Best 266 quotes in «rationality quotes» category

When we allow ourselves to ignore a rational option in favor of an irrational one, or perhaps an unjustified one, it’s like eating junk food. It fills the need for making a decision but does so with no decision at all. Just like junk food, it satiates the need to act, but it requires no action at all.

When you do a fault analysis, there's no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can't change afterward, it's like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity. Gravity isn't going to change next time. There's no point in trying to allocate responsibility to people who aren't going to alter their actions. Once you look at it from that perspective, you realize that allocating blame never helps anything unless you blame yourself, because you're the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there.

When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.

Within Hobbes’ depiction of the motives for conflict. . . there is a problematic in which the grave threat that human beings pose to other human beings is not constituted simply by the structures of human passions, interests, and desires, nor by the addition of a self-deceptive and egotistical desire for recognition and proof of one’s perhaps illusory power. In this moment, it is the very rationality of other humans, reason in the broad sense, understood as roughly equal to oneself in both capacity and structure, that poses such a threat

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.

Writing my own novels in the '90s...I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor.

You cannot connect with anyone except through reality.

You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false.

You'd think that it would make them all the more credible to be free of any obvious agenda or emotional bias, motivated only by objective logic. But there's something off-putting about these hyperrational types; they're immune to any appeals to common sense or humor, the for fuck's sake defense. [...] As Kim Stanley Robinson writes, "An excess of reason is in itself a form of madness".

You could call it heroic responsibility, maybe," Harry Potter said. "Not like the usual sort. It means that whatever happens, no matter what, it's always your fault. Even if you tell Professor McGonagall, she's not responsible for what happens, you are. Following the school rules isn't an excuse, someone else being in charge isn't an excuse, even trying your best isn't an excuse. There just aren't any excuses, you've got to get the job done no matter what." Harry's face tightened. "That's why I say you're not thinking responsibly, Hermione. Thinking that your job is done when you tell Professor McGonagall - that isn't heroine thinking. Like Hannah being beat up is okay then, because it isn't your fault anymore. Being a heroine means your job isn't finished until you've done whatever it takes to protect the other girls, permanently." In Harry's voice was a touch of the steel he had acquired since the day Fawkes had been on his shoulder. "You can't think as if just following the rules means you've done your duty.

You say that it is time to shake off the Mist, but Mankind walks in a Mist; that Reason which you cry up as the Glory of this Age is a Proteus and Cameleon that changes its Shape almost in every Man: there is no Folly that may not have a thousand Reasons produc'd to advance it into the Class of Wisdom. Reason itself is a Mist.

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

You have to disentangle the details. You have to hold up every one independently, and ask, "How do we know *this* detail?" Someone sketches out a picture of humanity's descent into nanotechnological warfare, where China refuses to abide by an international control agreement, followed by an arms race ... Wait a minute—how do you know it will be China? Is that a crystal ball in your pocket or are you just happy to be a futurist? Where are all these details coming from? Where did *that specific* detail come from?

You know what? This isn't about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain's feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn't even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up and multiply.

You need one whole hell of a lot of rationality before it does anything but lead you into new and interesting mistakes.

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

You should accept the fact that there's no clear boundary between you and the horse, between rationality and instinct. It's not easy for a woman…

Hatred is a form of faith, distilled by passion to remove all rationality.

Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.

Humans were eventually irrational creatures gifted with the power of rationality.

I’m not insane, I’m voluntarily indifferent to conventional rationality.

The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.

The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.

And so come the cults, claiming to meet the needs that science has thus far failed to meet--and offering the prospective inductee a place on the ground floor. Some cults may be harmless enough, but whenever false doctrine is propagated there is some cost. Many such doctrines are dressed up as science in their own right. For even though established science may be distrusted, "science" is still a thumps-up word for most people. So we find many of these theories borrowing liberally from genuine science, and many more using terms that sound, to the uninitiated, like the stuff of which true science is made. Now many of the bogus doctrines are actually unintelligible; their seeming content simply vanishes when closely scrutinized. But given the incomprehensibility of so much genuine science for so many of us, that very unintelligibility can be mistaken as a sign of authenticity. Alas, it can even inspire reverence.

All right," Harry said coldly. "I'll answer your original question, then. You asked why Dark Wizards are afraid of death. Pretend, Headmaster, that you really believed in souls. Pretend that anyone could verify the existence of souls at any time, pretend that nobody cried at funerals because they knew their loved ones were still alive. Now can you imagine destroying a soul? Ripping it to shreds so that nothing remains to go on its next great adventure? Can you imagine what a terrible thing that would be, the worst crime that had ever been committed in the history of the universe, which you would do anything to prevent from happening even once? Because that's what Death really is - the annihilation of a soul!

A man goes to a foreign country and kills somebody who's not aggressing against him; in a Hawaiian shirt he's a criminal, in a green costume he's a hero who gets a parade and a pension. So that, as a culture, we remain in a state of moral insanity. To point out these contradictions to people in society is to be labeled insane. This is how insane society remains, that anybody who points out logical opposites in the most essential human topic of ethics, is considered to be insane.

And who should see the truth but you and I?

We no longer have the pact from 1997; it was radically amended in 2005 and the Commission is applying this Stability Pact with wisdom and rationality.

All believers assert that they were lucky enough to be born in the religious community to which they belong. All other religions are mystification and distortion of reality. No other community can be as moral as their community, because they don’t obey the divine rules as their community, and they destroy them more or less. That is why for believers only their religious community can be an ideal example for imitation of others, only their holy scriptures and texts hold the absolute truth concerning everything. Similarly, all patriots believe that they are lucky that they were born in the society to which they belong. They sincerely believe that only their historical texts, with their interpretation, can be absolutely correct. No other social community can be as brave and humanistic as they are. For patriots, their social community can be or must have been the center of global historical progress. As a result, both religion and history give you self-confidence and honor, but instead take critical thinking from you. What is first-rate for a reasonable agnostic? — to be self-confident and proud, or increase an intuition that there must be something wrong and illusory moments in any religious or historical ideology. The difference between ideology and science, which may be the only criteria for a reasonable agnostic, is that any ideology divides humans into yours and ours, bad and good, respectively, but for science such badness and goodness don’t exist -- there are only individuals with the brain and mind, desires and emotions, and so on, and so forth.

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.

A mosquito is a more rational creature than a human being because it follows its instincts. Whereas a human being gets bogged down in an endless tangle of contradictory doubts and desires.

And when the Duke of Alva ordered three hundred Citizens to be put to Death together at Antwerp, a Lady who saw the Sight was presently afterwards deliver'd of a Child without a Head. So lives the Power of Imagination even in this Rationall Age.

Be rational’ is what they tell you when you are having a sane reaction to an insane situation, and the rationale behind their conception of reason is FUCKED. Be rational. What it really means is assume your position in the status quo. Assume the position.

As understanding deepens, the further removed it becomes from knowledge.

Being on the side of the majority is often a sign that you are wrong, or the most unlikely to be right.

As we have repeatedly seen, domination ultimately deprives both subjugator and subjugated of recognition. Gender polarity deprives women of their subjectivity and men of an other to recognize them. But the loss of recognition between men and women as equal subjects is only one consequence of gender domination. The ascendancy of male rationality results finally in the loss and distortion of recognition in society as a whole. It not only eliminates the maternal aspects of recognition (nurturance and empathy) from our collective values, actions, and institutions. It also restricts the exercise of assertion, making social authorship, and agency a matter of performance, control and impersonality - and thus vitiates subjectivity itself. In creating an increasingly objectified world, it deprives us of the intersubjective context in which assertion receives a recognizing response. We must face the enormity of this loss if we are ever to find our way back through the maze of domination to the heart of recognition.

A thinking human must practice thinking.

A true rationalist ought to be effective in the real world.

Baptize yourself with the flow of rational thinking and the world is bound to become rational.

Because the way people are built, Hermione, the way people are built to feel inside -" Harry put a hand over his own heart, in the anatomically correct position, then paused and moved his hand up to point toward his head at around the ear level, "- is that they hurt when they see their friends hurting. Someone inside their circle of concern, a member of their own tribe. That feeling has an off-switch, an off-switch labeled 'enemy' or 'foreigner' or sometimes just 'stranger'. That's how people are, if they don't learn otherwise.

Compassion without discipline is egregious self-sabotage.

Careful. When you dabble too much with reason life becomes nothing but a process of dying.

But it was important to be rational at all times, not just when calm.

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.

Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious.

„Das Gefühl ist jedenfalls ein schlechter Berater. Es besitzt per definitionem keine Allgemeingültigkeit.“ „Und der Verstand ist eine Illusion“, erwidert die ideale Geliebte schnell. „Nichts weiter als ein Kostüm, in das der Mensch die Summe seiner Gefühle steckt.“ „Du sprichst in romantischen Anachronismen!“, ruft Mia. „Und du in jenen intellektuellen Sophistereien, an denen Moritz zugrunde gegangen ist!

Culture makes lies plausible through exposure to time. It makes prejudice seem like physics intergenerationally. It is therefore the most dangerous opponent of philosophy, because it feels the most credible to the average person.

Dismissing without further investigation something that conflicts with what is already known is the very heart of rationality.

Doing worse with more knowledge means you are doing something very wrong.

Dr. Peter Boghossian’s A Manual for Creating Atheists is a precise, passionate, compassionate and brilliantly reasoned work that will illuminate any and all minds capable of openness and curiosity. This is not a bedtime story to help you fall asleep, but a wakeup call that has the best chance of bringing your rational mind back to life. (Review of Dr. Peter Boghossian's book, 'A Manual for Creating Atheists')