Irrational Quotes - Page 13

• In a way, both the U.S. media and those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar, two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs — not least the notion that you can flush a 950-page book down one of Al Gore's eco-crazed federally mandated low-flush toilets, a claim no editorial bigfoot thought to test for himself in Newsweek's executive washroom.

  Mark Steyn

  Book, Self, Media

  "Firing Up the Crowd: From Newsweek to the Nuts, in One Fast Ball". www.jewishworldreview.com. May 23, 2005.

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• So that, in effect, religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves.

  John Locke

  Men, Beast, Should

  John Locke (1836). “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, p.532

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• There are two kinds of fears: rational and irrational- or in simpler terms, fears that make sense and fears that don't.

  Daniel Handler

  Fear, Two, Kind

  "The Wide Window". Book by Daniel Handler, February 25, 2000.

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• I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts.

  P. D. James

  Order, Ideas, Guilt

  Interview With Jennifer Reese, www.salon.com. February 26, 1998.

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• What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.

  George Saunders

  War, Guy, Slaughterhouse Five

  George Saunders (2012). “The Brain-Dead Megaphone”, p.82, A&C Black

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• Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. But capitalism is identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. But capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise.

  Max Weber

  Mean, Forever, May

  Max Weber (2012). “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, p.17, Courier Corporation

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• My greatest personal mistake is ever to allow a word or moment that “doesn’t count,” i.e., that I do not refer to my own basic principles. Every word, every action, every moment counts. (This is the pattern on which everybody makes mistakes [or] becomes irrational — not relating their one action or one conviction to another.

  Ayn Rand

  Mistake, Principles, Patterns

  Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff (1999). “The Journals of Ayn Rand”, p.295, Penguin

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• You'll think this is a bit silly, but I'm a bit--well, I have a thing about birds." "What, a phobia?" "Sort of." "Well, that's the common term for an irrational fear of birds." "What do they call a rational fear of birds, then?

  Neil Gaiman

  Silly, Thinking, Bird

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• There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.

  Erich Fromm

  Evil, Giving, Comfort

  Erich Fromm (2013). “Psychoanalysis and Religion”, p.39, Open Road Media

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• Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Language, Said, Complexity

  Robert A. Heinlein (2014). “Stranger in a Strange Land”, p.227, Hachette UK

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• Every man builds his world in his own image; he has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice.

  Ayn Rand

  Power, Men, Escaping

  Ayn Rand (2016). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.604, Hamilton Books

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• This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken. The doctor says, Well, why don’t you turn him in? And the guy says, I would but I need the eggs. Well I guess that’s pretty much how I feel about relationships. You know they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd but I guess we keep going through it because, uh, most of us need the eggs.

  Woody Allen

  Witty, Brother, Crazy

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• In order to develop normally, a child requires progressively more complex joint activity with one or more adults who have an irrational emotional relationship with the child. Somebody's got to be crazy about that kid. That's number one. First, last and always.

  Urie Bronfenbrenner

  Children, Crazy, Kids

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• It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Century, Missions, Twentieth Century

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• The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship

  Jonathan Haidt

  Atheist, Practice, Faces

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• The people who are abroad are all those that have no religion, neither one based on speculation nor one received by tradition. Such are the extreme Turks that wander about in the north, the Kushites who live in the south, and those in our country who are like these. I consider these as irrational beings, and not as human beings; they are below mankind, but above monkeys, since they have the form and shape of man, and a mental faculty above that of the monkey.

  Maimonides

  Country, Religious, Animal

  Moses Maimonides (1961). “The Guide for the Perplexed”, p.384, Courier Corporation

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• We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Space, World, Divinity

  "Discussion". Book by Jorge Luis Borges, 1932.

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• When you're in the throes of this romantic love, it's overwhelming - you're out of control, you're irrational, you're going to the gym at 6 A.M. every day - Why? Because she's there.

  Helen Fisher

  Romantic Love, Overwhelming, Gym

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• I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?

  Philip Zimbardo

  Smart, Hero, Unusual Things

  "Emperor of the Edge". Interview with Christina Maslach, www.psychologytoday.com. September 1, 2000.

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• I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Stupid, Thinking, Would Be

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• Every attempt to employ mathematical methods in the study of chemical questions must be considered profoundly irrational and contrary to the spirit of chemistry.... if mathematical analysis should ever hold a prominent place in chemistry -- an aberration which is happily almost impossible -- it would occasion a rapid and widespread degeneration of that science.

  Auguste Comte

  Analysis, Aberration, Spirit

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• Research – and using what you learn from it to analyze every situation – is what separates being unreasonable from being irrational.

  Eli Broad

  Research, Situation, Unreasonable

  Eli Broad (2012). “The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking”, p.5, John Wiley & Sons

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• I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.

  Ayn Rand

  Real, Evil, Triumph

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.170, Penguin

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• If something is irrational, that means it won't work. It's usually unrealistic.

  Albert Ellis

  Mean, Working It, Ifs

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• It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

  Thomas Huxley

  Belief, Forgotten, Instinct

  Thomas Henry Huxley (2011). “Collected Essays”, p.310, Cambridge University Press

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