Top 260 Rational Quotes

The movie business is very much like that: people in authority making purely emotional decisions instead of interesting rational ones.

Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers.

My brother and I both used to worry about dying at 40 because our father died at 40. That probably wasn’t terribly rational, since my father led a rather unhealthy lifestyle, shall we say.

Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and others who raced to the microphones at the slightest hint of Obama overstepping the lines were damn quiet as Trump wildly colored outside the lines of any rational version of executive power.

With my fighters, there’s no excuses like, ‘Hey, listen, he’s a dumb guy. Came from the mean streets of somewhere. He’s just not all that bright.’ These are educated guys, most of them went to college, they have families, children, etc. These are smart, rational people I’m dealing with.

Economists discount any factors that would not influence the thinking of a rational person.

The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational.

Throughout the whole vegetable, sensible, and rational world, whatever makes progress towards maturity, as soon as it has passed that point, begins to verge towards decay.

Very bad things follow when we kid ourselves that we’re naturally rational, rather than the more humbling truth: naturally emotional.

In the end, rational policy is always good.

No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

We would like the rest of the world to look up to American democracy. So when there is this kind of folly taking place, it makes it difficult for other rational nations to look up to American democracy.

It has a sound and rational circulating medium, a real and definite representative of wealth.

Unfortunately, most gun control advocates are not really interested in rational debate, and their political games simply send Alice chasing white rabbits down holes.

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

When the U.S. claims the right to invade any country unilaterally and then defines a country like Iran or North Korea as ‘evil,’ then it is a rational response for these countries to develop nuclear weapons as the only military deterrent to invasion. We create what we most fear.

Just as Wall Street needs to break the hold of the bonus culture, which drives risk-taking that is rational for individuals but damaging to the financial system, so science must break the tyranny of the luxury journals. The result will be better research that better serves science and society.

Illogical thinkers throw names and slurs around because they have no arguments with which to rebut their opponents. Rational people have to keep hammering their points home.

In truth, there is no rational argument for guns in this society. This is no longer a frontier nation in which people hunt their own food. It is a crowded, overwhelmingly urban country in which letting people have access to guns is a continuing disaster.

The word ‘tolerance’ once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate.

Kim Jong-un is not a rational person.

I tend to write first drafts that are incredibly cognitive, very rational, very boring. They come off as justification. Like, ‘This is my idea and here’s all the reasons that it’s right.’ It doesn’t make for very compelling reading.

Indeed, eventually, random outcomes all revert to the mean, meaning that streaks eventually end. Understanding this is a key part of intelligent and rational investing.

When I was a very young author, I knew I needed to build myself a tower outside of Europe. Like when you’re a hunter, and build towers to watch the animals move. I knew I would never understand the world without that perspective. I came to Africa for that rational reason, although I love Mozambique now.

The amygdala is like a point guard in the emotional part of your middle brain. When it is overwhelmed, it hijacks you away from being able to access your upper rational brain and think and assess what to do. It essentially disables your ability to think.

Ironically, from our perspective, Russia finds Iran a stabilizing force. This is because Iran provides a counterweight to all of the Sunni Muslim powers in the region, being predominantly Shia. And Putin actually sees, and the rest of the Russian leadership, sees Iran very much as a rational actor.

Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors.

The great advantage of being human is that we can employ rational thought and resolve to change our circumstances.

Human beings can remain spiritual and religious while enjoying the benefits of rational administration of their affairs.

I find humanism to be the most rational and positive philosophy for life. And it’s not a new thing at all – the history of humanist thought is deep and inspiring.

Men tend to try to struggle to be more rational and reduce things to simplicity more and are more impatient with ambiguity than women are.

I know what I saw. And the rational explanation is… it was a UFO. There’s UFOs over New York, as the song goes. And I saw another one in the early ’80s, and I know other did people did too.

So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational.

Making recess appointments when the Senate isn’t in recess is neither rational nor moderate. It’s a raw misuse of executive power by a president whose love of government is his most vulnerable spot with the electorate.

I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up Scotty, there’s no rational life here.

I approve designs not because I think I am more gifted or somebody who can see ahead three or four years from now, but just to make sure that the design is a logical, rational decision, taken after analyzing pros and cons.

Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created.

But when it comes to writing the thing that I’ve sort of been thinking about lately, is why? You know, is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do.

To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

Emotions don’t disrupt our rational thinking but guide and inform it. But they are missing from our digital experience. Your smartphone knows who you are and where you are, but it doesn’t know how you feel. We aim to fix that.

Architecture is not an inspirational business, it’s a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that’s all.

When an entrant competitor attacks the low end of any market, the rational reaction of the incumbent firms is to abandon rather than defend it – because the low end is the least profitable of their possible investments.

Been trading up recently? You have, haven’t you? You’ll be squawking that you’re too rational, too busy and too socially concerned for any of that. But go through the fridge – come to think of it, what about the fridge itself? I bet it’s bigger than its predecessor.

Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.

We could solve all our problems if only we were the efficient, rational human beings of standard economic theory and had politicians willing to think in the long-term interest of their people rather than their own.

I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational.

Rational thought will always trump medieval dogma.

My fear is turnout. I think a lot of people might think: ‘Well, in the end, it’s the rational thing to stay, but I’ll let other people make that choice for me.’ Don’t. This is very close, no doubt about it.

It is rational Republicans who want to pull the plug on the Trump presidency.

The great changes in civilisation and society have been wrought by deeply held beliefs and passion rather than by a process of rational deduction.

I’d like to think that maybe the average person is rational, and they realise that I’m not this crazy monster that, at times, I’ve been perceived to be.