Irrationality Quotes

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot

I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.

There is always some madness in love.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason. Events which excite those feelings will produce wonderful effects.

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.

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.

Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated.

A knight errant who turns mad for a reason deserves neither merit nor thanks. The thing is to do it without cause

… the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.

The mob begins to think and reason. Poor reptiles!

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

Mass democracy guarantees stupidity. Masses of people, even if they're individually intelligent, can only act stupidly.

Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down.

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals for the most part governed by the impulse of passion. This is a truth well understood by our adversaries who have practised upon it with no small benefit to their cause. For at the very moment they are eulogizing the reason of men & professing to appeal only to that faculty, they are courting the strongest & most active passion of the human heart - VANITY!

It seems to be very hard for people to live with riddles or to let them live, although one would think that life is so full of riddles as it is that a few more things we cannot answer would make no difference. But perhaps it is just this that is so unendurable, that there are irrational things in our own psyche which upset the conscious mind in its illusory certainties by confronting it with the riddle of its existence.

While Poe and the Symbolists were exploring the irrational in literature, Freud had begun to explore the resonant figure/ground double-plot of the conscious and unconscious.

I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved, and fostered by fear.

To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.