Rationality Quotes

Then you get the wrong answer and you can't go to the Moon that way! Nature isn't a person, you can't trick them into believing something else, if you try to tell the Moon it's made of cheese you can argue for days and it won't change the Moon! What you're talking about is rationalization, like starting with a sheet of paper, moving straight down to the bottom line, using ink to write 'and therefore, the Moon is made of cheese', and then moving back up to write all sorts of clever arguments above. But either the Moon is made of cheese or it isn't. The moment you wrote the bottom line, it was already true or already false. Whether or not the whole sheet of paper ends up with the right conclusion or the wrong conclusion is fixed the instant you write down the bottom line.

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political, and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility - for incompetence or worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science.

~ Carl Sagan

It is significant comment on the victory of science over magic that were someone to say ‘if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,’ we might believe them; but were they to cry ‘if I pronounce this spell over your beer it will go flat,’ we should remain incredulous and Paracelsus, the Alchemists, Aleister Crowley and all the Magi have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific.

~ Cyril Connolly

The world,” he said, “grows hourly more and more sceptical of all that lies beyond its own narrow radius; and our men of science foster the fatal tendency.The Phantom Coach

~ Amelia B. Edwards

The human has not one but two births – first, when a person is born from the mother’s womb, and second, when that person rises from the socio-culturally imposed cocoon of prejudices and ignorance.

~ Abhijit Naskar

In the society of thinking humanity, the natural law of trust should be - In I, I trust.

~ Abhijit Naskar

It's hard to imagine a more extraordinary claim than that some hidden intelligence created a universe of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each containing more than a hundred billion stars, and then waited more than 13.7 billion years until a planet in a remote corner of a single galaxy evolved an atmosphere sufficiently oxygenated to support life, only to then reveal his existence to an assortment of violent tribal groups before disappearing again.

~ Lawrence M. Krauss

It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffiness of expectancy. It is only at certain times that they weaken, letting imagination in. That's the time to get them. (“The Disinheritors”)

~ Richard Matheson

Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly...Her triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression.

~ Thomas Hardy

Rationality and calm self-determination were one of the great illusions of the universe... in the end, we were all ruled by our passions.

~ Michael R. French

It considered trying to explain their error to them, but what would be the use? They would only go away with hurt feelings. You can't always expect people, or squirrels, to be rational.

~ Thomas M. Disch

Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t. Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind.A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone’s orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone’s opinions, threats, wishes, plans, or “welfare.” Such a mind may be hampered by others, it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument. (An example and symbol of this attitude is Galileo.)It is from the work and the inviolate integrity of such minds—from the intransigent innovators—that all of mankind’s knowledge and achievements have come. (See The Fountainhead.) It is to such minds that mankind owes its survival. (See Atlas Shrugged.)

~ Ayn Rand

Compassion without discipline is egregious self-sabotage.

~ Stefan Molyneux

To evade insanity and depression, we unconsciously limit the number of people toward whom we are sincerely sympathetic.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.

~ Noam Chomsky

Your moral values & ability to rationalize, not your religious beliefs or political affiliations define what you should stand for in society.

~ Mamur Mustapha

I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.

~ Jane Austen

If we are ever going to achieve a rational approach to organizing our affairs, we have to dignify the process of admitting to being wrong. It doesn't help matters at all if the media, or your friends, accuse you of flip-flopping when you change your mind. Changing our minds is our hope for the future.

~ Brian Eno

Sexual starvation forces a heterosexual man to see beauty in every single female who he can sleep with without his society’s disapproval.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

You have to be a light to yourself in a world that is utterly becoming dark.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.

~ Jane Austen

Rationality attracts conscientious humans, whereas mysticism attracts fools.

~ Abhijit Naskar

A narrow hallway is all that separates rational from irrational, creativity from insanity, and intelligence from stupidity.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If God meant for people to fly, He would have given them brains.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder.

~ Karl Popper

You are modern humans of the civilized world. And modern humans rise beyond all laws and superstitions of the society. They help their fellow beings to rise from the ashes of ignorance, illusion and fear.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The New Man means to develop all the three dimensions of being, all the three doors to God: the head, the dimension of thinking, logic and reason, the heart - the dimension of joy, trust, intuition, relationships, beauty, creativity and a sense of unity in love and the being, the dimension of meditation, silence, emptiness and oneness with life.The first level of the head is the dimension of ideas, intellect, hypothesis, theories, logic, analysis, rationality and dualistic thinking.The first level is the level of the mind, which means a continuous oscillation like a pendulum between the mind's memories of the past and the ideas, dreams and expectations of the future. The second level of the heart is the dimension of joy, acceptance, trust, understanding, trust, friendship, intuition, empathy, creativity, compassion, humor, playfulness and a sense of unity in love. The third level of being is the dimension of presence, awareness, meditation, silence, emptiness and wholeness. The third level is our connection with our inner life source.

~ Swami Dhyan Giten

People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.

~ Simon Blackburn

The goal of argumentation is to make a case so forceful (note the metaphor) that skeptics are coerced into believing it—they are powerless to deny it while still claiming to be rational. In principle, it is the ideas themselves that are, as we say, compelling, but their champions are not always averse to helping the ideas along with tactics of verbal dominance, among them intimidation (“Clearly . . .”), threat (“It would be unscientific to . . .”), authority (“As Popper showed . . .”), insult (“This work lacks the necessary rigor for . . .”), and belittling (“Few people today seriously believe that . . .”). Perhaps this is why H. L. Mencken wrote that “college football would be more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students.

~ Steven Pinker

Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable.

~ J.g. Ballard

No validation of our rationality - of our very sanity - can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness?

~ Rebecca Goldstein

Melancholy is an escape not from reality, but unreality of the world.

~ Raheel Farooq

The more rational we are, the more emotional we can be.

~ Nino Gruettke

The sexual mechanisms of the two genders are just not compatible, that’s the horrible truth of it. (...)This is a truth we dare not acknowledge these days - because sameness is our religion and heretics are no more welcome now than they ever were - but I’m going to acknowledge it, because I’ve always felt that humility before the facts is the only thing that keeps a rational man together. Be humble in the face of facts, and proud in the face of opinions, as George Bernard Shaw once said. He didn’t, actually. I just wanted to put some authority behind this observation of mine, because I know you’re not going to like it.

~ Hugh Laurie

Never trust books on the question of whether or not to trust your rational thinking. Trust your rational thinking on the question of whether or not to trust the books.

~ Abhijit Naskar

A bitter thing cannot be made sweet. The taste of anything can be changed. But poison cannot be changed into nectar.

~ B.r. Ambedkar

A man who does not question his own judgment, society, and who flourishes between deceit and bewilderment, fails his moral responsibility as a rational being.

~ Duop Chak Wuol

Empathy is the sunlight to the vampire of culture.

~ Stefan Molyneux

When the experts’ scientific knowledge is legitimated in terms of being rational, logical, efficient, educated, progressive, modern, and enlightened, what analogies can other segments of society . . . utilize to challenge them?

~ Martin Guevara Urbina