#rationality

If we are ever going to achieve a rational approach to organizing our affairs, we have to dignify the process of admitting to being wrong. It doesn't help matters at all if the media, or your friends, accuse you of "flip-flopping" when you change your mind. Changing our minds is our hope for the future. ↗

— Brian Eno

#rationality #change

A bitter thing cannot be made sweet. The taste of anything can be changed. But poison cannot be changed into nectar. ↗

— B.R. Ambedkar

#human-nature #rationality #society #change

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. ↗

— Mary Wollstonecraft

#double-standards #empowerment #equality #feminism #flattery

Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge. ↗

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

#rationality #reality #thinking #equality

With a philosophy education, one can infuriate his peers, intimidate his date, think of obscure, unreliable ways to make money, and never regret a thing. ↗

— Criss Jami

#composure #contentment #education #education-system #freedom

Some may wonder whether part of the harvest of this invisible pollution (electromagnetic radiation) may be the comparative rarity of visionary experience in the modern world, and the predominence of a removed, overanalytical, repelling 'onlooker' intelligence in its place, resembling that of the (Martin) Amis hero (who will not see because he cannot feel). If this is so, such an intelligence has produced conditions favoring its evolution and survival. ↗

— Peter Redgrove

#em-pollution #martin-amis #rationality #experience

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible. ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#irrationality #religion #faith

Faith is stronger than so-called reason. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#h-h #rationality #reason #faith

The practice which obtains amongst the Americans of fixing the standard of their judgment in themselves alone, leads them to other habits of mind. As they perceive that they succeed in resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of the understanding. Thus they fall to denying what they cannot comprehend; which leaves them but little faith for whatever is extraordinary, and an almost insurmountable distaste for whatever is supernatural. ↗

— Alexis de Tocqueville

#rationality #faith

Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food. ↗

— Austin O'Malley

#irrationality #memory #food