Quotes About Rationality

There is no such thing as 'the public interest' except as the sum of the interests of individual men. And the basic, common interest of all men—all rational men—is freedom. Freedom is the first requirement of 'the public interest'—not what men do when they are free, but that they are free. All their achievements rest on that foundation—and cannot exist without it.

If you have not yet heard it, my dear old-fashioned friends, it has now been proved that the rational is the insane.

And that, I suppose, is what I'd been trying to tell my mother that day: that her faith in justice and rationality was misplaced, that we couldn't overcome after all, that all the education and good intentions in the world couldn't help you plug up the holes in the universe or give you the power to change its blind, mindless course.

I'm an old-fashioned guy. I believe in the Enlightenment, and reason, and logic, and you know, facts.

That's what science is about: seeing the exact same things that other people do, finding the units of measurement with which to describe those things, communicating in the fewest and most precise words available. What could be saner—or more sociable—than that?

So if low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic.

And this, indeed, is the standard line among social scientists who study choice. If we're rational, they tell us, added options can only make us better off as a society. Those of us who care will benefit, and those of us who don't care can always ignore the added options. This view seems logically compelling; but empirically, it isn't true.

According to standard economic assumptions, the only opportunity costs that should figure into a decision are the ones associated with the next-best alternative.

Sane men will often take a hint," Mr. Kenopensky said. "Crazy men rarely do.

if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question.

Se ha demostrado que la toma de decisiones más se basa en las emociones y en las suposiciones que en la lógica.

For emotion is the enemy of rational argument.

His best chance of doing so is to engage the public's emotions, for emotion is the enemy of rational argument.

The modern world demands that we all think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally; that we think from a different angle, with a different set of muscles, with a different set of expectations; that we think with neither fear nor favor, with neither blind optimism nor sour skepticism. That we think like—ahem—a Freak.

We'd like to bury the idea that there's a right way and a wrong way, a smart way and a foolish way, a red way and a blue way. The modern world demands that we all think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally; that we think from a different angle, with a different set of muscles, with a different set of expectations; that we think with neither fear nor favor, with neither blind optimism nor sour skepticism. That we think like—ahem—a Freak.

To Chen's surprise, Felix and the others responded rationally. When the price of a given food rose, the monkeys bought less of it, and when the price fell, they bought more. The most basic law of economics—that the demand curve slopes downward—held for monkeys as well as humans.

emotion is the enemy of rational argument.

Freakonomics is out to dazzle you with facts; The Armchair Economist is out to dazzle you with logic.

Logic matters. It leads us from simple ideas to surprising conclusions.

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor favor to those of skill, but time and chance happen to them all. An essential part of rationality is dealing with randomness in our lives and uncertainty in our knowledge.

smarter people tend to think more like economists

To make decisions "rationally," by some set of rules, means to base the decisions on some grounds of truth:

Progress, The Progress Paradox, Infinite Progress, The Infinite Resource, The Rational Optimist, The Case for Rational Optimism, Utopia for Realists, Mass Flourishing, Abundance, The Improving State of the World, Getting Better, The End of Doom, The Moral Arc, The Big Ratchet, The Great Escape, The Great Surge, The Great Convergence.

A commitment to the concrete does more than just ease communication; it can lead to better reasoning.