Quotes About Rational

Remember how social change happens. Each of us has a worldview that pretty much interprets the world for us, puts our personal and public experiences in some kind of rational and understandable order. That worldview works fairly well for a period of time. Then something happens that renders it insufficient. Something happens that can't be fit into life as we have known and interpreted it.

I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will -- and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain. Gene Roddenberry

It makes a great difference by what path we come to a knowledge of certain things. If we begin in our youth with metaphysics and religion we can easily proceed along a series of rational conclusions that will lead us to the immortality of the soul. Not every other path will lead to this, at least not quite so easily.

Reason is the substance of the universe. The design of the world is absolutely rational.

Progressives celebrated Holmes' assertion that government should be able to exercise almost untrammeled police powers as long as government asserts what would come to be called a "rational basis" for exercises of this power. And a mere assertion should suffice.

The events we have passed through form a coherent pattern and the political actors who have shaped the world are rational--if not necessarily moral or decent--actors. Americans tend to think of its leaders as fools and knaves and of its enemies as psychotic. This seems to comfort us. While America's leaders might be knaves, they are not fools, and while our enemies might have utterly different moral values that are repugnant to us, they are far from insane.

The system failed not because it was rational, but because rational choice in the face of massive ignorance—whether attributable to folly or deceit—is meaningless. Capitalism depends not on the freedom to choose but on the free flow of information across a low-entropy carrier. Corrupt the carrier with noise, and capitalism collapses. And the great corrupter of any carrier, the great generator of destructive noise, is power. And in this case the powers assembled were immense.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

The will is conceived as a faculty of determining oneself to action in accordance with the conception of certain laws. And such a faculty can be found only in rational beings.

The sight of a being who is not graced by any touch of a pure and good will but who yet enjoys an uninterrupted prosperity can never delight a rational and impartial spectator. Thus a good will seems to constitute the indispensable condition of being even worthy of happiness.

Philosophy may be said to contain the principles of the rational cognition that concepts

My fear is turnout. I think a lot of people might think: 'Well, in the end, it's the rational thing to stay, but I'll let other people make that choice for me.' Don't. This is very close, no doubt about it.

What could be more rational than the decision to use my gifts in a way which would most clearly manifest my moral and intellectual convictions?' My

In the past, secularists sought to challenge dogma by the use of rational argument, claiming, for example, that miracles described in the Bible are scientifically impossible.

My family is out of the ordinary in our physical lifestyle and the day-to-day things that we deal with, but my approach to them is pretty rational and sound. And I'm the quiet one! It's very different from my performing life.

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.

I have tried to be very rational, although I know love and hate are not rational and explained feelings.

As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning—actually I believe that one can be an intellectual without being a nerd, provided one has a private library instead of a classroom, and spends time as an aimless (but rational) flâneur benefiting from what randomness can give us inside and outside the library. Provided

types of errors is the most rational thing to do, when the errors are of little cost, as they lead to discoveries. For instance, most medical "discoveries" are accidental to something else. An error-free world would have no penicillin, no chemotherapy…almost no drugs, and most probably no humans.

In finance, for instance, people use flimsy theories to manage their risks and put wild ideas under "rational" scrutiny.

Self-efficacy is not the certainty that we will be able to master any and every challenge that life presents. It is the conviction that we are capable in principle of learning what we need to learn and that we are committed to doing our rational and conscientious best to master the tasks and challenges entailed by our values.

Thus, psychology, as it pertains to man, is properly conceived and defined as the science that studies the attributes and characteristics which man possesses by virtue of his rational faculty.

How wise of the founders to hide a kernel of truth within something so absurd. Who among the rational would search for it there?

Could the doomsayers have been correct, but rung the alarm a little too early? After all, Earth is finite, so the amount of energy it contains must also be finite. Isn't it wholly rational to expect fossil fuels to run out?