Rational Quotes - Page 16

• It is sometimes rational to do what is wrong, and sometimes irrational to do what is right

  Dennis Prager

  Sometimes, Irrational

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• It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.

  Alasdair MacIntyre

  Practice, Community, Participation

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• We live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are children if they're serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton's Oval Office.

  Mark Steyn

  Children, Infantry Division, Office

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• All the worth which the human being possesses all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State... For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of History in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity...

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Spiritual, Reality, Objectivity

  "Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Volume 1". Book by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1832.

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• In the face of such overwhelming statistical possibilities hypochondria has always seems to me to be the only rational position to take on life.

  John Diamond

  Health, Faces, Possibility

  C by John Diamond p. 17. Vermilion, London (1998)

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• For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Greshams law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.

  Walter Lippmann

  Law, Liberty, Overcoming

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.196, Harvard University Press

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• If you wish a wise answer, you must put a rational question.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Wise, Wish, Answers

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• Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.

  Eric Hoffer

  Animal, Men, Play

  "Reflections on the Human Condition". Book by Eric Hoffer. Section 28, 1973.

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• I'm optimistic about Turkey's prospects for reaching the E.U.'s standards of development, governance, and democracy, whether inside or outside the E.U. Provided you have a prosperous, rational society in Turkey that can interact with Europe and the West, I don't really care what kind of institutional arrangement you have. The point to make about Turkey and Europe is that it's a very long, drawn-out process. What's important is that the process not be stopped, that Turkey and Europe evolve in the right direction, on a path of convergence. Convergence is the name of the game.

  Andrew Mango

  Optimistic, Long, Democracy

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• The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God.

  Joseph Campbell

  God, Reflection, Men

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.31, Anchor

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• I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

  Julian Barnes

  Thinking, Morbid, Fear Of Death

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• The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.

  Carlos Fuentes

  Mexican, Soul, Intelligence

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• The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.

  Anthony Kennedy

  Lying, Simple, Ordinary

  "Justice Kennedy Wants You to Fight Lies with Truth" by Robyn Hagan Cain, blogs.findlaw.com. June 29, 2012.

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• The development of a rational view of the nature of catalysis was thus absolutely dependent on the creation of the concept of the rate of chemical reaction.

  Wilhelm Ostwald

  Views, Development, Creation

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• The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation of it.

  Eugene Wigner

  Ontology, Logic, Mysterious

  Eugene Paul Wigner, Jagdish Mehra, Arthur S. Wightman (1997). “Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses”, p.535, Springer Science & Business Media

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• Labor was marching toward the goal of industrial democracy and contributing constructively toward a more rational arrangement of our domestic economy.

  John L. Lewis

  Goal, Democracy, Economy

  Labor and the Nation, delivered 3 September 1937 in Washington D.C.

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• Our rational minds often attempt to minimise or negate the mystical encounters. We forget the power of our experiences. We must embrace the reality of that event, which is a miracle.

  Brian Weiss

  Reality, Miracle, Mind

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• I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.

  Edward Abbey

  Men, Numbers, America

  "The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West". Book by Edward Abbey ("The Crooked Wood", p. 208), 1977.

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• I invent, find, and borrow ways of making painterly statements, which reflect my person to the extent that I am able to reach into that core of my being. It’s a kind of self-analysis that requires a balance between the rational and the intuited.

  Thornton Willis

  Self, Balance, Analysis

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• What no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.

  Austin Farrer

  Climate, Doe, May

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• Lawyers have a way of seeing that sets them apart from the rest of us. In some way this special vision makes them invaluable, and in other ways, repulsive. Lawyers are much more focused on rational, logical, and objective criteria to the exclusion of the emotional, subjective, and sometimes irrational reponses to the world. Moreover, lawyers like to show no emotion, and possess a particular disdain for the emotions that are found in others, which has the quality of making them seem inhuman.

  Thane Rosenbaum

  Emotional, Vision, Special

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• The movie business is very much like that: people in authority making purely emotional decisions instead of interesting rational ones.

  Bill Forsyth

  Emotional, People, Interesting

  Interview with Gerald Peary, www.geraldpeary.com. September 1985.

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• From 1918 on, trade unionists were to express from the platforms of their congresses the workers' desire for peace through a rational organization of the world.

  Leon Jouhaux

  Organization, Desire, World

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• Water creates a neurosis in golfers. The very thought of this harmless fluid robs them of their normal powers of rational thought, turns their legs to jelly, and produces a palsy of the upper limbs.

  Peter Dobereiner

  Golf, Water, Jelly

  Peter Dobereiner (1973). “The glorious world of golf”

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• You're saying, "I'm gonna do this thing," and you have to be aware, as a rational human being, that you may not be allowed back in.

  M. Night Shyamalan

  May, Humans, Human Beings

  Source: collider.com

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