Irrational Quotes - Page 20

• Religion is an irrational construct.

  Michel Onfray

  Constructs

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• There is nothing in life so irrational, that good sense and chance may not set it to rights; nothing so rational, that folly and chance may not utterly confound it.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Rights, May, Chance

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• Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a desperate hope for political miracles. This irrational attitude which springs from intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach 'back to nature' or 'forward to a world of love and beauty'; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell - that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.

  Karl Popper

  Beautiful, Dream, Attitude

  Karl Raimund Popper (1950). “The Open Society and Its Enemies”

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• Souls that have lived in virtue are in general happy, and when separated from the irrational part of their nature, and made clean from all matter, have communion with the gods and join them in the governing of the whole world. Yet even if none of this happiness fell to their lot, virtue itself, and the joy and glory of virtue, and the life that is subject to no grief and no master are enough to make happy those who have set themselves to live according to virtue and have achieved it.

  Sallust

  Grief, Make Happy, Joy

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• Irrational barriers and ancient prejudices fall quickly when the question of survival itself is at stake.

  John F. Kennedy

  Fall, Survival, Prejudice

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• It is easy enough to say, Be true to your values. But what if your values are irrational? Or what if the virtues you have committed yourself to are so much against human nature that they cannot be practiced consistently? Be careful of what you accept as your code of morality. Think carefully about whether its tenets serve your life and well being. Exercise critical judgment. Realize how much is at stake-your life, your happiness, your self-esteem.

  Nathaniel Branden

  Self Esteem, Exercise, Thinking

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• Just as it would be madness to settle on medical treatment for the body of a person by taking an opinion poll of the neighbors, so it is irrational to prescribe for the body politic by polling the opinions of the people at large.

  Plato

  People, Would Be, Body

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• Most of the time it is a good job and a good honour to fight against people's values, because most of the time people's values are irrational and absurd!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Jobs, Fighting, People

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• For some reason I've always had an irrational love for New York. There's no reason that you would necessarily like it on paper. It's very expensive.

  Woody Allen

  New York, Paper, Reason

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• ... A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those ... truths were really there, would be an irrational rule.

  William James

  Philosophy, Thinking, Would Be

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• Building a company is basically taking all the irrational people you know... Putting them in one building and then living with them 12 hrs a day at least.

  Keith Rabois

  People, Building, Company

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• It's a funny thing, by the way, how people who love free markets are also quite sure that they know that investors are being irrational.

  Paul Krugman

  Funny Things, People, Way

  "Why Paul Krugman thinks inflation fears are baloney". Interview with Paul Solman, www.pbs.org. November 3, 2014.

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• A person who believes that Elvis is still alive is very unlikely to get promoted to a position of great power and responsibility in our society. Neither will a person who believes that the holocaust was a hoax. But people who believe equally irrational things about God and the bible are now running our country. This is genuinely terrifying.

  Sam Harris

  Running, Country, Believe

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• What we need to understand is, one, that there are market failures; and two, that there are things like asset bubbles and irrational exuberance. There are periods of booms, bubbles, and manias. These things, if left to themselves, can lead to crashes, to busts, to panics.

  Nouriel Roubini

  Two, Needs, Panic

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• In the battle between the sexes, men and women will go practically to the end of the earth in illogical, irrational ways to give each other pain.

  Karen DeCrow

  Sex, Pain, Men

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• Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system which controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and equal society is a more difficult task than Marx realized.

  Peter Singer

  Tasks, Saws, Construction

  Peter Singer (2000). “Marx: A Very Short Introduction”, p.100, Oxford Paperbacks

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• I no longer idolize reason. I have come to accept that ninety percent of what we do is irrational and that we spend what little rational thought we have in justifying our irrationality.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Littles, Reason, Accepting

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• I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Thinking, Numbers, Criticism

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• Sanity is a matter of culture and convention. If it's a crazy culture you live in, then you have to be irrational to want to conform. A completely rational person would recognize that the culture was crazy and refuse to conform. But by not conforming, he is the one who would be judged crazy by that particular society.

  Margaret Millar

  Crazy, Would Be, Culture

  Margaret Millar (2016). “A Stranger in My Grave”, p.45, Soho Press

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• The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.

  Edith Hamilton

  Greek, Mind, Firsts

  Edith Hamilton (1987). “The Greek way ; The Roman way”, Random House Value Pub

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• Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations ... the root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced, and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  War, Party, Thinking

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• Irrational crushes, infatuations, or obsessions. Whatever you want to label it, it's important to reach out to others.

  Janeane Garofalo

  Crush, Important, Labels

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• Trading has taught me not to take the conventional wisdom for granted. What money I made in trading is testimony to the fact that the majority is wrong a lot of the time. The vast majority is wrong even more of the time. I've learned that markets, which are often just mad crowds, are often irrational; when emotionally overwrought, they're almost always wrong.

  Richard Dennis

  Mad, Majority, Crowds

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• The ... irrational fear of communism is being deliberately used in many quarters to blind us to our real problems.

  Helen Gahagan Douglas

  Real, Irrational Fear, Problem

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• So Marxism, Freudianism: any one of these things I think is an irrational cult. They're theology, so they're whatever you think of theology; I don't think much of it. In fact, in my view that's exactly the right analogy: notions like Marxism and Freudianism belong to the history of organized religion.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Views, Analogies

  Noam Chomsky (2013). “Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky”, p.227, The New Press

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