Rationality

Logic precedes every experience—that something is so.

More personally, my intellect is a stumbling block to much that makes life worth living: laughter, love; a wiling acceptance of being created. The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art.

La región ventromedial desempeña una función crucial en la toma de decisiones. Establece contingencias y relaciones, y organiza la montaña de información que recibimos del mundo exterior para priorizar y señalar las cosas que exigen atención inmediata. Quienes sufren alguna lesión en esta zona están plenamente capacitados para el pensamiento racional y pueden ser muy inteligentes y funcionales, pero carecen de capacidad de juicio.

McMahon made use of Veblen's conception of emulation in consumption, whereas Kyrk adopted Mitchell's view that notions of rationality derived from business calculation of profit cannot be applied to households controlled by other standards (1923, p. 144).

Precisamos de um senso de justiça, mas precisamos também de senso comum, de imaginação, de uma capacidade profunda de imaginar o outro, às vezes de nos colocarmos na pele do outro. Precisamos da capacidade racional de nos comprometer e, às vezes, de fazer sacrifícios e concessões. p. 53

North Korea is not irrational, and nothing shows this better than its continuing survival against all odds. North Korea is essentially a political living fossil, a relic of an era long gone.

North Korea's alleged penchant for irrational and erratic behavior is illusionary: the North Korean leaders actually know perfectly well what they are doing. They are neither madmen nor ideological zealots, but rather remarkably efficient and cold-minded calculators, perhaps the best practitioners of Machiavellian politics that can be found in the modern world.

There is much more to apologetics than affirming the capacity of the Christian faith to make sense of things. Apologetics, we must recall, engages the mind, emotions and imagination. It appeals to beauty and morality, as much as to rationality.

A lot of irrational behavior would look more rational if you could see it in the context of your whole long life.

Idea and image juxtapositioned, spinning between myth and rationality, the odd years spent at a right angle; if I over-reach, can I be sure of reclaiming a formula outside habitual movement? How easy it would be to finally slide over, allowing the rest to absolve itself. But remember society owes you nothing, therefore, doing yourself in isn't the answer, no reward for the resentment, and how would I know if it had proved freedom?

I am arguing that science can, in principle, help us understand what we would do and should want - and, therefore, what other people should do and should want in order to live the best lives possible. My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics, and such answers may on day fall within reach of the maturing sciences of mind.

The truth is that some people appear to be almost entirely motivated by their religious beliefs. Absent those beliefs, their behavior would make absolutely no sense; with them, it becomes perfectly understandable, even rational.

One of the greatest obstacles I see to our fashioning a rational approach to spirituality is to have religious superstition and self-deception masquerade as science.

religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse.

Bertrand Russell

We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them "religious"; otherwise, they are likely to be called "mad," "psychotic," or "delusional

Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity ? a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible. When foisted upon each generation anew, it renders us incapable of realizing just how much of our world has been unnecessarily ceded to a dark and barbarous past.

The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.

we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification

By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.

In our next presidential election, an actor who reads his Bible would almost certainly defeat a rocket scientist who does not. Could there be any clearer indication that we are allowing unreason and otherworldliness to govern our affairs?

Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it shall perish by it.

what reason did not dictate, reason cannot explain.

ALOGY  (A'LOGY)   n.s. Unreasonableness; absurdity.Dict.