Walter O'Brien Quotes

Empathy has some unfortunate features - it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We're often at our best when we're smart enough not to rely on it.

Italians think with their heads.

I'm left-brain dominant, so anxiety and nervousness don't affect me; most emotions don't.

My intellect has always been more responsible than my emotions for how I respond to the world.

The problem with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than their minds.

It's hard to do that with people who think emotionally. A lot of people think in terms of people, emotions, and feelings. That's more complicated. Engineering mentality makes it, in theory, a little easier.

I think one of the important evolutions is that we no longer feel compulsively the need to argue, or to justify things on a kind of rational level. We are much more willing to admit that certain things are completely instinctive and others are really intellectual.

I'm against sloppy, emotional thinking.

I am a linear thinker in a lot of ways.

I'm always quite rational.

I have a very linear mind.

The problem with wonks is that they can't deal with emotion and feeling, and they don't like stories. It means that they cannot connect at all with the feelings and imaginations of the voters.

As a nation, we may take pride in the fact that we are softhearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed.

When you need to make a decision, don't let your emotions vote.

With method and logic one can accomplish anything.

Only when you combine sound intellect with emotional discipline do you get rational behavior.

Never let your emotions overrule your head.

Rational thinking is an important aspect of human nature, but we have imagination, we have ambition, we have irrational fear, we are swayed by other people, we get indoctrinated and we get influenced by advertising.

We are often in society told to make decisions in one of two ways. We're either told "Use your gut, just go with how you feel about it and let that guide you," or we're told to use reason - some very deliberative methodical process of pros and cons and really thinking it through.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

One of the things this world is finding is that emotion is the basis of reason. We really have to trust our emotions, which are much smarter than our reason in some ways.

Since when was an emotional argument won by logic?

I don't guess. I think. I ponder. I deduce. Then I decide. But I never guess.

Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.