Rational Quotes - Page 24

• In a way, one gets stability from being able to order the rational mind.

  Richard Gere

  Order, Mind, Able

  "Richard Gere: My Journey as a Buddhist". Interview with Melvin McLeod, www.lionsroar.com. 1999.

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• Any approach to scientific inference which seeks to legitimize it and answer in reponse to complex uncertainty is, for me, a totalitarian parody of a would-be rational learning process.

  Adrian Smith

  Learning, Would Be, Answers

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• Out of an intuitive experience of the world comes a continuous flow of novel distinctions. Purely rational understanding, on the other hand, serves to confirm old mindsets, rigid categories. Artists, who live in the same world as the rest of us, steer clear of these mindsets to make us see things anew.

  Ellen Langer

  Thinking, Artist, Hands

  Ellen J. Langer (1989). “Mindfulness”, Da Capo Press

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• The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.

  C. S. Lewis

  Animal, Past, Guiding Principles

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• It is the job of conscious rational thought to decide what you want, select the goals you wish to achieve-and concentrate upon these rather than upon what you do not want. To spend time and effort concentrating upon what you do not want is not rational.

  Maxwell Maltz

  Motivational, Jobs, Goal

  Maxwell Maltz (1989). “Psycho-Cybernetics”, p.76, Simon and Schuster

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• Fear overrides all rational thinking

  Greg Secker

  Thinking, Self Improvement, Rational Thinking

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• Humans are ambitious and rational and proud. And we don't fall in line with people who don't respect us and who we don't believe have our best interests at heart. We are willing to follow leaders, but only to the extent that we believe they call on our best, not our worst.

  Rachel Maddow

  Inspirational, Leadership, Respect

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• It is man's intrinsic and irreducible self-responsibility to humanize himself, to exercise his entire range of rational and moral resources to raise his mode of being and seeing and acting above not just that of animals, but also above that of the majority of subhuman (never to be self-realized) humans who will never draw themselves into a self-punishing position of focal self-diagnosis and self-accountability.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Responsibility, Exercise

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• I've always wanted to make the world a more rational place. I'm still working on it.

  Penn Jillette

  World, Wanted, Stills

  Interview with Ken Plume, asitecalledfred.com. September 2003.

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• The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.

  Richard Dawkins

  Faith, Religious, Liberty

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything.

  Richard Linklater

  Dream, Waking, Infinite

  "Fictional character: Guy Forsyth". "Waking Life", www.imdb.com. 2001.

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• There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.

  Ayn Rand

  Truth, Integrity, Knowledge

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.101, Penguin

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• American literature has been, and is, singularly deficient in established critics who have anything like a rational conception of their jobs. The majority, initiate in a few of the patent rituals of Aristotle and Quintilian, don the forbidding robes of high priests to Sweetness and Light, and go about their business much as if the idea were to keep all they know to themselves.

  Burton Rascoe

  Jobs, Light, Ideas

  "Fanfare" by Burton Rascoe in "H. L. Mencken", 1920.

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• So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational. A free discipline controls the individual by appealing to his reason and conscience, and therefore to his self-respect; while an unfree control works upon some lower phase of the mind, and so tends to degrade him. It is freedom to be disciplined in as rational a manner as you are fit for.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Mean, Self, Discipline

  Charles Horton Cooley (2017). “Human Nature and the Social Order”, p.370, Routledge

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• All doctrines relating to the creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and his destiny after death, are conjectures which have been given out as facts, handed down with many adornments by tradition, and accepted by posterity as "revealed religion". They are theories more or less rational which uncivilised men have devised in order to explain the facts of life, and which civilised men believe that they believe.

  William Winwood Reade

  Believe, Destiny, Men

  William Winwood Reade (1874). “The Martyrdom of Man”, p.179

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• China should be developing through the various foreign investments it receives. I hope for its level-headed and rational understanding that anything to discourage that is a disservice to itself.

  Yoshihiko Noda

  Understanding, Levels, Investment

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• The Founding Fathers worried that some common impulse of passion might lead many to subvert the rights of the few. It's a rational fear, one that is played out endlessly.

  David Harsanyi

  Father, Passion, Rights

  "Right blogs on guns: 'We win'" by Kevin Cirilli, www.politico.com. April 18, 2013.

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• If a severe pandemic materializes, all of society could pay a heavy price for decades of failing to create a rational system of health care that works for all of us.

  Irwin Redlener

  Pandemics, Care, Pay

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• Wherefore, as I have said to you, I, God, have become man, and man has become God by the union of My Divine Nature with your human nature. This greatness is given in general to all rational creatures, but, among these I have especially chosen My ministers for the sake of your salvation, so that, through them, the Blood of the humble and immaculate Lamb, My only-begotten Son, may be administered to you.

  St. Catherine of Siena

  Humble, Son, Greatness

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• The argument from design is ultimately an appeal to miraculous causes, i.e., causes that do not, and cannot, occur in the natural course of events. This is why an explanation via design is not a legitimate alternative to scientific and other naturalistic modes of explanation. To refer to a miraculous cause is to refer to something that is inherently unknowable, and this sanctuary of ignorance explains nothing at all. However much it may soothe the imagination of the ignorant, it does nothing to satisfy the understanding of a rational person.

  George H. Smith

  Ignorance, Imagination, Design

  George H. Smith (2000). “Why Atheism?”, Pyr Books

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• It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Atheism, Citizens, Tests

  Thomas Jefferson (2011). “The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, Volume 7: 28 November 1813 to 30 September 1814”, p.304, Princeton University Press

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• There is no justice, there is no rational structure to it [life]. That is just the way it is, and each person figures out some way to cope.

  Woody Allen

  Justice, Way, Structure

  "Woody Allen's World: Whatever Works". Interview with Robert E. Lauder, www.commonwealmagazine.org. April 15, 2010.

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• The mind is the enemy of intuition, according to many New Age adherents, but I don't buy that. I look at everything in terms of polarities - two ends of the same continuum. Young/old, male/female, individuality/conformity, work/play, freedom/constraint, right/left, day/night, life/death, rational/emotional, and so on.

  Shakti Gawain

  Night, Emotional, Play

  "Shakti Gawain Is Still ‘Living in the Light’". Interview with BJ Gallagher, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 5, 2012.

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• That the world is not the embodiment of an eternal rationality can be conclusively proved by the fact that the piece of the worldthat we know--I mean our human reason--is not so very rational. And if it is not eternally and completely wise and rational, then the rest of the world will not be either; here the conclusion a minori ad majus, a parte ad totum applies, and does so with decisive force.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Wise, Mean, Doe

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• Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Reality

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1958). “Philosophy of right”

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