Quotes About Rational

Freud introduced the unconscious, which in effect dethroned man as the uncontested master of his own rational faculties. Instead , our lives and our decisions, our loves and our hates, are more often the result of forces working elsewhere than in our conscious mind, and we are the dupes of those forces, rather than their master. (...) Indeed, thinking, as Descartes conceived it, accounts for considerably less than half the story of our being in the world.

Evil devastates any possibility of an intellectual response; the tools of the rational intellect are as helpless incoping with the aftereffects of evil as it was in preventing it.

We are the rational managers of a modern democracy, taking the optimum decisions to safeguard and enhance the lives of busy citizens who haven't got the time to work things out for themselves.

There is seldom any rational reason for having regreats about past deeds or events. Because the past does not exist in any other way than in your memory. When you recognise this lack of reality, you can be calm.

Presumably, those overhearing half a conversation were strongly compelled to try to infer the missing half in a way that made for a complete narrative. As the authors point out, the study may help explain why we find one-sided cell phone conversations in public spaces so intrusive, but it also reveals the ineluctable way we are drawn to imbue the events around us with rational explanations.

when all the bullshit about rational, divinely inspired social order is put to one side, Roman law was all about defining and protecting property rights...

horror stories in many ways touch us even more deeply. Because they remind us, that despite all our veneers of civilization and all our scientific progress, there are still things out there that defy the rational, and can scare the living daylights out of us.