Tribalism is an addiction that is driven by false beliefs that need to be reflected back to be perceived as true.

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...

Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies — the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe....

The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.

The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people...

On your quest to spirituality it is often required to suspend your rationality; but true spirituality asks that you enhance your rationality.

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

People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death....

In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.

A man goes to a foreign country and kills somebody who’s not aggressing against him; in a Hawaiian shirt he’s a criminal, in a green costume he’s a hero who gets a parade and a...

A Christian telling an atheist they’re going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they’re not getting any presents from Santa.

Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the...

To want to tackle everything rationally is irrational.

Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that’s like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can...

Truth has nothing to do with the conclusion, and everything to do with the methodology.

Of course, I rationalize the fear. I realize it’s not real, that my house isn’t burning down, that the deer aren’t going to kill me.

Like many another materialist, that is, he lied cleverly on the basis of insufficient knowledge, because the knowledge supplied seemed to his own particular intelligence inadmissible.(“The Wendigo”)

The voices of cold reason were talking, as usual, to deaf ears.

There is voluminous evidence that exclusive reliance on heuristic processing tendencies of Type I sometimes results in suboptimal responding (Baron, 2008; Evans, 2007a; Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002; Johnson-Laird, 2006; Kahneman & Tversky, 1973, 1996,...

When the experts’ scientific knowledge is legitimated in terms of being rational, logical, efficient, educated, progressive, modern, and enlightened, what analogies can other segments of society . . . utilize to challenge them?

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.

Of course, when you shut off your brain from rational analysis, any book is dangerous. Taking literally ancient parables from thousands of years ago is much more dangerous than playing with a loaded gun. Ancient...

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.

The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy.

I am the one constant obstacle to my own momentum.

You have to choose your future regrets.

A man who does not question his own judgment, society, and who flourishes between deceit and bewilderment, fails his moral responsibility as a rational being.

Rationality or consciousness is itself a ratio or proportion among the sensuous components of experience, and is not something added to such sense experience. Subrational beings have no means of achieving such a ratio or...

Eye-rolling is not exactly the pinnacle of socratic investigation.

The educated don’t get that way by memorizing facts; they get that way by respecting them.

Education levels are highly and negatively correlated to religious belief. In other words, ignorance is bliss.

The Apparent is the Bridge to the Real

In a society where rationality has ruled so long, the church frequently fails to see that in forsaking the weekly pursuit of the transcendent, we have given up the only ground that was uniquely ours...

How strange that excision – female circumcision, with several languages using the same term for both kinds of mutilation – of little girls should revolt the westerner but excite no disapproval when it is performed...

Just as the moon derives the light it reflects from the sun, so the rational human mind derives a created ability to know from its origin, God.

The most flattering spin I can put on this phase of paradoxes and metaphysical tangles is that I was smart enough, at age fourteen, to destroy any fledgling hypothesis I came up with. A tentative...

To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.

Careful. When you dabble too much with reason life becomes nothing but a process of dying.

The best way to destroy the decrepit is to build the glorious.

It is one of the greatest Curses visited upon Mankind, he told me, that they shall fear where no Fear is: this astrological and superstitious Humour disarms men’s Hearts, it breaks their Courage, it makes...

Its impossible to initiate a rational dialogue with some one about beliefs and concepts if he has not acquired them through reason. It doesn’t matter whether we are looking at God, race, or national pride.

Within Hobbes’ depiction of the motives for conflict. . . there is a problematic in which the grave threat that human beings pose to other human beings is not constituted simply by the structures of...

The joy from eating does not come from the exclusivity of the food, but instead from the sensitivity that we eat it with.

The New Man means to develop all the three dimensions of being, all the three doors to God: the head, the dimension of thinking, logic and reason, the heart – the dimension of joy, trust,...

We hold these truths to be self-evident.{Franklin’s edit to the assertion in Thomas Jefferson’s original wording, ‘We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable’ in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it...

All of us, whether vivisector or vegan, have been subject to mechanisms undercutting sympathy for animals. How long and to what extent we submit to these mechanisms is not a matter of rationality: to cut...

It was a good answer that was made by one who when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have...

Rationality doesn’t exist; right is absence of wrongness and wrong is what seems to be unfair.

People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life...

The type of journalism that relies on the reporter’s notion of what does or doesn’t “seem” correct or controversial is self-indulgent and irresponsible. It gives credence to the belief that we can intuit our way...