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.