Rationality Quotes - Page 9

• Science is wonderful at explaining what science is wonderful at explaining, but beyond that it tends to look for its car keys where the light is good.

  Jonah Goldberg

  Keys, Light, Car

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• It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the later. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomena.

  Henri Poincare

  Errors, Differences, Finals

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• I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics...What's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating wide-spread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel an inadequacy in classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Real, Fall, Thinking

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later...They are just ghosts, immortal gods of the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are within that mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the anthropomorphic gods they replaced.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Real, Mind, Essentials

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Numbers, Infinite, Given

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• Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it.

  Steven Pinker

  Ideas, People, Ordinary

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• Reason is not like the goods sold in the market places--the more plentiful they are, the less they are worth. Reason's worth waxes with her abundance. But were she sold in the market, it is only the wise man who would understand her true value.

  Khalil Gibran

  Wise, Men, Abundance

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• Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. ... Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think.

  Max Horkheimer

  Men, Thinking, Law

  Max Horkheimer (1970). “Zeitschrift Fur Sozialforschung”

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• The inversion of external compulsion into the compulsion of conscience ... produces the machine-like assiduity and pliable allegiance required by the new rationality.

  Max Horkheimer

  Machines, Inversions, Produce

  "The Essential Frankfurt School Reader" by Max Horkheimer, (p. 34), 1982.

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• The dilemma of Brechtian performance is that, for all of Brecht's emphasis on rationality and the undermining of theatrical illusion, the actor must convincingly portray something that she is not.

  Philip Auslander

  Actors, Illusion, Brecht

  Philip Auslander (2002). “From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism”, p.33, Routledge

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• This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Self, Hypocrisy, Moments

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2015). “Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics: (Library of America #263)”, p.218, Library of America

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• The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Real, Character, Mean

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2015). “Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics: (Library of America #263)”, p.204, Library of America

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• I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how people work. So I think most moral philosophy is disconnected from the species that we happen to be. In fact, they like it that way. Many moral philosophers insist that morality grows out of our rationality, that it applies to any rational being anywhere in the universe, and that it is not based on contingent or coincidental facts about our evolution.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Philosophy, Thinking, People

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.

  A. R. Ammons

  Stress, Successful, Order

  A. R. Ammons (1996). “Set in motion: essays, interviews, and dialogues”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

  Isaac Asimov

  Ignorance, Knowledge, Science

  Isaac Asimov (1984). “Asimov's New guide to science”, Basic Books (AZ)

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• I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Childhood, Stories

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• Afraid? Batman's not afraid of anything. It's me. I'm afraid. I'm afraid that The Joker may be right about me. Sometimes…I question the rationality of my actions. And I’m afraid that when I walk through those asylum gates... when I walk into Arkham and the doors close behind me... it’ll be just like coming home.

  Grant Morrison

  Home, Doors, May

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• To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Humble, Modesty, Fallibility

  "Twelve Virtues of Rationality". Personal Website, yudkowsky.net.

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• 

  I’m not insane, I’m voluntarily indifferent to conventional rationality.

  Jared Leto

  Insane, Indifferent, Conventional

  FaceBook post by Jared Leto from Aug 04, 2013

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• To deal with future we have to deal with possibilities. Analysis will only tell us what is.

  Edward de Bono

  Future, Analysis, Possibility

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• Science is simply common sense at its best.

  Thomas Huxley

  Motivational, Math, Science

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1902). “An Introduction to the Study of Zoology, Illustrated by the Crayfish”

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• Scientists are not the paragons of rationality, objectivity, openmindedness and humility that many of them might like others to believe.

  Marcello Truzzi

  Believe, Humility, Science

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• There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling - absolutely essential to mental health and happiness.

  Dan Barker

  Joy, Doubt, Mind

  Dan Barker (1992). “Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist”, Freedom from Religion Fndtn

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• There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt at least a faint, morbid urge to jump. And anyone who has ever put a loaded pistol up to his head... All right, my point is this: even the most well-adjusted person is holding onto his or her sanity by a greased rope. I really believe that. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.

  Stephen King

  Depression, Suicide, Believe

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• If we can combine our knowledge of science with the wisdom of wildness, if we can nurture civilization through roots in the primitive, man's potentialities appear to be unbounded, Through this evolving awareness, and his awareness of that awareness, he can emerge with the miraculous-to which we can attach what better name than 'God'? And in this merging, as long sensed by intuition but still only vaguely perceived by rationality, experience may travel without need for accompanying life.

  Charles Lindbergh

  God, Wisdom, Science

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