Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.
It is neither racist nor elitist to say publicly what every rational person believes privately – that if you don’t know anything about a subject, you ought not to raise your hand or cast a ballot on the matter.
In a dream it’s typical not to be rational.
The human race will then become one family, and the world will be the dwelling of Rational Men.
What is faith? If you believe something because you have evidence for it, or rational argument, that is not faith. So faith seems to be believing something despite the absence of evidence or rational argument for it.
We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and irrational.
The internet was supposed to make this whole business of job searching rational and simple. You could post your resume and companies would search them and they’d find you. It doesn’t seem to work that way. There aren’t enough jobs for experienced, college educated managers and professionals.
The Founding Fathers worried that ‘some common impulse of passion’ might lead many to subvert the rights of the few. It’s a rational fear, one that is played out endlessly.
Republicans: steely, rational, paternalistic, respectful of authority, easy to herd, the party of No. Democrats: sugary, emotional, idealistic, yearning for novelty, hard to marshal, the party of Oh Yeah, Baby, Make Mama Feel Good.
To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.
In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence, I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.
Emotions are one of the main things that derail communication. Once people get upset at one another, rational thinking goes out of the window.
I’m one of the most superstitious people I know. There are these two battling parts of me, one is very rational and intellectual, and the other part of me, at my core, I believe in magic in a certain way, and serendipity.
Artists are those people who sit at the intersection between the known and unknown, the rational and irrational, coming to terms with some of the confusing histories we, as artists, deal with.
I’ve always been interested in the intersection between our rational and our unconscious lives.
I don’t think it’s rational for a country to try to kill the Saudi Arabian ambassador in a restaurant in Washington.
I grew up Catholic, and when you’ve grown up, and these belief systems have been presented to you at a young, impressionable age, I don’t know that you can shake them. Even if your rational mind tells you something else, sometimes they’re so deeply ingrained that they are with you for the rest of your life.
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
The bedrock foundation of any rational immigration policy should be to benefit America rather than benefiting potential or existing immigrants, or any other specific group, whether favorable or antagonistic to them.
Despite all the lunacy of the last century, all the absurdity of war and genocide, we believe that humans being are rational and are made to seek the truth.
A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.
Illegal immigrants make a rational choice when they decide to violate our immigration laws. They weigh the costs, including the risks of getting caught, against the benefits of a better life.
There’s no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.
What matters to me is to find rational solutions for those that are facing difficulties so that France preserves jobs and its ability to innovate.
Legal behavior is not incompatible with rational, self-interested behavior.
A person without a shadow should keep out of the sun, that is the only safe and rational plan.
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.
Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn’t realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.
Most Jews, like most rational persons, know that their personal identity and their ethnic identity are not one and the same.
No crime can ever be defended on rational grounds.
I think political parties can be funded in a perfectly rational way without being corrupt.
In my rational mind, I know… that is a very simplistic way of looking at it, but when there is violence of that kind, it challenges my faith. I still can’t say that I totally understand why – why that is allowed to happen.
I love Richard Thaler’s ‘Quasi Rational Economics.’ A collection of some of his most interesting and inventive essays, the real foundation of behavioral economics.
I’m not rational enough to be a good journalist.
Respect for another man’s opinion is worthy. It is the realization that any opinion is valuable, for it is the sign of a rational being.
I made the case for public ownership in ‘Another World is Possible’ – a manifesto for 21st-century socialism – as it is the most rational approach for managing resources in the long-term interest of the entire community.
Compared with members of other nations of Western civilization, the ordinary American is a rationalistic being, and there are close relations between his moralism and his rationalism. Even romanticism, transcendentalism, and mysticism tend to be, in the American culture, rational, pragmatic and optimistic.
I consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity – you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.
I find religion and spirituality fascinating. I would like to believe this isn’t the end and there’s something more, but I can’t convince the rational part of me that that makes any sense whatsoever.
I never map things out in advance. It would be better if I did and more economical in terms of time, but I’ve found that if you work out a plot line from beginning to end, at the beginning it becomes very rational.
Personally, I don’t see old economics and behavioural economics as opposed. It is useful to assume people are rational as a good approximation to their long term behaviour, but it would be unwise not to think how in practice their behaviour may deviate from that simplifying assumption.
I believe there are two types of business people – risky and rational.
My family is out of the ordinary in our physical lifestyle and the day-to-day things that we deal with, but my approach to them is pretty rational and sound. And I’m the quiet one! It’s very different from my performing life.
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
The first and most optimistic response was complete rational expectations econometrics. A rational expectations equilibrium is a likelihood function. Maximize it.
Stories need stupid decisions that, at the time, seem absolutely rational and necessary. Without stupid decisions, the world isn’t thrown out of balance, and so there’s no need for a ‘rest of the story’ to balance it back.
We have no rational evidence that there exists another world, but we have a clear feeling that man does not exist only to produce and to consume.
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.
I make spaces that are calm rather than confrontational. I seek a certain kind of logic that allows you to move in space and perceive it as beautiful and rational. Clarity is a worthwhile quality.
In a way, one gets stability from being able to order the rational mind.
When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.
What do you do when your world is falling apart? How do you hold onto the real and the rational? I think that’s very relatable for people.
Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law cannot be found in a rational state of society.
A rational model of software is to design it quickly – the economic pressure to improvise presents an interesting challenge.
I don’t think any extremism is rational.
Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity.
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
From 1918 on, trade unionists were to express from the platforms of their congresses the workers’ desire for peace through a rational organization of the world.
