Quotes About Rationality

The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Albert Einstein when he said, "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

How sad when those who reason, reason wrong.

There is nothing in life so irrational, that good sense and chance may not set it to rights; nothing so rational, that folly and chance may not utterly confound it.

Common sense is a tool that isn't in everyone's shed.

Rationality is the way to lead life. So high time, let's stop feeding our dreams and shake hands with the reality.

Concorde fallacy," the conviction that it's less wasteful to keep on throwing money into a failing project than to cut your losses and do something else.

In the scientific community, the adjective 'theological' is some- times used pejoratively to refer to a vague or ill-formulated belief. I believe this usage to be very far from the truth. It sad- dens me that some of my colleagues remain unaware of the truth-seeking intent and rational scrupulosity that character- ise theological discourse at its best.

As a consequence, scientists who are carefully reflective about their activity do not instinctively ask the question 'Is it reasonable?' as if they were confident beforehand what shape rationality had to take. We have noted how 'unreasonable', in classical Newtonian terms, the nature of light turned out to be. Instead, for the scientist the proper phrasing of the truth- seeking question takes the form, 'What makes you think that might be the case?

Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason.

In a world where millions of people make complex economic decisions, often what "feels right" makes for bad policy.

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognise, that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.

assuming that the true opinion abides in the mind, but abides as a prejudice, a belief independent of, and proof against, argument - this is not the way in which truth ought to be held by a rational being. This is not knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth.

Every induction is a syllogism with the major premise suppressed.

Nadie puede ser un gran pensador sin reconocer que su primer deber como tal consiste en seguir a su inteligencia cualesquiera que sean las conclusiones a que se vea conducido.

When you flip hamburgers, sit at a computer all day, unpack and shelve merchandise from China year after year, you manage the tedium better if you have a shallow inner life, one you can escape through booze, drugs, sex, media, or other low level addictive behaviors. Easier to keep sane if your inner life is shallow. School, thought Harris the great American schoolman, should prepare ordinary men and women for lifetimes of alienation. Can you say he wasn't fully rational?

Superstition may be defined as constructive religion which has grown incongruous with intelligence.

Don't you sometimes wish that you had been born into the Age of Reason, instead of into the Age of the Ostensible Reason?

man is not a rational animal. He may have invented many social philosophies, but he remains incurably biological.

Aronson's first law: People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy.

The voices of cold reason were talking, as usual, to deaf ears.

But when you begin with bullshit the conclusion you reach is still bullshit.

[Physics is] a good framework for thinking. … Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.