Rationality Quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche
One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.
2400 René Descartes
And thus, the actions of life often not allowing any delay, it is a truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine the most true opinions we ought to follow the most probable.
1946 Salman Rushdie
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
4248 Robert S. Mulliken
I decided that life rationally considered seemed pointless and futile, but it is still interesting in a variety of ways, including the study of science. So why not carry on, following the path of scientific hedonism? Besides, I did not have the courage for the more rational procedure of suicide.
4772 Stefan Molyneux
The true self is that which is in touch with reality.
The false self is the aspects of your personality that are adapted to threats and no longer consciously recognizes either the adaptation or the threat.
2130 Simon Blackburn
People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.
1673 Paul Gibbons
Many of the cataclysmic leadership failures were failures of rationality. The pendulum of leadership development needs to swing back toward the rational: strategy, creativity, foresight, decision-making, and analytics.
1658 Tom Heehler
The educated don't get that way by memorizing facts; they get that way by respecting them.
4399 Eliezer Yudkowsky
One of chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring rationalists is "Don't try to be clever." And, "Listen to those quiet, nagging doubts." If you don't know, you don't know what you don't know, you don't know how much you don't know, and you don't know how much you needed to know.
3668 Stefan Molyneux
The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.
1844 Bauvard
Selfishness is a bad habit. That’s why I always rationally think through my decisions to act without regard for others.
3500 Gene Wolfe
The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.
4622 Brian Cox
The problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it.
The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense!
4995 Leo Tolstoy
Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment.
2084 Norman G. Finkelstein
Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.
3092 Paul Graham
You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false.
2264 Ricky Gervais
A Christian telling an atheist they're going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they're not getting any presents from Santa.
2711 Mary Doria Russell
Writing my own novels in the '90s...I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor.
3070 Susan Neiman
You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms.
1061 Stefan Molyneux
Lies don't make you happy. They just make you lie about being happy.
3974 Ayn Rand
When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another - except brute, physical force.
4922 Terence McKenna
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.
1905 Peter Ackroyd
You say that it is time to shake off the Mist, but Mankind walks in a Mist; that Reason which you cry up as the Glory of this Age is a Proteus and Cameleon that changes its Shape almost in every Man: there is no Folly that may not have a thousand Reasons produc'd to advance it into the Class of Wisdom. Reason itself is a Mist.
1799 Peter Ackroyd
Well,' said Hawksmoor. 'It's a theory and a theory can do no harm.
2289 Stefan Molyneux
Truth has nothing to do with the conclusion, and everything to do with the methodology.
3738 Jane Austen
Elinor agreed with it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.
3290 David Levithan
the thing about fear is that it defies the laws of rationality. It creates its own laws instead
1839 Shannon Celebi
Of course, I rationalize the fear. I realize it’s not real, that my house isn’t burning down, that the deer aren’t going to kill me.
1905 Ronald H. Nash
Just as the moon derives the light it reflects from the sun, so the rational human mind derives a created ability to know from its origin, God.
3722 Eliezer Yudkowsky
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.
3974 J.G. Ballard
...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable.
4286 Raheel Farooq
Melancholy is an escape not from reality, but unreality of the world.
1048 Stefan Molyneux
Tribalism is an addiction that is driven by false beliefs that need to be reflected back to be perceived as true.
2239 Stefan Molyneux
Spiritual": religion without any rules. All the comfort of fictitious friends with none of their demands.
2356 Amit Kalantri
Rationality and common sense never goes out of fashion.
3406 Amit Kalantri
Leaders console the world with their speeches, heroes console the world with their actions.
1742 Stefan Molyneux
When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.
1707 Stefan Molyneux
Culture makes lies plausible through exposure to time. It makes prejudice seem like physics intergenerationally. It is therefore the most dangerous opponent of philosophy, because it feels the most credible to the average person.
3755 Jeffrey Tucker
The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy.
3445 Stefan Molyneux
The best way to destroy the decrepit is to build the glorious.
1603 Brian Eno
If we are ever going to achieve a rational approach to organizing our affairs, we have to dignify the process of admitting to being wrong. It doesn't help matters at all if the media, or your friends, accuse you of "flip-flopping" when you change your mind. Changing our minds is our hope for the future.
4624 Thomas M. Disch
It considered trying to explain their error to them, but what would be the use? They would only go away with hurt feelings. You can't always expect people, or squirrels, to be rational.
4072 Roy Blount Jr.
Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.
4264 Krzysztof Kieślowski
In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.
3339 Duop Chak Wuol
A man who does not question his own judgment, society, and who flourishes between deceit and bewilderment, fails his moral responsibility as a rational being.
2317 Martin Guevara Urbina
When the experts’ scientific knowledge is legitimated in terms of being rational, logical, efficient, educated, progressive, modern, and enlightened, what analogies can other segments of society . . . utilize to challenge them?
4923 B.R. Ambedkar
A bitter thing cannot be made sweet.
The taste of anything can be changed.
But poison cannot be changed into nectar.
4667 Jane Austen
I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.
2977 Mary Wollstonecraft
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.
3748 Raheel Farooq
That which does not come by logic, does not leave by logic.
2777 Nathaniel Branden
Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.
2025 Nathaniel Branden
In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued above thought, and self-surrender is valued above self-expression, and conformity is valued above integrity, those who preserve their self-esteem are likely to be heroic exceptions.
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