75 Quotes About Irrationality

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.

Good intentions are ubiquitous in politics; what is scarce is accurate beliefs.

The reader who thinks that rationality does not require a definition should ponder the following: I'll give you a million dollars to do something irrational.

If you're rational you don't get to believe whatever you want to believe.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

Indeed if one had just seen him at the end of the evening with the dusk and the mist of the fenlands close behind him he might have believed that in the dusk and the mist was an army that followed this gay worn confident man. Had the army been there Niv was sane.Had the world accepted that an army was there, still he was sane. But the lonely fancy that had not fact to feed on, nor the fancy of any other for fellowship, was for its loneliness mad.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

For twenty years and more the whole planet had been bombed, raped, ravaged, and gouged by people whose fury had so exceeded their judgment that the only thing they could think of to do to express their discontent was to kill somebody.

The idea of original sin--of guilt with no possibility of innocence, no freedom of choice, no alternatives--inherently militates against self-esteem. The very notion of guilt without volition or responsibility is an assault on reason as well as on morality. Sin is not original, it is originated--like virtue.