346 Quotes About Rationality

When we allow ourselves to ignore a rational option in favor of an irrational one, or perhaps an unjustified one, it’s like eating junk food. It fills the need for making a decision but does so with no decision at all. Just like junk food, it satiates the need to act, but it requires no action at all.

Some may wonder whether part of the harvest of this invisible pollution (electromagnetic radiation) may be the comparative rarity of visionary experience in the modern world, and the predominence of a removed, overanalytical, repelling 'onlooker' intelligence in its place, resembling that of the (Martin) Amis hero (who will not see because he cannot feel). If this is so, such an intelligence has produced conditions favoring its evolution and survival.

A rational mind is sometimes the queerestmixture of rationality and irrationality on earth.

In short, one may say anything about the history of the world--anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational. The very word sticks in one's throat.

It is a common folk theory of progressives that ‘the facts will set you free.’ If only you can get all the facts out there in the public eye, then every rational person will reach the right conclusion. It is a vain hope. Human brains just don’t work that way. Framing matters. Frames once entrenched are hard to dispel.

Knowing I piss off the right and the left gives me comfort. It is a great feeling to be rational.

My peace of mind is doubly involved in it;— for not only is it horrible to suspect a person, who has been what HE has been to ME, of such designs,—but what must it make me appear to myself?—What in a situation like mine, but a most shamefully unguarded affection could expose me to’—

Perfect rationality consists, not in believing what is true, but in attaching to every proposition a degree of belief corresponding to its degree of credibility.

Personal reason is admittedly a meager asset, but take away human reason and we would exist in a world of utter ignorance and perpetual darkness.