Quotes About Rationality

Vanity can easily overtake wisdom. It usually overtakes common sense.

Emotion is always the enemy of wise statesmanship.

Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional form and ceremonies.

I mean, I think it's a two-way relationship: I think you should not have too much faith in your own rationality. You should not have too much faith in the rationality of, you know, anybody else either. We all learn together about the way the world is, and I think it's a sort of antidote to wishful thinking of all kinds.

Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason.

There's no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.

To discover the true principles of Morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of gods: They have need only of common sense.

I don't know if the term 'liberation theology,' which can be interpreted in a very positive sense, will help us much. What's important is the common rationality to which the church offers a fundamental contribution, and which must always help in the education of conscience, both for public and for private life.

The classical theory of omniscient rationality is strikingly simple and beautiful.

In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence, I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.

It's hard to do that with people who think emotionally. A lot of people think in terms of people, emotions, and feelings. That's more complicated. Engineering mentality makes it, in theory, a little easier.

We could solve all our problems if only we were the efficient, rational human beings of standard economic theory and had politicians willing to think in the long-term interest of their people rather than their own.

Most investors give too much credence to the theory that prices are rational; they presume that a market collapse must have been justified by serious economic trouble.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

Education must lead us from the irresponsible opinion to true responsible judgment. It must lead us from chance and arbitrariness to rational clarity and intellectual order. Therefore, let us guide our students over the road of discipline from materials, through function, to creative work.

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.

Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts.

the skill of putting one's emotions on the shelf so as to think through solutions to problems more objectively, rationally, and logically—a skill called separation of affect—is really important. Kids who are pretty good at this skill tend to respond to problems or frustrations with more thought than emotion, and that's good.

Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.

Hegel claimed that reality was essentially reason and logic – "whatever is rational is real, and whatever is real is rational".

In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man's petty private rationality.