Rationality Quotes - Page 2

• Many of the things you can count, don't count. Many of the things you can't count, really count.

  Albert Einstein

  Success, Money, Crazy

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• Reason is the light, the sun of the brain. It is the compass of the mind, the ever-constant Northern Star, the mountain peak that lifts itself above all clouds.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Stars, Clouds, Light

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.1089, Library of Alexandria

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• No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.

  Niels Bohr

  Inspirational, Life, Thinking

  Attributed to Niels Bohr in William Glen "The Mass-Extinction Debates: How Science Works in a Crisis" (p. 62), 1994.

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• The end point of rationality is to demonstrate the limits of rationality.

  Blaise Pascal

  Thinking, Limits, Ends

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• Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standard of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world.

  Sam Harris

  Spiritual, Creativity, Ignorance

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.21, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Giving, Atheism, Pages

  Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

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• Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos.

  John Forbes Nash

  Cosmos, Limits, Relation

  "John F. Nash Jr. - Biographical". "Les Prix Nobel" ("The Nobel Prizes 1994") edited by Tore Frängsmyr, Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, www.nobelprize.org. 1995.

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• So few of us really think. What we do is rearrange our prejudges.

  George Vincent

  Thinking

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• A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

  Herbert Simon

  Attention, Information, Poverty

  "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World". "Communication, and the Public Interest". Book by Martin Greenberger, pp. 40-41, 1971.

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• The illogical man is what advertising is after. This is why advertising is so anti-rational; this is why it aims at uprooting not only the rationality of man but his common sense.

  Henryk Skolimowski

  Men, Common Sense, Uprooting

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• Mystical experience of nature can be of particular relevance to our troubled age, bringing deeper into our consciousness and emotions the logic that nature sustains humanity as humanity must, in turn, sustain nature. Rationality alone, however, cannot be our guide in the task of restoring our environment. A spiritual connection to nature must inspire the emotional commitment that is the yin, complementing the yang of intellectual understanding.

  Carl von Essen

  Spiritual, Commitment, Emotional

  Carl von Essen (2010). “Ecomysticism: The Profound Experience of Nature as Spiritual Guide”, p.15, Simon and Schuster

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• Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

  A. R. Ammons

  Vision, Definitions, Way

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

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• It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

  Ayn Rand

  Sacrifice, Men, Offering

  Ayn Rand (2005). “The Fountainhead”, p.677, Penguin

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• Why continue? Because we must. Because we have the call. Because it is nobler to fight for rationality without winning than to give up in the face of continued defeats. Because whatever true progress humanity makes is through the rationality of the occasional individual and because any one individual we may win for the cause may do more for humanity than a hundred thousand who hug their superstitions to their breast.

  Isaac Asimov

  Giving Up, Fighting, Winning

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• Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.

  Michael Shermer

  Powerful, Joints, Moral

  Michael Shermer (2002). “Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time”, p.12, Macmillan

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• The willingness to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence is a sign of rationality not weakness.

  Stuart Sutherland

  Light, Mind, Weakness

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• Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

  James Harvey Robinson

  Wisdom, Believe, Intellectual

  James Harvey Robinson (1939). “The Mind in the Making”

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• Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.

  Ayn Rand

  Religion, Defense, Lines

  "The Romantic Manifesto" by Ayn Rand, (Ch. 3), 1969.

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• People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

  William Butler Yeats

  Wisdom, Philosophy, People

  "Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing". Book by Larry Chang, p. 417, 2006.

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• When people say to me, 'You hate America,' I don't hate America. I love America. I am just embarrassed that it has been taken over by people like evangelicals, by people who do not believe in science and rationality. It is the 21st century. And I will tell you, my friend. The future does not belong to the evangelicals. The future does not belong to religion.

  Bill Maher

  Hate, Taken, Believe

  "Scarborough Country" with Joe Scarborought, www.nbcnews.com. February 16, 2005.

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• We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people. We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact. This feeling is EVIL. Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind. Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin.

  Robin Hanson

  Believe, People, Evil

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• Contemporary man is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food - and, above all, a large array of neuroses

  Carl Jung

  Running, Spiritual, Men

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• Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality-not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.

  Ayn Rand

  Acceptance, Men, Thinking

  Ayn Rand (2005). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.999, Penguin

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• Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice-and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man-by choice; he has to hold his life as a value-by choice; he has to learn to sustain it-by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues-by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

  John Galt

  Suicidal, Animal, Men

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• What a deep faith in the rationality of the structure of the world and what a longing to understand even a small glimpse of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton to enable them to unravel the mechanism of the heavens in long years of lonely work!

  Albert Einstein

  Lonely, Science, Years

  Albert Einstein (2013). “Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb”, p.234, Princeton University Press

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