Rationality Quotes - Page 8

• In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.

  Krzysztof Kieslowski

  Believe, Too Much, Lost

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• Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

  Bertrand Russell

  Thinking, Essentials, Doubt And Certainty

  Bertrand Russell (2016). “Why I Am Not a Christian”, p.21, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Workers and their families may starve to death in the New World Order of economic rationality, but diamond necklaces are cheaper in elegant New York shops, thanks to the miracle of the market.

  Noam Chomsky

  New York, Order, Miracle

  Noam Chomsky (1997). “World Orders, Old and New”, p.128, Pluto Press

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• The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning.

  Rodolfo Llinas

  Creativity, Brain, Looks

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  Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

  Philip K. Dick

  Atheist, Real, Believe

  Valis ch. 5 (1981). Originally appeared in a 1978 lecture by Dick entitled "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart in Two Days." See Paktor 1

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• The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality.

  Robert Greene

  Real, Facts, Intense

  50 Cent, Robert Greene (2010). “The 50th Law”, p.46, Profile Books

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• I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science.

  Wernher von Braun

  Science, Origin Of Life, Design

  Wernher Von Braun (2007). “The Voice of Dr. Wernher Von Braun: An Anthology”, Collectors Guide Pub

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• The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball.

  Warren Buffett

  Investing Money, People, Triumph

  Warren Buffett (2009). “Warren Buffett on Business: Principles from the Sage of Omaha”, p.163, John Wiley & Sons

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• Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it.

  Steven Pinker

  Ideas, People, Ordinary

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• The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Numbers, Infinite, Given

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• What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later...They are just ghosts, immortal gods of the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are within that mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the anthropomorphic gods they replaced.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Real, Mind, Essentials

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics...What's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating wide-spread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel an inadequacy in classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Real, Fall, Thinking

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Weapons, Rulers

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• It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the later. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomena.

  Henri Poincare

  Errors, Differences, Finals

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• Since ancient times, the left side has stood for the side of the unconscious or the unknown; the right side, by contrast, has represented the side of consciousness or wakefulness. Through the late twentieth century, the movement of the Left limited themselves to a materialist understanding of reality- exemplified by Marxism- demanding social justice and economic equality but not the restoration of intuition and the recognition of the hidden, qualitative dimensions of being suppressed by the mental-rational consciousness, narrowly focused on the quantifiable.

  Jean Gebser

  Reality, Justice, Understanding

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• Science is wonderful at explaining what science is wonderful at explaining, but beyond that it tends to look for its car keys where the light is good.

  Jonah Goldberg

  Keys, Light, Car

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• Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of 'true' and 'false'? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance- different 'values', to use the language of painters?

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Shadow, Essentials, Degrees

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.236, Modern Library

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• Reason is not like the goods sold in the market places--the more plentiful they are, the less they are worth. Reason's worth waxes with her abundance. But were she sold in the market, it is only the wise man who would understand her true value.

  Khalil Gibran

  Wise, Men, Abundance

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• Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. ... Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think.

  Max Horkheimer

  Men, Thinking, Law

  Max Horkheimer (1970). “Zeitschrift Fur Sozialforschung”

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• I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how people work. So I think most moral philosophy is disconnected from the species that we happen to be. In fact, they like it that way. Many moral philosophers insist that morality grows out of our rationality, that it applies to any rational being anywhere in the universe, and that it is not based on contingent or coincidental facts about our evolution.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Philosophy, Thinking, People

  Source: bigthink.com

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• In the past, when people criticized me for asking unexpected questions, I felt ashamed. Now I realize that normal people are acting in a superficial and often false manner. So rather than let them make me feel bad, I express my annoyance. It's my way of trying to strike a blow for logic and rationality.

  John Elder Robison

  Blow, Past, People

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• If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!

  Tom Stoppard

  Would Be, World, Fields

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Jumpers”, p.26, Faber & Faber

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• Who is the brave man--he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Fear, Men, Imagination

  Geraldine Brooks (2006). “March”, p.106, Penguin

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• By elevating the dictum of the market to the role of the sole criterion of rationality and efficiency, economics denies even all "respectability" to the distinction between essential and non-essential consumption, between productive and unproductive labor, between actual and potential surplus.

  Paul A. Baran

  Essentials, Roles, Economics

  Paul A. Baran (1968). “Political Econ of Growth”, p.25, NYU Press

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• The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Real, Character, Mean

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2015). “Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics: (Library of America #263)”, p.204, Library of America

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