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Rationality Quotes

Browse 562 quotes about Rationality.

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Rationality Quotes

“Stressful conditions tax our cognitive bandwidth, reducing our ability to think clearly and exercise executive control. Stress also hurts our ability to make rational long-term decisions that require delayed gratification. Living in a community in which we feel a sense of trust and support acts as a buffer against the detrimental impact of scarcity. However, a higher level of income inequality in our community can fray our sense of social trust.”

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Book:Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things
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“The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.”

StatesPhilosophyGovernmentReligionEvilPoliticsNationsFreedomLibertyKnowledgeDemocracySelf EsteemLibertarianSocialismCommunismPatriotismNationalismDelusionAnarchyFascismSelf KnowledgeRationalityTaxationTheftMafiaSuperstitionCollectivismPsychopathStatismVoluntaryismNazisAncapAnarcho CapitalismCountries
Author:Stefan Molyneux
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“The battle between impulse and wisdom is not a sign that one is weak or flawed - it is a natural feature of being human. Our psyches are not monolithic, but assemblages of different drives, emotions, and thought patterns. By acknowledging the battle, we can more consciously support the side of wisdom.”

WisdomEmotionPsychologyMindfulnessSelf AwarenessMental HealthRationalityPsycheInternal DialogueInner Leadership
Book:The Council of Gods
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“Do you know, I sometimes, catch myself wishing that I too were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They're wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight living is a worthless act. To labor at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me. I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you”

LifeReasonFactsPurposeEmotionBlindIntelligenceSatisfactionDelightIntellectEnvyReasoningRationality
Author:Jack London
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“Sorry, but I have to be who I am. Everyone else is taken... So be your self! Speak your truth - if there are people around you who tempt you with non-existence blast through that and give them the full glory of who you are. Do not withhold yourself from the world. Do not piss on the incandescent gift of your existence. Do not drown yourself in the petty fog and dustiness of other people's ancient superstitions, unbeliefs, aggressions, culture and crap! No! Be a flare! We were born that way. Born perfectly happy being inconvenient to our parents. We shit, piss, cry, wake up at night, throw up on their shoulders, scream... We are, in essence, in our humanity, perfectly comfortable with inconveniencing others. That's how we're born, how we grow and develop. I choose to inconvenience the irrational.”

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Author:Stefan Molyneux
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“Had reason ever created a poem, or a symphony, or a painting? If rationality can’t see things like the secret commonwealth, it’s because rationality’s vision is limited. The secret commonwealth is there. We can’t see it with rationality any more than we can weigh something with a microscope: it’s the wrong sort of instrument. We need to imagine as well as measure ...”

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Book:The Secret Commonwealth
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“It is one thing to explain the causal origins of thinking, as science commendably does; it is an entirely different thing to conflate thinking in its formal or rule-governed dimension with its evolutionary genesis. Being conditioned is not the same as being constituted. Such a conflation not only sophistically elides the distinction between the substantive and the formal, it also falls victim to a dogmatic metaphysics that is impulsively blind to its own epistemological and methodological bases qua origins. It is this genetic fallacy that sanctions the demotion of general intelligence as qualitatively distinct to a mere quantitative account of intelligent behaviours prevalent in nature. It should not come as a any surprise that this is exactly the jaded gesture of antihumanism upon whose shoddy pillars today's discourse of posthumanism supports its case. Talk of thinking forests, rocks, worn shoes, and ethereal beings goes hand in hand with the cult of technological singularity, musings on Skynet or the Market as speculative posthuman intelligence, and computers endowed with intellectual intuition. And again, by now it should have become obvious that, despite the seeming antagonism between these two camps - one promoting the so-called egalitarianism of going beyond human conditions by dispensing with the rational resources of critique, the other advancing the speculative aspects of posthuman supremacy on the grounds of the technological overcoming of the human condition - they both in fact belong to the arsenal of today's neoliberal capitalism in its full-on assault on any account of intelligence that may remotely insinuate an ambition for collective rationality and imagination.”

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Book:Intelligence and Spirit
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“The common mob, the philistines and money changers, are 'flies in the market-place'. Then, as the Outsider's insight becomes deeper, so that he no longer sees men as a million million individuals, but instead sees the world-will that drives them all like ants in a formicary, he knows that they will never escape their stupidity and delusions, that no amount of logic and knowledge can make man any more than an insect; the most irritating of the human lice is the humanist with his puffed-up pride in Reason and his ignorance of his own silliness.”

HumanismIndividualityConformityRationalityElitism
Book:The Outsider
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“In a state which is really articulated rationally all the laws and organizations are nothing but a realization of freedom in its essential characteristics. When this is the case, the individual’s reason finds in these institutions, only the actuality of his own essence, and if he obeys these laws, he coincides, not with something alien to himself, but simply with what is his own. Freedom of choice, of course, is often equally called ‘freedom’; but freedom of choice is only non-rational freedom, choice and self-determination issuing not from the rationality of the will but from fortuitous impulses and their dependence on sense and the external world.”

FreedomInstitutionsIndividualityRationalityModernityLawsHegelThe State
Book:Lecciones de Estetica
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“We must certainly consider, not just in this class, but outside it, in our own turbulent and fretful lives, the element of chance. The number of people we deeply meet is strangely few. Passion may mislead us furiously. Reason may mislead us just as much. Our genetic inheritance might hamstring us. So might previous events in our lives. It is not just soldiers in the field who later suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. It is often the inevitable consequence of a seemingly normal sublunary existence.”

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Book:Elizabeth Finch
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“The human has not one but two births – first, when a person is born from the mother’s womb, and second, when that person rises from the socio-culturally imposed cocoon of prejudices and ignorance.”

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Book:Principia Humanitas
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“In the society of thinking humanity, the natural law of trust should be - In I, I trust.”

PhilosophyTruthScienceInspirational QuotesHumanityConsciousnessHuman NatureSelf HelpIgnoranceSelf LoveWise WordsWords Of WisdomPrejudiceSelf AwarenessSelf ConfidenceSelf RealizationPhilosophy QuotesWise SayingsTruth QuotesRationalitySageNeuroscienceRational ThinkingSocial PsychologyNeuropsychologySocial NormsPrejudicesFree ThinkingPrinciples Of HumanismSagesPrincipia HumanitasIn God We TrustIn God I Trust
Book:Principia Humanitas
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“For the most part, people strenuously resist any redefinition of morality, because it shakes them to the very core of their being to think that in pursuing virtue they may have been feeding vice, or in fighting vice they may have in fact been fighting virtue.”

SelfReasonPhilosophyFactsGovernmentEvilBeliefPeaceFreedomEducationLibertyKnowledgeLearningVirtueDangerousMoralityEthicsEvidenceUniversalLibertarianProofRationalAnarchySecularSelf KnowledgeRationalityCoercionCritical ThinkingSuperstitionIndoctrinationStatismBrainwashingVoluntaryismAncapRelearningUniversal EthicsUniversally Preferable Behavior
Author:Stefan Molyneux
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“Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious.”

ReasonPhilosophyFreedomEducationDoctrineCatholicismPersecutionRationalityGood SenseSchoolingFreedom Of ThoughtInquisitionFreedom Of ReligionIndependent Thought
Book:The Dream of Scipio
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“Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly...Her triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression.”

LifeFearPovertyRationalityElizabeth Jane
Book:The Mayor of Casterbridge
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“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am -- not stuck in the middle, but hovering above the entire farcical spectrum, weeping as I behold my fellow man's devotion to political illusion and self-destruction.”

ReasonPhilosophyGovernmentTruthEvilPoliticsFreedomLibertyKnowledgeLibertarianSocialismVotingAnarchyIndividualismThievesSelf KnowledgeRationalityTaxationGangTheftMafiaCoercionCollectivismStatismVoluntaryismAncapMatrixAnarcho CapitalismUseful Idiots
Author:Robert Higgs
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“Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims—as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force—he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious; reason, to him, is a means of deception; he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason—and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked. His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men’s means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it.”

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Author:Ayn Rand
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“The root of liberalism, in a word, is hatred of compulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys. The liberal has faith in the individual – faith that he can be persuaded by rational means to beliefs compatible with social good.”

ReasonFaithIndividualRespectConscienceLiberalismRationalityCompulsionCoercionLiberalLost Generation
Book:Liberalism in America: Its Origin, Its Temporary Collapse, Its Future
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“Of course, when you shut off your brain from rational analysis, any book is dangerous. Taking literally ancient parables from thousands of years ago is much more dangerous than playing with a loaded gun. Ancient scrawls, written by different authors in different centuries with different agendas--yeah, let's get mad literal about that. The literalness problem is compounded in religion by the circular logic of not being allowed to question anything, or else you're lacking faith.”

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Book:When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden: What the Government Should be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism
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“The New Man means to develop all the three dimensions of being, all the three doors to God: the head, the dimension of thinking, logic and reason, the heart - the dimension of joy, trust, intuition, relationships, beauty, creativity and a sense of unity in love and the being, the dimension of meditation, silence, emptiness and oneness with life. The first level of the head is the dimension of ideas, intellect, hypothesis, theories, logic, analysis, rationality and dualistic thinking. The first level is the level of the mind, which means a continuous oscillation like a pendulum between the mind's memories of the past and the ideas, dreams and expectations of the future. The second level of the heart is the dimension of joy, acceptance, trust, understanding, trust, friendship, intuition, empathy, creativity, compassion, humor, playfulness and a sense of unity in love. The third level of being is the dimension of presence, awareness, meditation, silence, emptiness and wholeness. The third level is our connection with our inner life source.”

LoveLifeMindHeartJoyFriendshipExistenceBrainConsciousnessSilenceMeditationSocietyAwarenessAcceptanceTrustLogicIntuitionIntellectEmptinessMysticismWholenessRationalityBeingHeadUnity In LoveThe New ManConsciousenss
Author:Swami Dhyan Giten
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“Most reject the more repugnant or indefensible dogmas while still holding onto some core belief. Many believers will proudly describe themselves as "reasonable" or "rational" based on how little of their religion they still embrace versus how much they now reject. I think it's funny when people realize that the less you believe the more reasonable you are, but they stop before they reach the logical conclusion.”

ReasonGodReligionFaithBeliefAtheismLogicDogmaSkepticismRationalityAtheistsSkepticism Of ReligionSkepticism And Religion
Author:Aron Ra
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