Quotes About Irrationality

Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

Faith and feelings are the darkness to reason's light.

It wasn't possible to reason with people who were irrational. That was what made irrational people so profoundly dangerous.

Between every rational moment were a billion irrational ones.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

What happens if fully rational politicians compete for the support of irrational voters — specifically, voters with irrational beliefs about the effects of various policies? It is a recipe for mendacity.

Irrationality in politics is not a puzzle. It is precisely what an economic theory of irrationality predicts.

I love my early movies, but naturalism is an artist's early style. Now I want to deal with feelings, dreams, an acceptance of irrationality.

Madness was only a handicap only if you couldn't control its irrationalities.

Our society is full of hypocrites and irrational people.

I think everyone else felt as I did, secretly and irrationally, that if we could only succeed, if we could only destroy the whole place, we could save ourselves from ever having been in here.

When exposed to the light of day, the belief that objectivity protects us against irrationality and chaos does not seem to be true.

Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly...Her triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression.

Religious fervor breeds obsessive actions. Whether these actions are rational or irrational depends of your perspective.

there are four factors that create irrational market behavior: overconfidence, biased judgments, herd mentality, and loss aversion.

I stand four-square for reason, and object to what seems to me to be irrationality, whatever the source. If you are on my side in this, I must warn you that the army of the night has the advantage of overwhelming numbers, and, by its very nature, is immune to reason, so that it is entirely unlikely that you and I can win out. We will always remain a tiny and probably hopeless minority, but let us never tire of presenting our view, and of fighting the good fight for the right.

I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

But that emotional reaction isn't you being dumb or irrational; you are being human. It is hard to stay committed to anything when you are feeling vulnerable and threatened.

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.

My problem is that I'm not rational.

In other words, the diagonal of that square is irrational—and nowadays we recognize that number as the square root of two.

Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful.

No matter how high are one's estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that: a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid. b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.