Rationality Quotes

“Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite.”
― Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

“In short, one may say anything about the history of the world--anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational. The very word sticks in one's throat.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“We may convince ourselves that something is true, but that doesn’t make it true.”
― Petros Scientia, Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate

“Reasoning built on made-up stuff isn’t rational.”
― Petros Scientia, Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate

“The real school for the people and for all grown men is life. The only grand and omnipotent authority, at once natural and rational, the only one which we may respect, will be that of the collective and public spirit of a society founded on equality and solidarity and the mutual human respect of all its members. Yes, this is an authority which is not at all divine, wholly human, but before which we shall bow willingly, certain that, far from enslaving them, it will emancipate men. It will be a thousand times more powerful, be sure of it, than all your divine, theological, metaphysical, political, and judicial authorities, established by the Church and by the State; more powerful than your criminal codes, your jailers, and your executioners.”
― Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State

“It is one thing to explain the causal origins of thinking, as science commendably does; it is an entirely different thing to conflate thinking in its formal or rule-governed dimension with its evolutionary genesis. Being conditioned is not the same as being constituted. Such a conflation not only sophistically elides the distinction between the substantive and the formal, it also falls victim to a dogmatic metaphysics that is impulsively blind to its own epistemological and methodological bases qua origins.
It is this genetic fallacy that sanctions the demotion of general intelligence as qualitatively distinct to a mere quantitative account of intelligent behaviours prevalent in nature. It should not come as a any surprise that this is exactly the jaded gesture of antihumanism upon whose shoddy pillars today's discourse of posthumanism supports its case. Talk of thinking forests, rocks, worn shoes, and ethereal beings goes hand in hand with the cult of technological singularity, musings on Skynet or the Market as speculative posthuman intelligence, and computers endowed with intellectual intuition. And again, by now it should have become obvious that, despite the seeming antagonism between these two camps - one promoting the so-called egalitarianism of going beyond human conditions by dispensing with the rational resources of critique, the other advancing the speculative aspects of posthuman supremacy on the grounds of the technological overcoming of the human condition - they both in fact belong to the arsenal of today's neoliberal capitalism in its full-on assault on any account of intelligence that may remotely insinuate an ambition for collective rationality and imagination.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“Hölderlin's sense of loss and destitution was not simply due to a personal predilection for suffering, but was part of a larger cultural phenomenon that arose from powerful currents seething under the Enlightenment—an increasing alienation from nature and a growing sense of disenchantment in the face of a triumphant rationality and waning traditions and values. Hölderlin was not alone in perceiving these changes and experiencing them deeply. Hegel, for example, famously wrote of alienated consciousness, and Schiller described modern human beings as "stunted plants, that show only a feeble vestige of their nature." Hölderlin, for his part, reacted to these currents with an almost overwhelming longing for lost wholeness.”
― Friedrich Holderlin, Odes and Elegies

“Seeing that our birth involves the blending of these two things—the body, on the one hand, that we share with animals, and, on the other hand, rationality and intelligence, that we share with the gods—most of us incline to this former relationship, wretched and dead though it is, while only a few to the one that is divine and blessed.”
― Epictetus, Enchiridion

“Christians like yourself invariably declare that monsters like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung spring from the womb of atheism. ... The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths. Most become the center of a quasi-religious personality cult, requiring the continual use of propaganda for its maintenance. There is a difference between propaganda and the honest dissemination of information that we (generally) expect from a liberal democracy. ...

Consider the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout the period. The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914. And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide.

Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. One need not accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virgin birth of Jesus to be a preposterous idea. The problem with religion—as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology—is the problem of dogma itself. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.”
― Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

“Can we self-generate knowledge by simply assuming things to be true? Where do assumptions come from?”
― Petros Scientia, Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate

“My peace of mind is doubly involved in it;— for not only is it horrible to suspect a person, who has been what HE has been to ME, of such designs,—but what must it make me appear to myself?—What in a situation like mine, but a most shamefully unguarded affection could expose me to’—”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“It is a common folk theory of progressives that ‘the facts will set you free.’ If only you can get all the facts out there in the public eye, then every rational person will reach the right conclusion. It is a vain hope. Human brains just don’t work that way. Framing matters. Frames once entrenched are hard to dispel.”
― George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives

“Real faith and reason don’t fit the mold of traditional thinking but come from the person of Christ rather than a human viewpoint. And yet we need prayer to understand them since they come from a place totally different from the usual ineffective, weak, soft, inductive ways of thinking. Those old ways of thinking process thought but never come to the knowledge of the truth.”
― Petros Scientia, Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate

“God doesn’t base His statements on assumptions. He bases His statements on the truth.”
― Petros Scientia, Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate

“We’re not ashamed of Jesus Christ or the divine revelation that comes from Him.”
― Petros Scientia, Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate

“We don’t define faith as an intellectual exercise where we either make ourselves believe (which is make-believe), or else we interpret the physical evidence while “holding to the right presuppositions.”
― Petros Scientia, Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate

“You just need to come to Jesus, listen to Him, and yield yourself in willing submission. You need to know Him. And everyone who seeks Him finds Him. He’s real and knowable.”
― Petros Scientia, Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate

“Sound reasoning must be built on truth.”
― Petros Scientia, Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate

“Reasoning built on lies isn’t sound.”
― Petros Scientia, Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate

“Never would the humanities or psychoanalysis have existed if it had been miraculously possible to reduce man to his “rational” behaviors. The whole discovery of the psychological, whose complexity can extend ad-infinitum, comes from nothing but the impossibility of exploiting to death (the workers), of incarcerating to death (the detained), of fattening to death (the animals).”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“A man reaches the peak of irrationality just before, and that of rationality just after, an ejaculation.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“For every act of independent thinking puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril.”
― B R Ambedkar

“Knowing I piss off the right and the left gives me comfort. It is a great feeling to be rational.”
― Don Rittner

“Apes do evidently understand what others are doing, and they can prudently do the same, in which sense they "cooperate"—for their own reasons. But they lack the ability to symbolically par­ticipate in others' existence and thus communalize their own. [...]

"Traditional models of economic decision-making assume that peo­ple are self-interested rational maximizers. Empirical research has demonstrated, however, that people will take into account the inter­est of others and are sensitive to norms of cooperation and fairness. [...] Here we show that in an ultimatum game, humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), are rational maximizers and are not sensitive to fairness. These results support the hypothesis that other-regarding preferences and aversion to inequitable outcomes, which play key roles in human social organization, distinguish us from our clos­est living relatives." {Jensen, Call, and To masello 2007, 107; see also Jensen et al. 2006)

So much, then, for the dismal economic science—whose future is not bright either, inasmuch as chimpanzees are disappearing.”
― Marshall Sahlins, What Kinship Is-And Is Not

“Chaotic times are not the period to abandon rational thinking but just another reason to cherish its existence.”
― C.A.A. Savastano

“Spells? Mistrust them.
Mind is the spell which governs earth and heaven.
Man has a mind with which to plan his safety.
Know that, and help thyself.

Empedocles on Etna: Act I, Scene II”
― Matthew Arnold, Selected Poems of Matthew Arnold: Volume II of II

“Justice is good in its own right and makes life among other people more dependable. Yet Stern accepted long ago that even perfect justice will not change who we are. The law is erected on many fictions and perhaps the falsest one of all is that humans, in the end, are rational. Without doubt, our life--so far as we can tell--is one of cause and effect. That is what science depends on. But our most intimate decisions are rarely based on the kinds of calculations of pluses and minuses Jeremy Bentham, or the free-market economists for that matter, have wanted to believe in. We are fundamentally emotional creatures. In the most consequential matters, we answer faithfully to the heart's cry, not the law's.”
― Scott Turow, The Last Trial

“Rigidity and civilization can never go together.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Ain't Enough to Look Human

“In game theory, as in applications of other technologies that use RPT [Revealed Preference Theory], the purpose of the machinery is to tell us what happens when patterns of behavior instantiate some particular strategic vector, payoff matrix, and distribution of information—for example, a PD [Prisoner's Dilemma]—that we’re empirically motivated to regard as a correct model of a target situation. The motivational history that produced this vector in a given case is irrelevant to which game is instantiated, or to the location of its equilibrium or equilibria. As Binmore (1994, pp. 95–256) emphasizes at length, if, in the case of any putative PD, there is any available story that would rationalize cooperation by either player, then it follows as a matter of logic that the modeler has assigned at least one of them the wrong utility function (or has mistakenly assumed perfect information, or has failed to detect a commitment action) and so made a mistake in taking their game as an instance of the (one-shot) PD. Perhaps she has not observed enough of their behavior to have inferred an accurate model of the agents they instantiate. The game theorist’s solution algorithms, in themselves, are not empirical hypotheses about anything. Applications of them will be only as good, for purposes of either normative strategic advice or empirical explanation, as the empirical model of the players constructed from the intentional stance is accurate. It is a much-cited fact from the experimental economics literature that when people are brought into laboratories and set into situations contrived to induce PDs, substantial numbers cooperate. What follows from this, by proper use of RPT, not in discredit of it, is that the experimental setup has failed to induce a PD after all. The players’ behavior indicates that their preferences have been misrepresented in the specification of their game as a PD. A game is a mathematical representation of a situation, and the operation of solving a game is an exercise in deductive reasoning. Like any deductive argument, it adds no new empirical information not already contained in the premises. However, it can be of explanatory value in revealing structural relations among facts that we otherwise might not have noticed.”
― Don Ross

“A line of reasoning does not lead but follows us to truth.”
― Raheel Farooq, Why I Am a Muslim: And a Christian and a Jew