Irrationality Quotes - Page 2

• The only factor that poses a genuine challenge to the current order is the willingness of human beings to reject the injustice and irrationality of this economy, and stand up for something better. Capitalism will not fall-rather, it must be pushed.

  Jim Stanford

  Fall, Order, Challenges

  "Economics For Everyone". Book by Jim Stanford, 2008.

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• I have lived lies. I have done it again and again. I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger, and I cannot admit the irrationality of love.-Marius

  Anne Rice

  Lying, Anger, Weakness

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• It has taken me a long time to realize where I most disagree with Marx. His assessment of capitalism is far too favorable. He took its instability, inhumanity and irrationality to be signs that it was a merely transitional form, which had delivered into humanity's hands the means to a much better way of life than any that have ever existed on earth. Marx could not bring himself to believe that our species is so benighted, irrational and slavish that it would put up with such a monstrous way of life.

  Allen W. Wood

  Believe, Taken, Mean

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of "the common good" and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed. In this world irrationality clings to man like his shadow so that the right things get done for the wrong reasons - afterwards, we dredge up the right reasons for justification. It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral; a world where "reconciliation" means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it.

  Saul Alinsky

  Mean, Angel, Men

  "Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals". Book by Saul Alinsky, p. 13, archive.org. 1971.

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• I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Character, Psychology

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• There is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgusting, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimous--secondly, because of its gross irrationality. We know the British to bear us little but ill will--we know that, in no case do they utter unbiased opinions of American books . . . we know all this, and yet, day after day, submit our necks to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that emanates from the fatherland.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Book, Ill Will, Criticism

  Edgar Allan Poe (2016). “Complete Works Of Edgar Allan Poe: The New Raven Edition”, p.1708, ShandonPress

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• Indeed, my wish is quite simple: if we could learn to recognise and evade the biggest errors in our thinking - in our private lives, at work or in government - we might experience a leap in prosperity. We need no extra cunning, no new ideas, no unnecessary gadgets, no frantic hyperactivity - all we need is less irrationality.

  Rolf Dobelli

  Simple, Thinking, Errors

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• The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, World, Rational

  Theodor W. Adorno (2013). “Aesthetic Theory”, p.27, A&C Black

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• I have thought sometimes that the sanest people, the people who are just very balanced, very happy, are probably lower achieving than other people. My kind of irrationality happens to be fear or anxiety.

  Jon Ronson

  People, Anxiety, Kind

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• Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn't exist, all at the same time.

  Robin Wasserman

  Memories, Data, Imagination

  Robin Wasserman (2011). “Shattered”, p.158, Simon and Schuster

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• Madness was only a handicap only if you couldn't control its irrationalities.

  Stuart Hill

  Madness, Handicaps, Ifs

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• To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life.

  George H. Smith

  Human Life, Humans, Destructive

  George H. Smith (2010). “Atheism: The Case Against God”, p.10, Prometheus Books

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• An engineer cannot participate in irrationality.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Engineering, Engineers

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• Seas of blood have been shed for the sake of patriotism. One would expect the harm and irrationality of patriotism to be self-evident to everyone. But the surprising fact is that cultured and learned people not only do not notice the harm and stupidity of patriotism, they resist every unveiling of it with the greatest obstinacy and passion (with no rational grounds), and continue to praise it as beneficent and elevating.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Passion, Self, Blood

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• Every man builds his world in his own image; he has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice.

  Ayn Rand

  Power, Men, Escaping

  Ayn Rand (2016). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.604, Hamilton Books

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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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• One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.

  Eric Hoffer

  Children, Growing Up, Eye

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Memories, Desire, Impulse

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2011). “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide”, p.142, Vintage

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• In fact, violence as a symbol of our growing irrationality has had an increasing role in activity for its own sake, when no possible justification could be made that the activity was seeking to resolve a problem.

  Carroll Quigley

  Sake, Violence, Facts

  Carroll Quigley (1979). “The evolution of civilizations: an introduction to historical analysis”, Liberty Fund Inc.

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• Appeasers will always try to get the least dangerous person to bend to the most dangerous person. This is one of the main problems in dysfunctional relationships. The more mature and rational you are the more you are victimized because, they are aware that you're not going to be as aggressive, destructive, or possibly as abusive and so you are the one who has to bend. You're the one who has to change and this constant rapping of rational people's souls around the prickly irrationalities of other people are what appeasers are constantly doing.

  Stefan Molyneux

  Rap, People, Soul

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• My conjecture is that most people will refuse to let go, even when their lives have become boring (at least in comparisons with possible lives lived by new generations). If this happens, there will eventually be no room for new generations. A kind of collective irrationality will lead to a bleak life for the last generation that decides to stay around. Unless we put and end to the human race (through global warming, for example), before this happens, individual egoism will block the path to a better world.

  Torbjorn Tannsjo

  Letting Go, Block, Race

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

  Ayn Rand

  Character, Winning, Thug

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.53, Penguin

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• I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

  Richard Dawkins

  Christmas, Father, People

  "Darwin's child". Interview with Simon Hattenstone, www.theguardian.com. February 10, 2003.

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• We're living through an age of irrationality and religious "fervor" I would call it religious idiocy. It's exhausting to year after year be on the receiving end of this demagoguery.

  Dan Savage

  Religious, Years, Age

  Source: www.rollingstone.com

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• In daily life, reality gives us material incentives to restrain our irrationality. But what incentive do we have to think rationally about politics?

  Bryan Caplan

  Reality, Thinking, Giving

  Bryan Caplan (2008). “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (New Edition)”, p.206, Princeton University Press

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