Quotes About Irrationality

Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.

Then, suddenly, I was unpredictably and uncontrollably irrational and destructive. This was not something that could be overcome by protocol or etiquette. God, conspicuously, was nowhere to be found.

Humans were eventually irrational creatures gifted with the power of rationality.

Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational.

Like my father, Donor White could hold in his head the incompatible demands of rationality and irrationality, of facts and love.

Falconer walked up and said, "I just want to say right now that this is the stupidest shit I've ever been involved in.

To be logical is very illogical.

You know," Sybylla said warmly, "it isn't such a terrible thing to be incapable of open-mindedness. All of us are swayed by our experiences, and by prejudices. If the school bully who beat you up had red hair, then maybe there's a tiny part of you that resents people with red hair, even though you may know this to be irrational.

Power beyond reason created a lasting irrationality.

The utilitarian behaves sensibly in all that is required for preservation but never takes account of the fact that he must die...His whole life is absorbed in avoiding death, which is inevitable, and therefore he might be thought to be the most irrational of men, if rationality has anything to do with understanding ends or comprehending the human situation as such. He gives way without reserve to his most powerful passion and the wishes it engenders.

Great creativity is astonishingly, absurdly, rationally, irrationally powerful.

Logic is boring because it works. Being unreasonable is exciting.

Humans are fundamentally irrational. They use what precious rationality they have justifying their irrational behavior. A

As long as the Cold War exists, the New Irrationality will have its own kind of rationality, just as Establishment-salaried Rationality has its own irrationalism.

So, in real-world democracy, well-informed citizens are politically at the mercy of their irrational and ignorant fellow citizens. Knowing this, politicians and officials strategically cater to majority irrationality, and, once in power, they govern for the sake of gaining reelection.

The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality.

Humanity is in the highest degree irrational, so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable arguments. Against prejudice one can do nothing.

One day Plapa told us about irrational numbers, and, I remember, I cried, banged my fists on the table, and screamed, "I don't want V-1"!! Take V-1 out of me!" That irrational root grew in me like something foreign, alien, terrifying. It devoured me, and you couldn't make sense of it or neutralize it, because it was completely beyond ratio.

To speak of chance is to negate the possibility of any law of cause and effect. Chance is the one final irrationality acceptable to the free will.

In Western European realist fiction, what is a writer going to do (we wondered out loud) with the irrational, with synchronicities, with superstition and the private magic we invent to keep us out of harm's way, with the uncanny, with thought streams and digressions that contradict our attempt to fix the story?

In fact, all the additional knowledge gained by an irrationally constituted society may but enlarge and enhance the powers of death and destruction.

Foolishness is living in opposition to what we know to be true. I am afraid this irrational condition and manner of thinking is universally prevalent in all of us. We are not merely irrational every now and then. Without God, we live in a state of irrationality.

If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.

In short, if we observe, we shall find that the animal man is pained by nothing so much as by that which is irrational; and, on the contrary, attracted to nothing so much as to that which is rational.