Irrationality Quotes

“All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.”
― Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

“Nationalism does nothing but teach you to hate people you never met, and to take pride in accomplishments you had no part in.”
― Doug Stanhope

“Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.”
― Stanislaw Lem

“The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.”
― Terence McKenna

“The hated man is the result of his hater's pride rather than his hater's conscience.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.”
― Austin O'Malley, Keystones Of Thought

“Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“Sanity is not about confrontation. It's about filtering. Having a stable and happy life is about saying "no" to crazy people, not about inviting them in and then hoping that confrontations are going to make them sane.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Kind of Anarchism I Believe in, and What's Wrong with Libertarians

“To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Collected Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley

“It seems that life, in order to maintain itself, must revolt every so often against man's ceaseless attempts to master its irrational forces with his mind.”
― Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology

“Wouldn't economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave?”
― Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

“Good intentions are ubiquitous in politics; what is scarce is accurate beliefs.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“All men are, at times, influenced by inexplicable sentiments. Ideas haunt them in spite of all their efforts to discard them. Prepossessions are entertained, for which their reason is unable to discover any adequate cause. The strength of a belief, when it is destitute of any rational foundation, seems, of itself, to furnish a new ground for credulity. We first admit a powerful persuasion, and then, from reflecting on the insufficiency of the ground on which it is built, instead of being prompted to dismiss it, we become more forcibly attached to it.”
― Charles Brockden Brown, Somnambulism and Other Stories

“I am like a machine being driven to excessive rotations: the bearings are incandescing and, in a minute, melted metal will begin to drip and everything will turn to nothing. Quick: get cold water, logic. I am pouring it over myself by the bucketload but the logic sizzles on the hot bearings and dissipates elusive white steam into the air.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin

“We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“In other words, the universe itself—and the Mind behind it—is insane. Therefore someone in touch with reality is, by definition, in touch with the insane: infused by the irrational.
In essence, Fat monitored his own mind and found it defective. He then, by the use of that mind, monitored outer reality, that which is called the macrocosm. He found it defective as well. As the Hermetic philosophers stipulated, the macrocosm and the microcosm mirror each other faithfully. Fat, using a defective instrument, swept out a defective subject, and from this sweep got back the report that everything was wrong.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“That’s right; put on the steam, fasten down the escape-valve, and sit on it, and see there you’ll land.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

“Facts do not fall in the face of discomfort.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“You see, I'd behaved pretty badly. Losing my head about someone I didn't really love and hurting someone I did. Why is one so stupid?"

"The heart has its reasons," said Will, "and the endocrines have theirs.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“On reflection, falling in love for him was not only extraordinary, but rather comical. By having closely observed Kiyoaki Matsugae, he knew full well what sort of man should fall in love.
Falling in love was a special privilege given to someone whose external, sensuous charm and internal ignorance, disorganization, and lack of cognizance permitted him to form a kind of fantasy about others. It was a rude privilege. Honda was quite aware that since his childhood, he had been the opposite of such a man.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn

“l'homme se trouve devant l'irrationnel. Il sent en lui son désir de bonheur et de raison. L'absurde naît de cette confrontation entre l'appel humain et le silence déraisonnable du monde.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely.”
― Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio

“When we allow ourselves to ignore a rational option in favor of an irrational one, or perhaps an unjustified one, it’s like eating junk food. It fills the need for making a decision but does so with no decision at all. Just like junk food, it satiates the need to act, but it requires no action at all.”
― Farshad Asl, The "No Excuses" Mindset: A Life of Purpose, Passion, and Clarity

“VLADIMIR: I missed you . . . and at the same time I was happy. Isn't that a strange thing?

ESTRAGON: (shocked). Happy?

VLADIMIR: Perhaps it's not quite the right word.

ESTRAGON: And now?

VLADIMIR: Now? . . . (Joyous.) There you are again . . . (Indifferent.) There we are again. . .
(Gloomy.) There I am again.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“If thou really believe in one God,
irrationality is subset of thou logic.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Resist your friends’ irrational opinions. But remind yourself to check in on them regularly in case reason has accidentally influenced them in the meantime.”
― George Hammond