I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.
A. R. Ammons
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
I mean, I think it's a two-way relationship: I think you should not have too much faith in your own rationality. You should not have too much faith in the rationality of, you know, anybody else either. We all learn together about the way the world is, and I think it's a sort of antidote to wishful thinking of all kinds.
Abhijit Banerjee
I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.
Alan Moore
I don't think you can rely on Iran. I don't think you can rely on other radicals like the Taliban. They dispatched Al Qaida to bomb New York and Washington. What were they thinking? Were they that stupid? They weren't stupid. There is an irrationality there, and there is madness in this method.
Benjamin Netanyahu
You have to be just as mistrustful of straightforward rationality in business as you do of a uniquely gut approach.
Bernard Arnault
I don't know if you realize this, but anger is anger. It has no mind. It has no rationality. It's mad, and it just wants to destroy.
Bernice King
When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.
Brian Eno
The only shibboleth the West has is science. It is the premise of modernity and it defines itself as a rationality capable of, indeed requiring separation from politics, religion and really, society. Modernisation is to work towards this.
Bruno Latour
We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.
Daniel Kahneman
Tourette's has always been a tough one for many to digest because of its seeming irrationality: 'Why do you have to twitch or make noises? You seem normal, with no physical defects.' It's next to impossible to answer without living it.
Dash Mihok
I think that there's a strain in journalism that believes that anyone who surrenders him- or herself to faith and to belief necessarily checks reason and rationality at the door.
David Gregory
I think that we must find some way to get more common sense, more rationality, in our decisions and less emotion.
David Packard
If you're going to vote on a television contract, there is a certain rationality to saying that the same structures that are applied to Health Plan participation should be placed on the right to vote on a strike.
Dick Wolf
I know that war and mayhem run in our blood. I refuse to believe that they must dominate our lives. We humans are animals, too, but animals with amazing powers of rationality, morality, society. We can use our strength and courage not to savage each other, but to defend our highest purposes.
Donella Meadows
To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Interestingly, human irrationality is a hot topic in economics at the moment. Behavioural economics it's called, on the cusp of economics and psychology.
Evan Davis
The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.
In Britain, politicians who openly discuss their spirituality are about as welcome as Jehovah' s Witnesses on the doorstep, and the British associate the mixture of politics and religion as a heady cocktail best reserved for the mass irrationality of Northern Ireland, Iran, Kashmir, and the Middle East.
Gavin Esler
We need to get some rationality on the Second Amendment. This is crazy what we allow ourselves.
The classical theory of omniscient rationality is strikingly simple and beautiful.
It is not rational to assume, without evidence, that rationality can disclose everything about the world, just because it can disclose some things. Our intuition in favour of rationality, where we are inclined to use it, is just that - an intuition. Reason is founded in intuition and ends in intuition, like a pair of massive bookends.
I love my early movies, but naturalism is an artist's early style. Now I want to deal with feelings, dreams, an acceptance of irrationality.
Unfortunately, addicts don't respond to reason or rationality.
I have a theatrical temperament. I'm not interested in the middle road - maybe because everyone's on it. Rationality, reasonableness bewilder me.
Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful.
I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However, this is not entirely a matter of joy, as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos.
Faith is not a rational thing, and yet to understand the universe, rationality alone will not give it to us. Our understanding of the universe must transcend the rational.
I have thought sometimes that the sanest people, the people who are just very balanced, very happy, are probably lower achieving than other people. My kind of irrationality happens to be fear or anxiety.
Non-fiction is a big responsibility. Rationality. Facts. The urgent need to reflect some small aspect of reality. But fiction is a private autism, a self-referential world in which the writer is omnipotent. Gravity, taxes, and death are mere options, subject to the writer's fancy.
It is important to value intellect and discipline, of course, but it is also important to recognize the power of irrationality, enthusiasm and vast energy.
I like to take certain aspects of genre fiction and modify them in my own way. 'Your Republic Is Calling You' follows the form of a spy novel, but it leads readers into a world of Kafkaesque irrationality.
In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.
Researchers may like to think that, given all the facts, we make rational choices. Ask economists how that assumption works out for them. No, we are emotional creatures who use value-based reasoning in conjunction with our rationality.
If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart.
By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There's no specific line, as you know.
As humans, we are not so rationalist as we think we are. I think our biggest quality is indeed that we are human, truly human: if our biggest quality would be rationality, we would lose our soul.
I think irrationality is one of the scariest things in the world.
Sometimes emotions are more important than rationality.
Irrationality may be more prevalent in the party of climate denial, but it isn't limited to Republicans.
The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight.
What keeps me up at night is our nation's continued and burgeoning lack of rationality in response to mass shootings.
What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense.
The second advantage claimed for naturalism is that it is equivalent to rationality, because it assumes a model of reality in which all events are in principle accessible to scientific investigation.
I don't know if the term 'liberation theology,' which can be interpreted in a very positive sense, will help us much. What's important is the common rationality to which the church offers a fundamental contribution, and which must always help in the education of conscience, both for public and for private life.
I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.
I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.
The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.
If we are to assess the rationality of government expenditures to protect the lives of Americans through massive domestic surveillance, we need to compare this program to others aimed at saving American lives.
