Rational Quotes - Page 38

• A king is always a king - and a woman always a woman: his authority and her sex ever stand between them and rational converse

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Kings, Sex, Authority

  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ch. 4 (1792)

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• Painting quickly is a calculated act to block out rational thought.

  Antoni Tapies

  Block, Painting, Rational Thought

  Barbara Catoir, Antoni Tàpies (1991). “Conversations with Antoni Tàpies: With an Introduction to the Artist's Work”

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• We must be both rational and intellectual, both analytic and imaginative, utilizing both statistics and insight.

  Lloyd

  Intellectual, Statistics, Insight

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• I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist. If it is child's play, an extension of make believe - something one is frequently assured by people who write about writing - how to account for the overriding wish to do that, just that, only that, and consider it as rational an occupation as riding a bicycle over the Alps?

  Mavis Gallant

  Children, Believe, Writing

  Mavis Gallant (2011). “Paris Stories”, p.366, New York Review of Books

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• Who has forbidden women to engage in private and individual studies? Have they not a rational soul as men do?...I have this inclination to study and if it is evil I am not the one who formed me thus - I was born with it and with it I shall die.

  Juana Inés de la Cruz

  Men, Evil, Soul

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• I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought.

  Mortimer Adler

  Religious, Believe, Intellectual

  "A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror: Further Autobiographical Reflections of a Philosopher at Large".

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• The most rational defender of nature is driven by a passion for wildness that cannot be explained by an appeal to logic.

  Eban Goodstein

  Passion, Climate, Logic

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• I am speaking to those among you who have retained some sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped: '- to the order of others'. If, in the chaos of the motives that have made you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who are making an effort to know. Those who are making an effort to fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, Order, Effort

  Ayn Rand (2005). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.1006, Penguin

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• Without calculation, economic activity is impossible. Since under Socialism economic calculation is impossible, under Socialism there can be no economic activity in our sense of the word All economic change, therefore, would involve operations the value of which could neither be predicted beforehand nor ascertained after they had taken place. Everything would be a leap in the dark. Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Taken, Dark, Would Be

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• But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective scientific method, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Thinking, Self, Robots

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• The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world ... Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.

  John Rawls

  Heart, Self, Views

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• To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.

  Anne Lamott

  Powerful, Mind, Ass

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.102, Anchor

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• Thank you for calling customer service. If you're calm and rational, press 1. If you're a whiner, press 2. If you're a hot head, press 3

  Randy Glasbergen

  Funny, Hot, Calling

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• People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control.

  Theodore Kaczynski

  People, Anarchy, Evolution

  The Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski (2005). “The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future”, p.46, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• In the world of minor lunacy the behaviour of both the utterly rational and the totally insane seems equally odd.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Insane, Behaviour, World

  "The 100 best nonfiction books: No24 - The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith (1958)" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. July 11, 2016.

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• TV is the only medium that I've ever been successful with in delivering really emotional messaging and I think as people are trying to work their way through what this changing environment is going to mean, playing to the emotional side as well as the pragmatic and the rational side is going to be something that a number of brands will want to fully explore.

  Jill McDonald

  Mean, Successful, Emotional

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• Each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self-interest.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, Self, Ends

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• Social values in general are incrementally variable: neither safety, diversity, rational articulation, nor morality is categorically a good thing to have more of, without limits. All are subject to diminishing returns, and ultimately negative returns.

  Thomas Sowell

  Social Values, Safety, Diversity

  Thomas Sowell (1996). “Knowledge And Decisions”, p.110, Basic Books

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• There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Investing, World, Investment

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• In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.

  Max Weber

  Jesus, Culture, Rooms

  Max Weber, Hans Gerth (1991). “From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology”, p.357, Psychology Press

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• What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French.

  Richard Rorty

  Determined, Good French, Argumentation

  "Richard Rorty. What made him a crucial American philosopher?" by Stephen Metcalf, www.slate.com. June 18, 2007.

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• At the constitutional level where we work, 90 percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.

  William O. Douglas

  Emotional, Thinking, Decision

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• I am perfectly convinced that I have both seen, and heard in a manner which should make unbelief impossible, things called spiritual which cannot be taken by a rational being to be capable of explanation by imposture, coincidence, or mistake.

  Augustus De Morgan

  Spiritual, Mistake, Taken

  Augustus De Morgan (1863). “From Matter to Spirit: The Result of Ten Years'experience in Spirit Manifestations. Intended as a Guide to Enquirers”, London, Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green

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• The genuine values in America arose from rational thought and breaking with tradition, not from blind allegiance to dirt and cloth.

  Stefan Molyneux

  America, Dirt, Blind

  Twitter post from Dec 16, 2016

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• But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore, it is madness. Alone I confront them and tell them that nothing could be saner or truer! What do people really know about life? We fall in line, follow the pattern established by our mentors. Everything is based on assumptions; even time, space, motion, matter are nothing but supposition. The world has no new knowledge to impart; it merely accepts what is there.

  Knut Hamsun

  Fall, Men, Space

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