Rational Quotes - Page 12

• The earlier, more analytic impulse was to use very rational but kind of absurd techniques or tendencies—mapping, charting, and architecture—to try and make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment. But there’s only so much truth to a theoretical understanding of something.

  Julie Mehretu

  Space, Political, Understanding

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• Always take the short cut; and that is the rational one. Therefore say and do everything according to soundest reason.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Cutting, Reason, Short Cuts

  "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, Book IV, (51), (c. 161 - 180 AD).

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• Retire into thyself. The rational principle which rules has this nature, that it is content with itself when it does what is just, and so secures tranquility.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Principles, Doe, Tranquility

  Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (2016). “Stoic Six Pack: Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Golden Sayings, Fragments and Discourses of Epictetus, Letters from a Stoic and The Enchiridion”, p.76, Enhanced Media Publishing

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• It is sometimes rational to do what is wrong, and sometimes irrational to do what is right

  Dennis Prager

  Sometimes, Irrational

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• Colour is uncontainable. It effortlessly reveals the limits of language and evades our best attempts to impose a rational order on it To work with colour is to become acutely aware of the insufficiency of language and theory – which is both disturbing and pleasurable.

  David Batchelor

  Order, Limits, Language

  Gary Hume, Adrian Searle, David Batchelor, British Council (1999). “Gary Hume: British Pavilion, XLVIII Venice Biennale, 13 June-7 Novermer 1999”

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• It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.

  Alasdair MacIntyre

  Practice, Community, Participation

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• We live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are children if they're serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton's Oval Office.

  Mark Steyn

  Children, Infantry Division, Office

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• The legislature, like the executive, has ceased to be even the creature of the people: it is the creature of pressure groups, and most of them, it must be manifest, are of dubious wisdom and even more dubious honesty. Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle...

  H. L. Mencken

  Honesty, Men, Law

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• All the worth which the human being possesses all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State... For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of History in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity...

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Spiritual, Reality, Objectivity

  "Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Volume 1". Book by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1832.

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• In the face of such overwhelming statistical possibilities hypochondria has always seems to me to be the only rational position to take on life.

  John Diamond

  Health, Faces, Possibility

  C by John Diamond p. 17. Vermilion, London (1998)

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• I have long been an ardent believer in the science of Homeopathy and I feel happy that it has got now a greater hold in India than even in the land of its origin. It is not merely a collection of a few medicines but a real science with a rational philosophy at its base. We require more scientific interest and inquiry into the matter with special stress upon the Indian environment

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Stress, Philosophy, Real

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• For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Greshams law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate.

  Walter Lippmann

  Law, Liberty, Overcoming

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.196, Harvard University Press

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• If you wish a wise answer, you must put a rational question.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Wise, Wish, Answers

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• Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.

  Eric Hoffer

  Animal, Men, Play

  "Reflections on the Human Condition". Book by Eric Hoffer. Section 28, 1973.

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• The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not.

  J. G. Ballard

  Thinking, Views, Enlightenment

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• My family is out of the ordinary in our physical lifestyle and the day-to-day things that we deal with, but my approach to them is pretty rational and sound. And I'm the quiet one! It's very different from my performing life.

  Dee Snider

  Sound, Ordinary, Different

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God.

  Joseph Campbell

  God, Reflection, Men

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.31, Anchor

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• Nature has not placed us in an inferior rank to men, no more than the females of other animals, where we see no distinction of capacity, though I am persuaded if there was a commonwealth of rational horses... it would be an established maxim amongst them that a mare could not be taught to pace.

  Mary Wortley Montagu

  Horse, Animal, Men

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1803). “The works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: including her correspondence, poems, and essays”, p.201

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• The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Science, Chaos, Social

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• The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them.

  Garrett Hardin

  Men, Cost, Waste

  Garrett James Hardin (1972). “Exploring new ethics for survival: the voyage of the spaceship Beagle”, Viking Adult

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• I'm not rational enough to be a good journalist.

  Jim Harrison

  Literature, Enough, Journalist

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, themorningnews.org. June 7, 2004.

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• I am death-fearing. I don't think I'm morbid. That seems to me a fear of death that goes beyond the rational. Whereas it seems to me to be entirely rational to fear death!

  Julian Barnes

  Thinking, Morbid, Fear Of Death

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• The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.

  Carlos Fuentes

  Mexican, Soul, Intelligence

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• The tubular steel chair is surely rational from technical and constructive points of view. It is light, suitable for mass production, and so on. But steel and chromium surfaces are not satisfactory from the human point of view.

  Alvar Aalto

  Light, Views, Steel

  Alvar Aalto, J. Stewart Johnson (1984). “Alvar Aalto, Furniture and Glass: Exhibition the Museum of Modern Art, New York”

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• The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.

  Anthony Kennedy

  Lying, Simple, Ordinary

  "Justice Kennedy Wants You to Fight Lies with Truth" by Robyn Hagan Cain, blogs.findlaw.com. June 29, 2012.

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