ÀÏ»¢»úÎÈÓ®·½·¨

“If you're rational you don't get to believe whatever you want to believe.”
― Michael Huemer

“Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims—as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force—he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious; reason, to him, is a means of deception; he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason—and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked. His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men’s means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it.”
― Ayn Rand

“Irrationality loves company.”
― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King

“If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“No evidence is powerful enough to force acceptance of a conclusion that is emotionally distasteful.”
― Theodosius Dobzhansky

“People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism.”
― Ayn Rand

“Then, one sunny September morning, the illusion of a personal God that I tried so hard to believe in, exploded over the skies of Manhattan. Even as the ashes and ruin of this horrific act of blind faith settled over New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, I watched people across the country scrambling to that same irrational altar for their answers. In the fierce storm of emotion that rolled across this country, one realization rose to the surface of my mind with blinding clarity: certainly this mechanism of unassailable blind faith is one of the greatest risks mankind faces today.”
― Nathan Phelps

“Empathy is the sunlight to the vampire of culture.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“Statism ends with an eye roll.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“The problem is that most people, most of the time, are desperate to believe ridiculous and divisive ideas for patently emotional reasons,and while rarely explicit what they're really worried about is death”
― Sam Harris

“The unthinking embrace of irrationality is literally madness. But embracing rationality while denying the existence of any mystery to life and its meaning — that is no less a form of madness than is eager devotion to unreason.”
― Dean Koontz, Forever Odd

“When I argue with devout statists, sometimes other voluntaryists tell me that I'm wasting my time, opining that a particular statist is never going to "get it." I often respond by saying that that's rarely my intention. Most of the time, when I argue with statists, the goal is for ME to learn more about the mentality and psychology of authoritarian indoctrination, and to hopefully help any SPECTATORS--whether statist or anarchist--learn something from the exchange. (Both of those goals can be achieved even if the statist continues to be a lunk-headed dupe.) Earlier today, a funny but possibly profound analogy came to mind about this:

When I argue with "true believer" devout statists, I'm not being a doctor trying to heal an ailing patient; I'm being a coroner, doing an AUTOPSY on a patient who is already beyond any hope of saving, in the hopes that I, and anyone observing, may learn more about the "disease" of statism, in order to better understand the nature of it, and possibly prevent others from experiencing a similar fate.”
― Larken Rose

“For ogsÃ¥ hun hadde hat sin historie, sin lille uregelmæssighet i sit liv (...)Siden sit ulykkelige forhold til en ung fremmed, en ren æventyrer ved navn Johan Nagel, en uanselig dværg, som hadde dukket op pÃ¥ hendes vei ifjor og gjort hende ganske forvirret, hadde fru Dagny hat sine dulgte sorger Ã¥ trækkes med. Forholdet var ikke endt med at en hat sænkedes dypt og en pyntelig farvel hadde lydt, nei den vilde man var gÃ¥t pÃ¥ hodet i havet og hadde gjort ende pÃ¥ sig uten Ã¥ si et ord.”
― Knut Hamsun , Redaktør Lynge

“When you go with first principles, a giant light goes off in what you think is a city and turns out to be an insane asylum.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“Paradoxes only stump sane people. Nuts have irrational on our side.”
― Brian Spellman, Psych Ward Cyrano

“Many great ideas, great love stories, and great achievements are born from a healthy irrationality.”
― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience

“Intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls…The genius of the irrational…This is the body’s intelligence, not the mind’s. Every living cell possess it…[the] indomitable will to survive.”
― David Marusek, Mind Over Ship

“An atheist who is a statist is just another theist.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“The idea of original sin--of guilt with no possibility of innocence, no freedom of choice, no alternatives--inherently militates against self-esteem. The very notion of guilt without volition or responsibility is an assault on reason as well as on morality. Sin is not original, it is originated--like virtue.”
― Nathaniel Branden

“It is better to make an irrational noise in a bush than in a desert.”
― Duop Chak Wuol

“The most important thing to remember about confronting an irrational person is that they are usually attributing an inaccurate meaning to a situation causing them to react irrationally.”
― Paul Colaianni, How to Deal with Irrational People: What to do When Common Sense Fails and "Crazy" Behavior Prevails

“Then the true name for religion,' Fat said, 'is death.'
'The secret name,' I agreed. 'You got it. Jesus died; Asklepios died - they killed Mani worse than they killef jesus, but nobody even cares; nobody even remembers. They killed the Catharist in southern France by the tens of thousands. In the Thirty Years War, hundreds of people died. Protestants and Catholics - manual slaughter. Death is the real name for it; not God, not the Savior, not love - death. Kevin is rights about his cat. It's all there in his dead cat. The Great Judge can't answer Kevin: "Why did my cat die?" Answer: "Damned i I knoe." There is no answer; there is only a dead animal that just wanted to cross the street. We're all animals that want to cross the street only something mows us down half-way across that we never saw. Go ask Kevin. "Your cat was stupid." "Who made the cat? Why did he make the cat stupid? Did the cat learn by being killed, and if so, what did he learn? Did Sherri learn anything from dying of cancer? did gloria learn anything-'
'Okay, enough,' Fat said.
'Kevin is right,' I said. 'Go out and get laid.'
'By who? they're all dead.'
I said, 'There's more. Still alive. Lay one of them before she dies or you die or somebody dies, some person or animal. You said it yourself: the universe is irrational because the mind behind it is irrational. You are irrational and you know it. We all are and we know it, on some level. I'd write a book about it but no one would believe a group of human being could be as irrational as we are, as we've acted.”
― Philip K. Dick

“We must fight for the freedom of religion; because that is the only way we can stand against irrationality.”
― M.F. Moonzajer

“We are betrayed by our maps of salience. They plot our narratives, identify our enemies and then coat them in distorting layer of loathing and dread. We feel that hunch - withdraw - and then conduct a post factum search for evidence that justifies it. We are motivated to fight our foes because we are emotional about them, but emotion is the territorial scent-mark of irrationality.”
― Will Storr

“They are very good odds. And I know that my scientific brain believes them, if not my panic-ridden, maternal one. Those odds should have made a difference to my reaction. I should have been able to take the diagnosis calmly, intelligently, reflectively. But that would be to assign rationality to this phenomenon. The trouble with abject fear - with searing, lurid metaphor - is that it is not rational. And the myths that spring out of fear that deep are certainly not. They are the stuff of nightmares. They are tenacious.”
― Alanna Mitchell, Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths

“For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument and the rest of the old stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau.”
― Bertrand Russell

“For twenty years and more the whole planet had been bombed, raped, ravaged, and gouged by people whose fury had so exceeded their judgment that the only thing they could think of to do to express their discontent was to kill somebody.”
― Frederik Pohl, The Annals of the Heechee

“Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them.”
― Alexander H. Stephens

“I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.”
― Alexander H. Stephens

“The reader who thinks that rationality does not require a definition should ponder the following: I'll give you a million dollars to do something irrational.”
― Lakshman Krishnamurthi, Principles of Pricing: An Analytical Approach