I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.
It is not rational, never mind ‘appropriate,’ to impose billions of dollars in economic costs in return for a few dollars in health or environmental benefits.
As history reminds us again and again, wars are not always made on the basis of rational calculations: often the contrary.
If you really look hard at the evidence, the most rational conclusion is to believe that the demonic is real.
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
To be bothered wherever you go – it’s not a rational thing to want at all.
If I have something that I’ve finished with, and someone else might find value in it, the idea of passing along for a price is a rational transaction. It exists in many aspects of our lives. But I do have to say that media is a different beast.
My rational mind knows I am blessed. So many women – some of whom I’ve interviewed over the years – endure infertility and childlessness.
I started to call myself a rational therapist in 1955; later I used the term rational emotive. Now I call myself a rational emotive behavior therapist.
I am a socialist, a believer in rational thought and the rule of law.
The auto industry must acknowledge that a rational transportation policy should seek a balance between individual convenience, the efficient use of limited resources, and urban-living values that protect spaciousness, natural beauty, and human-scale mobility.
I’m not emotional about investments. Investing is something where you have to be purely rational and not let emotion affect your decision making – just the facts.
I don’t think of poetry as a ‘rational’ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.
The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we’re sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we’re not.
First, he must hold rational values, and to do this he must be a thinker.
Back in 1968, when I was 30, my entire life blew up. I had a life plan, and it collapsed for no rational reason.
The movement of many people through a building can be musical, if the movement is harmonious, rational, but full of life and feeling.
Writers do not want to think they are less rational than other people, and at the mercy of compulsions, but in their hearts they know they are like those people who are taken for walks by their dogs, towed through hedges and ditches by an untrained sub-human energy.
I did a lot of work without thinking about it in a calm, rational way. Stopping and thinking about what I was doing made my music calmer and deeper in tone.
There are plenty of good, rational, compassionate and talented conservatives who deserve a microphone and a platform. It’s time to pass the baton to a new generation of leaders who don’t speak – or think – like Archie Bunker.
At the constitutional level where we work, 90 percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.
It doesn’t sound rational for a Klansman to sit down to dinner with a black man. What you’re overlooking is, to be racist is to be irrational. So, they are already irrational, and irrational people do irrational things. That’s why a Klansman will sit down with me.
How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesn’t believe that, about other possibilities?
From inside where I live, I feel like I just perceive events in a certain rational way. I often find it sad or poignant, and it may not make me laugh a bit. But I don’t mind inventing a portrait that allows others to laugh if that’s what they want to do.
Poetry is a form of necessary speech… I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements of poetry.
I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
While we somehow understand revenge on an intuitive level between individuals, I do suspect that companies, assuming that people are rational, completely miss and underestimate the motivation people have for revenge.
We live in an epoch where rational reasoning associated with evidence isn’t universally accepted and is, in fact, in jeopardy. That worries me a lot.
We think, each of us, that we’re much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it’s the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we’ve already made the decision.
Selecting about 100 judges of the higher judiciary every year in a rational and fair manner is an onerous task requiring a full-time and not an ex-officio body. An ex-officio body of sitting judges and ministers cannot devote the kind of time required for this job.
I’m very rational, so sometimes I need the facts, and if I don’t have the facts, then I get huffy, and I move on.
If I were to ask any parent, ‘Do you love your kid?’ the answer would unequivocally be, ‘Yes.’ If I went on to ask, ‘What would you do to protect your kid from harm’s way?’ any rational parent would answer without skipping a beat, ‘Anything.’
While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
There are so many different kinds of motivation for investing or giving or parting with your money in whatever other way, and plain old financial return is obviously attractive. But people are not always rational and are not just looking for that.
No one ever pretended that shopping for anything is a rational experience. If it were, would there be Fluffernutter? Laceless sneakers? Porkpie hats? Would the Chia Pet even exist?
The tubular steel chair is surely rational from technical and constructive points of view. It is light, suitable for mass production, and so on. But steel and chromium surfaces are not satisfactory from the human point of view.
It is my earnest hope that all parties across the political spectrum will bear Hong Kong’s long-term interests in mind, apply their political wisdom, and seek a consensus through open and rational communication with people of different views.
Human emotion isn’t neatly ordered and rational and easily predictable.
I am convinced that, because the criminal justice system is run by humans, it is naturally subject to human error. There is no rational basis to believe that this same type of human error will not infect capital murder trials.
The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.
Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional form and ceremonies.
Be able to defend your arguments in a rational way. Otherwise, all you have is an opinion.
Our rational minds often attempt to minimise or negate the mystical encounters. We forget the power of our experiences. We must embrace the reality of that event, which is a miracle.
China should be developing through the various foreign investments it receives. I hope for its level-headed and rational understanding that anything to discourage that is a disservice to itself.
I’m a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
You can’t ‘work through worry and fear rationally,’ because fear isn’t rational!
There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.
In fact, in more cases than not, when we are rational, we’re actually unhappy. Emotion is good; passion is good. Being into what we’re into, provided that it’s a healthy pursuit, it’s a good thing.
There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on.
Strong moral arguments exist for why we should often try to ignore stereotypes or override them. But we shouldn’t assume they represent some irrational quirk of the unconscious mind. In fact, they’re largely the consequence of the mind’s attempt to make a rational decision.
I think that it’s rational to fear your own death or to fear harm to your family.
TO fear God, is one of the first and greatest Duties of his rational Creatures.
If you call ‘religious’ a man who believes in what I call a Supermeaning, a meaning so comprehensive that you can no longer grasp it, get hold of it in rational intellectual terminology, then one should feel free to call me religious, really.
