Chris Rock Quotes

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

The number of people that can reason well is much smaller than those that can reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling rocks, then several reasoners might be better than one. But reasoning isn't like hauling rocks, it's like, it's like racing, where a single, galloping Barbary steed easily outruns a hundred wagon-pulling horses.

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.

It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.

Logic is the art of convincing us some truth.

On any occasion when one can discover the cause of events, one should not resort to the gods.

We need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.

A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.

If women are often frustrated because men do not respond to their troubles by offering matching troubles, men are often frustrated because women do.

We do not respect people's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough for believing what I believe, you will helplessly believe what I believe. I will give you my reasons and reasons are contagious. That is what it is to be a rational human being.

... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.

My father always used to say, "Don't raise your voice. Improve your argument." Good sense does not always lie with the loudest shouters, nor can we say that a large, unruly crowd is always the best arbiter of what is right.

We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.

First with the head, then with the heart.

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

It is a misfortune to pass at once from observation to conclusion, and to regard both as of equal value; but it befalls many a student.

What was it with men, that they found elementary logic so difficult?

Being rational is a moral Imperative. You should never be stupider than you need to be.

It is however always important to remember that the ability to see things in their correct perspective may be, and often is, divorced from the ability to reason correctly and vice versa. That is why a man may be a very good theorist and yet talk absolute nonsense.

One of the two is almost always a prevailing tendency of every author: either not to say some things which certainly should be said, or to say many things which did not need to be said. The first is the original sin of synthetic natures, the latter of analytical natures.

I do not take things to the heart. I calculate and I do what needs to be done. If I were to start acting emotionally, it would destroy my work.

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.

The first cause of Absurd conclusions I ascribe to the want of Method.

I sometimes think men don't 'hear' very well, if I take your meaning to be 'understand what is going on in a person.' That's what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve.