Ashley Montagu Quotes

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.

I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

Humans are lazy but not stupid.

Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

To say that man is a reasoning animal is a very different thing than to say that most of man's decisions are based on his rational process. That I don't believe at all.

The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not.

Very bad things follow when we kid ourselves that we're naturally rational, rather than the more humbling truth: naturally emotional.

When a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.

The human mind has infinite capacity to rationalize, and evil characters just push that boundary a bit. Whatever they're doing, they think it makes sense to do it, and they think they have a good reason to do it. In short, they feel justified.

I can measure the motion of bodies but I cannot measure human folly.

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

It is the habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire

We humans, you see, have an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.

The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.

Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.

Your trust in rationality makes you irrational.

Men follow their sentiments and their self-interest, but it pleases them to imagine that they follow reason. And so they look for, and always find, some theory which, a posteriori, makes their actions appear to be logical. If that theory could be demolished scientifically, the only result would be that another theory would be substituted for the first one, and for the same purpose.

We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.

It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.

There's no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.

Men often make up in wrath what they want in reason.

Logic will never change emotion or perception.