Irrational Quotes - Page 11

• It is irrational to charge high prices for socially valuable innovations as this guarantees that they will be underutilized. It is much better to sell them at cost and then to reward the innovator in some other way. This is not always possible, because in some cases the value of an innovation is in the eye of the beholder; it's very difficult to value how much a new Madonna song is worth, for example. But in the case of medicines, green technologies and seeds in agriculture, such an alternative reward mechanism is fairly straightforward.

  Thomas Pogge

  Song, Eye, Technology

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• We have this highly irrational system of incentivizing innovation for clean and green technologies, where we allow the innovator to have a temporary monopoly and then mark up the price of the product or sell licenses at high prices to those who want to use the kind of product that the innovator has invented. This system is collectively irrational because many people, to avoid the inflated prices of still-patented cleaner and greener technologies, opt for some older technology that is much more polluting.

  Thomas Pogge

  Technology, People, Innovation

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• You may know that in India now the Tata car is becoming all the rage; you can buy it for one lakh - $2000 dollars - it's very, very cheap. So India seems to be going the route that China went a few years ago and that developing countries all over the world seem to want to follow, namely, to rely on these personal vehicles, which is just an irrational way of organizing transport.

  Thomas Pogge

  Country, Years, Car

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• There are big, extremely irrational parts of the society, and they have now been mobilized politically by the Republican establishment, hoping that these people could be an electoral base to keep them in power.

  Noam Chomsky

  People, Republican, Bigs

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• [Trump's worldview states] that, for example, women are incompetent as compared to men in business settings. That women in general are intellectually inferior and have to make up for that by using their sexuality to get ahead. That women of color are angry, irrational, lazy, and always ready to get into a fight for no reason. That men in the workplace can say incredibly racist and sexist things, and as long as they make more money than their competitors, the racist and sexist things they say and do are totally acceptable.

  Jennifer Pozner

  Fighting, Men, Color

  Source: www.mtv.com

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• I like irrational things. I like scenarios where I can think, 'It would be great if at this point we could do x.' And there doesn't have to be a reason for 'x'.

  Jonathan Meades

  Thinking, Would Be, Reason

  Source: thequietus.com

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• The plot details of B movies are irrational: accept that people do things that are contradictory, against their own best interests, have short term aims & limited attention span, and do incredibly stupid things while things blow up. Apart from things blowing up, this is just like the music industry.

  Robert Fripp

  Stupid, Blow, People

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• Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims.

  Ayn Rand

  Pursuit, Whim

  Ayn Rand (1964). “The Virtue of Selfishness”, p.26, Penguin

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• This is a record I ended up having to make to get on to the next stage of my life. What I did was a desperate thing to do. I'm aware of the fact that it was irrational. I didn't mean to make it sound like it was my master plan. The tour had even been going all right, but I was just kind of fed up with the situation as it was, playing the same old rock and roll crap that everyone goes through, the general moaning when you really should be grateful that you don't work in the checkout counter at the grocery.

  Luke Haines

  Grateful, Mean, Rocks

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• Nothing goes on forever. I think that's one of the illusions of life. When I talk about my life being an extension of my dreams and fantasies, there's a tendency to think of them as immature. I live in a mature world. The majority of the people in this society live with delusions and illusions much more irrational and hurtful than mine. They deal with mortality, with fantasies relating to heaven and hell, and they don't really deal with their problems at all.

  Hugh Hefner

  Dream, Thinking, People

  "Media: Rabbit is Rich". Interview with Jonathan Roberts, www.interviewmagazine.com. December, 1985.

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• Life, from beginning to end, is fear. Yes, it is pain, yes, it is desire, but more than anything it is fear; a certain amount rational, an enormous amount irrational. All political cruelties stem from that overwhelming fear. To push back the threatening forces, to offer primitive sacrifices, to give up some in the hope that others will be savedthat is the power struggle. That is the outsidedness of the poor, the feeble, the infantile. That is the outsidedness of Jews. That is the outsidedness of blacks. That is the outsidedness of women.

  Vivian Gornick

  Giving Up, Pain, Fear

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• I dont agree with those who think that the conflict is simply between two religions, namely Christianity and Islam... To me, the key conflict is between irrational blind faith and rational, logical minds.

  Taslima Nasrin

  Thinking, Keys, Two

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• Randian heroes come off as metaphors for Jews because they are beset by irrational forces that try to bar them from the professions and use their virtues against them to bring about their destruction.

  Florence King

  Hero, Atheism, Trying

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• The claim is also sometimes made that science is as arbitrary or irrational as all other claims to knowledge, or that reason itself is an illusion. As Ethan Allen said Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are labouring to dethrone. If they argue without reason, which they must do, in order to be consistent with themselves, they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.

  Carl Sagan

  Science, Order, Principles

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• It began with one act of madness, and it ended with another. John Brown heard history's clock strike in the night and tried to hurry dawn along with gunfire; now John Wilkes Booth heard the clock strike, and he tried with gunfire to restore the darkness. Each man stood outside the human community, directed by voices the sane do not hear, and each kept history from going logically... The line from Harper's Ferry to Ford's Theater is a red thread binding the immense disorder of the Civil War into an irrational sort of coherence.

  Bruce Catton

  War, Night, Men

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• What matters is that they are curious about life, energy, truth, and themselves and that they haven't sold out to the establishment powers that tell us what to think, what to wear, how to behave, what to believe in and what goes beyond the line of rational and irrational thought.

  Frederick Lenz

  Believe, Buddhism, Thinking

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• Remember that failure is part of the process of successful running. Performance is a roller coaster; to think otherwise is irrational and will cause you much stress and discouragement. Lighten up on yourself. Ups and downs can be expected. The performance of most serious runners fluctuates by the week. You win some, you lose some; some days you're hot, some days you're not. Don't fight with yourself when failure, the teacher, pays an unexpected visit. Open up to learning from it.

  Jerry Lynch

  Running, Teacher, Stress

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• The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.

  Will Durant

  Acceptance, Assumption, Snares

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• If the spiritual values of human existence at its highest term of development and achievement do not endure, amidst all the changes and chances of this mortal universe, there seems to be no stable or coherent meaning in existence. Then the universe is irrational--indeed it is no universe at all.

  Joseph Alexander Leighton

  Spiritual, Achievement, Development

  Joseph Alexander Leighton (1922). “Man and the Cosmos - An introduction to Metaphysics.”

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• The core of the Marxist critique of capitalism is that although the individual capitalist is rational (as liberals assume), the capitalist system itself is irrational.

  Robert Gilpin

  Assuming, Individual, Marxist

  Robert Gilpin (2016). “The Political Economy of International Relations”, p.37, Princeton University Press

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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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• Hellenic science is a victory of rationalism, which appears greater, not smaller, when one is made to realize that it had been won in spite of the irrational beliefs of the Greek people; all in all, it was a triumph of reason in the face of unreason. Some knowledge of Greek superstitions is needed not only for a proper appreciation of that triumph but also for the justification of occasional failures, such as the many Platonic aberrations.

  George Sarton

  Appreciation, People, Greek

  George Sarton (2012). “Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece”, p.9, Courier Corporation

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• I'm trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.

  Charles Stross

  Fun, Crazy, Reflection

  Charles Stross (2006). “Glasshouse”, p.88, Penguin

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• This proletarianization of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is accompanied by an excess in the opposite direction: the irrationally high pay of top managers and bankers, a level of remuneration that is economically irrational since, as investigations in the US have demonstrated, it tends to be inversely proportional to the company's success.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Opposites, Bankers, Bourgeoisie

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• When we approach history, we are dealing with a conglomeration of irrational continua. Those who deal with history by nonrational processes are the ones who make history, the actors in it.

  Carroll Quigley

  Actors, Process, Deals

  Carroll Quigley (1979). “The evolution of civilizations: an introduction to historical analysis”, Liberty Fund Inc.

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