Rational Quotes - Page 6

• When money is free, the rational lender will keep on lending until there is no one else to lend to.

  George Soros

  Investing, Lending, Lenders

  George Soros (2008). “The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means”, p.15, PublicAffairs

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• What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes.

  Jeremy Bentham

  Dog, Horse, Animal

  Jeremy Bentham (2012). “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation”, p.311, Courier Corporation

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• Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Mean, Thinking, Effort

  "The Character of Physical Law". Book by Richard P. Feynman, 1965.

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• When one analyzes the pre-conscious step to concepts, one always finds ideas which consist of 'symbolic images.' The first step to thinking is a painted vision of these inner pictures whose origin cannot be reduced only and firstly to the sensual perception but which are produced by an 'instinct to imagining' and which are re-produced by different individuals independently, i.e. collectively... But the archaic image is also the necessary predisposition and the source of a scientific attitude. To a total recognition belong also those images out of which have grown the rational concepts.

  Wolfgang Pauli

  Attitude, Thinking, Ideas

  Letter to Markus Fierz, 1948.

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• If you attach your mind to any ideology, you're going to be on a road, and that road may or may not lead you in a good direction. But you're gonna stay on that road because you are attached to an ideology. It could be a terrible road, but you stick with it regardless of rational thinking.

  Joe Rogan

  Thinking, Mind, Sticks

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• I never overestimate the audience, nor do I underestimate them. I just have a very rational idea as to who we’re dealing with, and that we’re not making a picture for Harvard Law School, we’re making a picture for middle-class people, the people that you see on the subway, or the people that you see in a restaurant. Just normal people.

  Billy Wilder

  School, Law, Class

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• It is impossible for any rational creature to be happy without acting all for God. God Himself could not make him happy any other way... There is nothing in the world worth living for but doing good and finishing God's work, doing the work that Christ did. I see nothing else in the world that can yield any satisfaction besides living to God, pleasing Him, and doing his whole will.

  David Brainerd

  Yield, Acting, Finishing

  David Brainerd (1818). “The Life of the Rev. David Brainerd, Missionary to the Indians: From the Honourable Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge; who Died at Northampton in New England, Oct. 9, 1747 ...”, p.242

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• It is remarkable that God began this work among the Indians at a time when I had the least hope, and to my apprehension the least rational prospect of success.

  David Brainerd

  Missionary, Remarkable, Apprehension

  David Brainerd (1829). “Life of the Rev. David Brainerd, Missionary to the American Indians”, p.480

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• It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

  Martin Gardner

  Monsters, Energy, Lenses

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• The only reason of the institution of civil government; and the only rational ground of submission to it, is the common safety and utility

  Jonathan Mayhew

  Government, Safety, Common

  Jonathan Mayhew (1750). “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-resistance to the Higher Powers: With Some Reflections on the Resistance Made to King Charles I, and on the Anniversary of His Death: in which the Mysterious Doctrine of the Princes' Saintship and Martyrdom is Unriddled: the Substance of which was Delivered in a Sermon Preached in the West Meeting-house in Boston the Lord's-day After the 30th of January, 1749/50...”, p.38

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• God is in all things, but so far as God is Divine and so far as He is rational, God is nowhere so properly as in the soul - in the innermost of the soul

  Meister Eckhart

  Soul, Divine, All Things

  Eckhart (Meister) (1963). “Treatises and sermons of Meister Eckhart”

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• We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable.

  Thomas Berry

  Creative, Vision, Earth

  Thomas Berry, Thomas Mary Berry (1996). “Creative Energy: Bearing Witness for the Earth”, Random House (NY)

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• The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.

  Philipp Meyer

  Children, Growing Up, Animal

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• The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Thinking, Spirit

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• When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to assume that their president, hostile to the principles that formed the nation and determined to act with malice toward its inhabitants by suppressing their rights and enabling its enemies to prosper in their attempts to destroy it, must be confronted, a rational response for the nation is to encumber itself no more with such a president and reject his authority and the acolytes who carry out his wishes.

  David Shapiro

  Rights, People, Enemy

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• All men are, at times, influenced by inexplicable sentiments. Ideas haunt them in spite of all their efforts to discard them. Prepossessions are entertained, for which their reason is unable to discover any adequate cause. The strength of a belief, when it is destitute of any rational foundation, seems, of itself, to furnish a new ground for credulity. We first admit a powerful persuasion, and then, from reflecting on the insufficiency of the ground on which it is built, instead of being prompted to dismiss it, we become more forcibly attached to it.

  Charles Brockden Brown

  Powerful, Men, Ideas

  Charles Brockden Brown (1987). “Somnambulism and other stories”, Peter Lang Publishing

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• We like democracy because why? The pathologies of the U.S. version are so obvious in the aftermath of the latest averted crisis that we need to ask ourselves whether it’s worth it - and why electoral democracy hasn’t self-destructed before. Should Tunisians or Egyptians opt for the Chinese model, where rational autocrats may restrict rights, but no one threatens to blow up world markets in the name of an 18th-century tax protest?

  Noah Feldman

  Blow, Rights, Self

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• People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature - the laws of physics - are simply accepted as given, as brute facts. Nobody asks where they came from; at least not in polite company. However, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.

  Paul Davies

  Order, Law, People

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• Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.

  A. R. Ammons

  Art, Mean, Self

  A. R. Ammons (1996). “Set in motion: essays, interviews, and dialogues”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• Modern liberalism, for most liberals is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.

  James Burnham

  Emotional, Glowing, Color

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• I find it hard to understand why those who demand Unitary Education by the State do not also demand a Unitary Press by the State... Either the State is infallible, in which case we could not do better than to submit to it the entire domain of intelligent thought, or it is not, in which case it is no more rational to hand over education to it than the press.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Intelligent, Hands, Political

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• Economists who adhere to rational-expectations models of the world will never admit it, but a lot of what happens in markets is driven by pure stupidity - or, rather, inattention, misinformation about fundamentals, and an exaggerated focus on currently circulating stories.

  Robert J. Shiller

  Expectations, Focus, Stupidity

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• Man is said to be a rational creature; but should it not rather be said, that man is a creature capable of being rational, as we say a parrot is a creature capable of speech?

  Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

  Men, Speech, Parrots

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• The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning.

  Rodolfo Llinas

  Creativity, Brain, Looks

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• My purpose is to make a movie to make you warm. To give you some heat. Now, this rational world has become a place where only what is cool is good. Do you cut the movie on the basis of the beat of modernity or the basis of the beat of your own heart?

  Emir Kusturica

  Heart, Cutting, Giving

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

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