Irrationality Quotes - Page 3

• What a mathematical proof actually does is show that certain conclusions, such as the irrationality of , follow from certain premises, such as the principle of mathematical induction. The validity of these premises is an entirely independent matter which can safely be left to philosophers.

  Timothy Gowers

  Independent, Principles, Doe

  Timothy Gowers (2010). “Mathematics”, p.50, Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.

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• Whereas Absurdism in Europe seemed a logical, almost inevitable response to the irrationality of war, the analogous elements that surfaced in American drama seemed more a response to a materialist society run amok. The American-style Absurdism seemed to spring full-blown out of television advertisements and situation comedies, which had become new myth-making machines.

  Arnold Aronson

  Running, Spring, War

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• 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.

  Terence McKenna

  Reality, Sea, Moments

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• But when reason and the study of history began revealing the irrationality, the limitations, and the merely transitory nature of the capitalist order, bourgeois ideology as a whole and with it bourgeois economics began abandoning both reason and history.

  Paul A. Baran

  Order, Study, Reason

  Paul A. Baran (1968). “Political Econ of Growth”, p.4, NYU Press

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• At no time have I ever said that people should be stripped of their right to the insanity of belief in God. If they want to practice this kind of irrationality, that's their business. It won't get them anywhere; it certainly won't make them happier or more compassionate human beings; but if they want to chew that particular cud. they're welcome to it.

  Madalyn Murray O'Hair

  Practice, People, Insanity

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• In our most Puritan of society, gambling-like other pleasures-is either taxed, restricted to certain hours, or forbidden altogether. Yet the impulse to gamble remains an eternal aspect of the irrationality of man. It finds outlets in business, war, politics, in the formal overtures of the gambling casinos, and in the less ceremonious exchanges among individuals of differing opinions.

  Richard Arnold Epstein

  War, Men, Gambling

  "The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic". Book by Richard Arnold Epstein, Preface To The First Edition, 1977.

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• The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profit

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Fun, Loser, Flaws

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms”, p.15, Random House

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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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• The northern ocean is beautiful, ... and beautiful the delicate intricacy of the snowflake before it melts and perishes, but such beauties are as nothing to him who delights in numbers, spurning alike the wild irrationality of life and baffling complexity of nature's laws.

  John Lighton Synge

  Life, Beautiful, Ocean

  John Lighton Synge (1957). “Kandelman's Krim: A Realistic Fantasy”

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• The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced.

  Ayn Rand

  Russia, Roots, Anxiety

  Ayn Rand (1984). “Philosophy: Who Needs It”, p.71, Penguin

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• I love my early movies, but naturalism is an artist's early style. Now I want to deal with feelings, dreams, an acceptance of irrationality.

  Irvin Kershner

  Dream, Acceptance, Artist

  "Irvin Kershner obituary" by Ronald Bergan, www.theguardian.com. November 29, 2010.

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• Doubtless, we are as slow to conceive of Paradise as of Heaven, of a perfect natural as of a perfect spiritual world. We see how past ages have loitered and erred. "Is perhaps our generation free from irrationality and error? Have we perhaps reached now the summit of human wisdom, and need no more to look out for mental or physical improvement?" Undoubtedly, we are never so visionary as to be prepared for what the next hour may bring forth.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Spiritual, Past, Errors

  Henry David Thoreau (2002). “The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau: Selected and Edited by Lewis Hyde”, p.122, North Point Press

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• Our world is integrated to an unprecedented degree, while the global political awakening is injecting into interstate relations an intense amount of tension, emotion, even irrationality, which could cumulatively produce circumstances that preclude an effective and genuinely shared universal response to new global problems.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Our World, Political, Degrees

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• Atheism, which people have tried to for hundreds of years as 'the ways of reason and science,' is proving to be mere irrationality and ignorance.

  Harun Yahya

  Ignorance, Years, People

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• The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance - if it is not irrational, you make illustration.

  Francis Bacon

  Lying, Illustration, Mystery

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• The transfinite numbers are in a sense the new irrationalities [ ... they] stand or fall with the finite irrational numbers.

  Georg Cantor

  Fall, Irrational Numbers, Mathematics

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• Priest is a fisherman and Holy Book is a fishook. We either refuse to be a fish or we burn in the frying pan of irrationality!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Book, Frying Pans, Holy

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• To enlighten people by reminding them the irrationality of their beliefs is an act more honest and more important than the act of praising and respecting people's beliefs!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  People, Important, Honest

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• Wherever there is a religious regime, over there there is ignorance, misery and absurdity! No religious state can ever elevate its own people! Sooner or later, the primitiveness of the religious administrations and the irrationality of the religious rules will cause a great collapse of those countries! The downfall is inevitable!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Country, Religious, Ignorance

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• There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Scientist, Made

  "The Politics of Ignorance". www.huffingtonpost.com. August 02, 2005.

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• But there are times when men have serious thoughts, and it is at such times, when they begin to think, that they begin to doubt the truth of the Christian religion; and well they may, for it is too fanciful and too full of conjecture, inconsistency, improbability and irrationality, to afford consolation to the thoughtful man. His reason revolts against his creed. He sees that none of its articles are proved, or can be proved.

  Thomas Paine

  Christian, Men, Thinking

  Thomas Paine (1854). “The Works of Thomas Paine: A Hero in the American Revolution. With an Account of His Life ...”, p.260

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• I start off with the obvious, that it makes no sense either to believe or to disbelieve in God until a substantial and intelligent definition or concept should be offered. Belief or disbelief is a secondary consideration, contingent on the intelligibility and cogency of the premise; the primal unintelligence or irrationality of moderns is revealed by their eagerness to leap to a conclusion without ever being curious what the hell the original premise was.

  Kenny Smith

  God, Believe, Intelligent

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• I understand, of course, that grain-fed meat is not the cause of the world hunger problem - and eating some of it doesn't directly take food out of the mouths of starving people - but it is, to me, a symbol and a symptom of the basic irrationality of a food system that's divorced from human needs. Therefore, using less meat can be an important way to take responsibility. Making conscious choices about what we eat, based on what the earth can sustain and what our bodies need, can help remind us that our whole society must begin to balance sustainable production with human need.

  Frances Moore Lappé

  Responsibility, Vegetarianism, People

  "Frances Moore Lappe: Diet for a Small Planet". Interview with Steve Keull and Pat Stone, www.motherearthnews.com. March/April 1982.

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• My clinical psychologist wife of 40 years has always had a close intellectual influence on me. When I was beginning to talk openly in the economics profession about irrationality in decision-making, I received a lot of criticism. Ginny would support my views and remind me that a whole other profession - psychology - studies people's irrational sides.

  Robert J. Shiller

  Views, Years, People

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• When you find yourself reluctant to sit on a chair because it had unexpectedly collapsed in the past you might shake your head and think "there, I'm so irrational!". But your reluctance to sit on a probably rickety chair is not irrational - you think it's irrational because you have a false view of what irrationality is.

  Nomy Arpaly

  Past, Thinking, Finding Yourself

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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