Irrational Quotes - Page 14

• 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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• Everest is regarded as one of, if not the most challenging of human conquests. I was passionate about climbing and a great believer that one should always challenge their own perception of where their boundaries lie. Everest seemed like an irrational challenge for an Egyptian, so I embraced it wholeheartedly. This feeling grew stronger when I realized that no Egyptian had attempted, let alone stood, on the roof of the world. The desire and pride of representing my country and raising the Egyptian flag on the highest points on earth has been with me ever since.

  Omar Samra

  Country, Lying, Pride

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• But you must still know to respect other people's faith.'
  'Why? We don't respect any other delusion. We lock up people who believe they're Christ, yet we're supposed to humour those who believe in him.'
  'By definition, faith is irrational: a belief you hold against the normal rules of evidence.'
  'In which case I believe in Jedi

  Michael Arditti

  Believe, People, Locks

  Michael Arditti (2009). “The Enemy of the Good”, Arcadia Books

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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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• A rational reaction against the irrational excesses and vagaries of scepticism may, I admit, readily degenerate into the rival folly of credulity. To be engaged in opposing wrong affords, under the conditions of our mental constitution, but a slender guarantee for being right.

  William E. Gladstone

  Guarantees, Excess, Rivals

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

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• Mother love is the most powerful, the most irrational force on earth, even more powerful than sexual love. However, one does lead to the other, so best not to spurn the former.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Love, Mother, Powerful

  Rita Mae Brown (2007). “Full Cry: A Novel”, p.329, Ballantine Books

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• People will assign irrational importance to almost anything in quotes on top of a pleasant image

  Colin Fletcher

  People, Importance, Pleasant

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• An exotic and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed.

  Samuel Johnson

  Exotic, Entertainment, Has Beens

  'The Lives of the English Poets' (1779-81) 'Hughes'

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• When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. ... No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.

  Arthur Miller

  Men, White, Hands

  Arthur Miller (2016). “Collected Essays: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.157, Penguin

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• Bad news drives out good news. The irrational is more controversial than the rational. Concurrence can no longer compete with dissent. One minute of Eldridge Cleaver is worth ten minutes of Roy Wilkins. The labor crises settled at the negotiating table is nothing compared to the confrontation that results in a strike ... normality has become the nemesis of network news.

  Spiro T. Agnew

  News, Tables, Controversial

  John R. Coyne, Spiro T. Agnew (1972). “The Impudent Snobs: Agnew Vs. the Intellectual Establishment”, New Rochelle, N.Y. : Arlington House

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• People are irrational. What I want to do is let's take the irrational aspects out of it and let's just break this down. And you and I, let's go and see if we can't master this thing, a few steps at a time without giving up your day job, without having to give up your whole life.

  Tony Robbins

  Jobs, Giving Up, People

  "Interview with Tony Robbins on His New Book, ‘Money: Master the Game’". Interview With Marianne Schnall, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 20, 2014.

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• Artists are people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. Art education should help build those capacities and that discipline without messing over the child.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Art, Children, Discipline

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• In fact a man in love or one consumed with hatred creates symbols for himself, as a superstitious man does, from a passion of conferring uniqueness on things or persons. A man who knows nothing of symbols is one of Dante's sluggards. This is why art mirrors itself in primitive rites or strong passions, seeking for symbols, revolving round the primitive taste for savagery, for what is irrational (blood and sex).

  Cesare Pavese

  Art, Strong, Sex

  Cesare Pavese (2017). “This Business of Living: Diaries 1935-1950”, p.286, Routledge

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• While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Plot, Literature, Conscious

  "Laws of Media: The New Science". Book by Marshall McLuhan, co-written with Eric McLuhan, p. 52, 1988.

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• The authority of science promotes and encourages the activity of observing, comparing, measuring and ordering the physical characteristics of human bodies. Cartesian epistemology and classical ideals produced forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity that, though efficacious in the quest for truth and knowledge, prohibited the intelligibility and legitimacy of black equality. In fact, to "think" such an idea was to be deemed irrational, barbaric or mad.

  Cornel West

  Thinking, Objectivity, Ideas

  "Prophesy Deliverance!". Book by Cornel West, 1982.

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• In the background lurks the scourge of international terrorism. There are people exercising power in a few countries and leading political factions in others who seem to be moved by narrow, brutal and irrational impulses. Their view of their own self-interest is so blinkered as to leave no space for purely human values, for peaceful negotiation or for economic advancement. They are bent on the destruction of the established order and of civilised ways of doing business. They must never be allowed to succeed.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Country, Exercise, Self

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• For the first time in history, men and women are seriously exploring the possibilities of relationships based on separateness rather than togetherness. Instead of clinging to Yahweh, to a rigid set of laws established by a jealous Father-God who will rant in fury if he is disobeyed, they are simply ignoring that ranting, walking away from it, and attempting to put their trust in the irrational. In other words, they are trying to live by the spirit.

  Marion Woodman

  Father, Jealous, Men

  Marion Woodman (1982). “Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride : a Psychological Study”

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• Do you know that my personal crusade in life (in the philosophical sense) is not merely to fight collectivism, nor to fight altruism? These are only consequences, effects, not causes. I am out after the real cause, the real root of evil on earth the irrational.

  Ayn Rand

  Real, Philosophical, Fighting

  Ayn Rand (1997). “Letters of Ayn Rand”, p.382, Penguin

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• To me this question whether liberty is a good or a bad thing appears as irrational as the question whether fire is a good or a bad thing. It is both good and bad according to time, place, and circumstance, and a complete answer to the question, In what cases is liberty good and in what cases is it bad? would involve not merely a universal history of mankind, but a complete solution of the problems which such a history would offer.

  James Fitzjames Stephen

  Fire, Liberty, Answers

  "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". Book by James Fitzjames Stephen, Ch.2, 1873-1874.

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• In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Character, Average, Reactions

  "The Mass Psychology of Fascism". Book by Wilhelm Reich, 1933.

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• September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis Night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad in the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.

  Martin Amis

  Night, September 11, Islam

  "The voice of the lonely crowd" by Martin Amis, www.theguardian.com. June 1, 2002.

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• Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did achieve; and in every way the race grew better. Progress through irrational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the wildest cliches of romance, was what Kennaston found everywhere. All this, then, also was foreplanned, just as all happenings at Storisende had been, in his puny romance; and the puppets, here to, moved as they thought of their own volition, but really in order to serve a denouement in which many of them had not any personal part or interest...

  James Branch Cabell

  Race, Order, Romance

  "The Cream of the Jest: A Comedy of Evasions". Book by James Branch Cabell, 1917.

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• Law, in its most general and comprehensive sense, signifies a rule of action; and is applied indiscriminately to all kinds of action, whether animate, or inanimate, rational or irrational. Thus we say, the laws of motion, of gravitation, of optics, or mechanics, as well as the laws of nature and of nations. And it is that rule of action, which is prescribed by some superior, and which the inferior is bound to obey.

  William Blackstone

  Law, Optics, Action

  Sir William Blackstone, Edward Christian, John Frederick Archbold, Joseph Chitty (1827). “Commentaries on the Laws of England”, p.25

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