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Rational Quotes

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Rational Quotes

“We know from this book entitled... What is it? Surrendered? Succumbed? I can never remember the title perform. And we learn from this book that 24 hours after the election, the Hillary Clinton campaign decided to blame their defeat on the Russians colluding with Trump to affect the outcome of the election. And that allegation ends up being taken so seriously by so many supposedly rational people that now even so-called Republicans are talking about impeaching Donald Trump.”

“Any rational human being is horrified and existentially baffled by the reality of the Holocaust meted out by the Nazis, by the majority of Germans throughout the 1930s and World War II; and by the countless countries, communities and individuals who collaborated with the vast constellation of Hitler's monsters in the gruesome murder of well over 60% of European Jewry. Codex Orféo reminds us that the root of that insanity is continuing in the form of contemporary Holocausts against other species, with equally systematic, atrocious and inexplicable madness.”

“I don't know if Mika Brzezinski intended to be that honest. She's very worried the president intimidating the media is gonna lead to people believing what the president says instead of what the media says, and it's the media's job to control what people think. She used the word "control." She worries that Donald Trump is acing them on this and her fear is rational, but her philosophy is off course, all wet.”

“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.”

“In the last few decades we have seen the extraordinary rise of ecosocialist movements around the world inspired in large part by Marx's ecological critique of political economy. Marx was indeed influenced by some of the earliest attempts to develop what we now call an ecological-systems view, rooted in the concept of metabolism. Building on this perspective, Marx defined socialism as the rational regulation by the associated producers of the metabolism between society and nature in such a way as to conserve energy and to promote the satisfaction of human needs.”

“None of us are rational economic men as we're supposed to be portrayed in economic theory where mixes of passions, of desires, of moral principles, of self-deception, of altruism, of concern of others, of concerns for ourselves and an interest in our bank accounts. And social policies have to be responsive to the complexity of who we are as people or else, like the war on drugs, they're simply going to fail.”

“Philosophy is not a body of knowledge to impart to someone, that's why reading philosophy books isn't always the best way of learning philosophy. Philosophy is really more the process of rational engagement, rational reflection with a diversity of views and ideas and opinions and trying to sort of reason your way through to a more reflective position. I think if you look at it that way, philosophizing is to some extent some small way a part of almost everyone's lives although they don't recognize it as such and a lot of people are embarrassed about it.”

“I studied law before I became a filmmaker, and I actually have a great belief in the justice system and the rule of law. I think it's the thing that separates us from animals. I really believe in the rule of law because it's an attempt to bring rational accountability to human behavior, which has a great capability of becoming irrational.”

“I was raised Catholic. But if someone says I was raised in some religion, that's insufficient information to actually know what was going on. The real question is Was the religion in the household? The answer is no. Important decisions in the household were executed rationally and secularly. So as a result, the foundations of my reasoning derive not from religion but from the rational analysis of circumstances.”

“Why are we so addicted to factual knowledge? Why are we so uncomfortable with the unknown? Is it something about the anxiety of our time? Because of course that wasn't always the way. Even now the whole idea of the rational individual has been subject to question and yet we still cling to this idea of factual, rational knowledge being more valuable than whatever its opposite might be.”

“I'm also looking for the psychological elements that fuel commodity culture. For example, if we imbue girls with deep insecurity about their bodies through images of an impossible ideal, we create a really vulnerable and avid consumer. If somebody feels that they're not OK without a certain product, you have a very deep and loyal market that will come back to the product again and again. Sometimes, this process is both rational and irrational.”

“When people are temperate in their behavior, in their lives, someone who is addictive or extreme or obsessive can't understand how people can just go through their lives in the middle, and people who are rational and balanced can't understand the opposite. I'm one who's in the extreme camp in almost every area of my life and I always have been. I've observed that I'm in a minority, but I never understand people who are measured.”

“Do I think that people should in the best of all possible worlds have to go to jail for wanting the US government to pay attention to the warnings of scientists about climate change? Not really. I mean, in a rational world, if all the scientists said, "The worst thing that ever happened is about to happen and here's what you should do to stop it," you would expect any rational system to say, "Oh, sure, OK, let's do something about it." But that's not the world we live in. In the world we live in, you do need people willing to stand up, fight, march and sometimes go to jail.”

“There is a lot of new research about how stress hormones affect your body and how you can work on giving your body as much of the good hormones as possible, because that heals your body. I am quite a rational person - so when someone could show me that there was a rational way of seeing fear in terms of stress hormones, it was easier for me to understand. I think all autoimmune diseases are very sensitive to stress. It is typical that the flares come after a period of emotional stress. The connection is quite clear.”

“Most astronauts are very down-to-earth people. Many of us, three-quarters, have an engineering degree, and we have a very Cartesian, rational approach to things. You don't go and get swept off your feet. That's not your job and that's not why you're hired. So if you get so mesmerized that you forget to do what you're supposed to do, whether it's to open the cargo door of the space shuttle or configure something inside, then you should not be there as a professional operator.”

“I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people, at a younger age than I have, begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it.”

“What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness - a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian, a gun misfires and kills a bystander. Better to have some rational cause and effect between incident and injury. And if cause and effect aren't possible, better that there at least be some reward for all the suffering.”

“The scarcest resource these days is reason. What's certainly striking about American culture today is the great hostility toward science and the decline of respect for rational scientific thinking. People seem to think that we are ruled by the scientific method and that we overvalue reason. If there was ever a period when we overvalued reason, I think that it was probably extremely brief. What I see now is a great deal of superstition, as much superstition as there has ever been. There are probably more people who believe in guardian angels than who understand the law of gravity.”

“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.”

“But I still read Shaw on a regular basis. What I love is the nakedness of the polemic and the irresistible good humour. For me, 'Major Barbara' is the greatest of all the plays in that it starts from the rational and proceeds to the ecstatic in a spectacular way, and leaves you very confused if you cling to Euclidean logic.”