Irrational Quotes - Page 13

• Nothing could be more irrational than to give the people power, and to withhold from them information without which power is abused.

  James Madison

  People, Giving, Information

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• To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable.

  Epictetus

  Unendurable, Rational

  Epictetus (1926). “Discourses”

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• If anyone gets in my way when I'm making a picture, I become irrational. I'm never sure what I am going to do, or sometimes even aware of what I do-only that I want that picture.

  Margaret Bourke-White

  Photography, Want, Way

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• A rational reaction against irrational excesses and vagaries of skepticism may * * * readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity.

  William E. Gladstone

  Excess, Rivals, May

  "Homeric Synchronism: An Enquiry Into the Time and Place of Homer". Book by William Ewart Gladstone, 1876.

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• ... it is because one can build a compelling set of arguments - informed by science and thoroughly compatible with it - that to believe in anything despite the complete lack of evidence is, in fact, irrational.

  Massimo Pigliucci

  Believe, Religion, Atheism

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• The nightmare of the Cold War was nuclear weapons in the hands of an irrational person. I don't want to live through that nightmare.

  Rudy Giuliani

  War, Hands, Nuclear

  "He's Ready! Rudy Giuliani Talks with Sean Hannity". "Hannity & Colmes", www.foxnews.com. February 6, 2007.

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• I have a two-year-old who just turned three, and my four-year-old just turned five. I have the same irrational feelings taking them to pre-school. It's this charged combination of stress and joy and anxiety and excitement. When they're away, you've got a sudden loss of purpose and this ever-present fear about the kid's welfare. The departure of our children from our nest is not an easy thing.

  Vera Farmiga

  Children, Stress, School

  "Q&A: Bates Motel's Vera Farmiga on the Terrors of Parenthood". Interview with Eric Spitznagel, www.esquire.com. February 1, 2014.

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• It's a completely irrational decision to drop out of school.

  David Brooks

  School, Decision

  "David Brooks: From Spouses to Sofas, ‘Emotions Tell Us What to Value’". Interview with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. March 8, 2011.

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• How did reason come into the world? As is fitting, in an irrational manner, by accident. One will have to guess at it as at a riddle.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  World, Reason, Fitting

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.57, Penguin

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• The most basic inherent constraint is that neither time nor wisdom are free goods available in unlimited quantity. This means that in social processes, as in economic processes, it is not only impossible to attain perfection but irrational to seek perfection- or even to seek the best possible result in each separate instance.

  Thomas Sowell

  Mean, Perfection, Impossible

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• Idiosyncratic belief systems which are shared by only a few adherents are likely to be regarded as delusional. Belief systems which may be just as irrational but which are shared by millions are called world religions.

  Anthony Storr

  World Religions, May, Belief

  Anthony Storr (2015). “Feet Of Clay: The Power and Charisma of Gurus”, p.203, Simon and Schuster

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• Achieving success as an actor has not been easy for me. My biggest, probably most irrational complaint has been that I've had to work harder for what I've gotten. I've seen other people with nepotism or wealth or cheesy good looks on their side who've had it easy...

  James Woods

  Hard Work, People, Cheesy

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Dare to be irrational! - keep free from formulas, open to any fresh impulse, fluid.

  Edward Weston

  Courage, Fluid, Dare

  Edward Weston (1988). “Edward Weston”

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• I believe that if the silent majority were to protest against those who believe in irrational blind faith - who want to go backwards instead of forward, who are for tradition not innovation, who oppose individualism and plurality of thought - then the world would become a truly civilized world in which to live.

  Taslima Nasrin

  Believe, Innovation, Majority

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• It's not an irrational decision, I've been thinking about this for quite a while and maybe it'll be good for me [on his career break

  Ronnie O'Sullivan

  Thinking, Careers, Decision

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• The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational - an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.

  Herbert Read

  Art, Exercise, Skills

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• If you deeply appreciate and love what creative people do and how they think, which is usually in unpredictable and irrational ways, then you can start to understand them. And finally, you can see inside their minds and DNA.

  Bernard Arnault

  Thinking, Dna, People

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• Among irrational animals the love of the offspring and of the parents for each other is extraordinary because God, who created them, compensated for the deficiency of reason by the superiority of their senses.

  Saint Basil

  Animal, Parent, Reason

  Saint Basil (2010). “Exegetic Homilies (The Fathers of the Church, Volume 46)”, p.142, CUA Press

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• Society doesn't need that everybody is behaving in the full normal way... like people in a Buddhist monastery... But eccentricity may also connect with the irrational.

  John Muir

  Buddhist, People, Needs

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• Love is an irrational force, making humans do all sorts of strange and wonderful things like write poetry and take up the ukulele.

  Amy Dickinson

  Women, Writing, Love Is

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• It is not intuitive ease I am after, but rather a point of view which is sufficiently definite to clear up some difficulties, and to be criticized in rational terms. (Bohr's complementarity cannot be so criticized, I fear; it can only be accepted or denounced - perhaps as being ad hoc, or as being irrational, or as being hopelessly vague.)

  Karl Popper

  Science, Views, Ease

  Karl Popper, W.W. Bartley, III (2013). “Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics: From the Postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery”, p.103, Routledge

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• [T]he only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim.

  Ayn Rand

  Real, Men, Thinking

  Ayn Rand (2016). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.374, Hamilton Books

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• I feel that the time is always right to do what is right. Where progress for the Negro in America is concerned, there is a tragic misconception of time among whites. They seem to cherish a strange, irrational notion that something in the very flow of time will cure all ills.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  America, Progress, Flow

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• Post-Modern space is historically specific, rooted in conventions, unlimited or ambiguous in zoning and irrational or transformational in its relation of parts to whole……. …skew or distorted spaces, created by sharp angles which exaggerate perspective…. …always keep a mental coordinate system no matter how free- form and baroque they become. The reference plane is always an implied frontality, and the route through the building or the curvilinear elements then relate to this conceptual cage

  Charles Jencks

  Space, Perspective, Elements

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• The creative individual not only respects the irrational in himself, but also courts the most promising source of novelty in his own thought.

  Frank Barron

  Creative, Novelty, Individual

  Calvin Walker Taylor, Frank Barron (1963). “Research Conference on the Identification of Creative Scientific Talent”

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