We’ve collected the best Rational Quotes from the greatest minds of the world: Sophie Kennedy Clark, Frederick Douglass, Mark Goulston, Michael Shermer, John McDonnell. Use them as an inspiration.
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The amygdala is like a point guard in the emotional part of your middle brain. When it is overwhelmed, it hijacks you away from being able to access your upper rational brain and think and assess what to do. It essentially disables your ability to think.
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My family is out of the ordinary in our physical lifestyle and the day-to-day things that we deal with, but my approach to them is pretty rational and sound. And I’m the quiet one! It’s very different from my performing life.
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China should be developing through the various foreign investments it receives. I hope for its level-headed and rational understanding that anything to discourage that is a disservice to itself.
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There’s no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.
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Since coming back from overseas, this is more of a foreign country than the places overseas. I don’t understand it. It’s like America has lost faith in rational thought.
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It is essential to an architect to know how to see: I mean to see in such a way that the vision is not overpowered by rational analysis.
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There are two kinds of terrorism. Rational terrorism such as Palestinian terrorism and apocalyptic terrorism like Sept. 11. You have to distinguish between the two.
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It is not rational, never mind ‘appropriate,’ to impose billions of dollars in economic costs in return for a few dollars in health or environmental benefits.
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Hate is irrational. I am a rational person.
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Human decision-making is complex. On our own, our tendency to yield to short-term temptations, and even to addictions, may be too strong for our rational, long-term planning.
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I think the Democratic Party has picked a lot of the wrong candidates, the kind that Middle America, or people who are more down the middle and more rational, can’t side with. I think that’s been the problem.
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No one ever pretended that shopping for anything is a rational experience. If it were, would there be Fluffernutter? Laceless sneakers? Porkpie hats? Would the Chia Pet even exist?
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There are plenty of good, rational, compassionate and talented conservatives who deserve a microphone and a platform. It’s time to pass the baton to a new generation of leaders who don’t speak – or think – like Archie Bunker.
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I think most people, most rational people, most people that I would feel comfortable sitting in a room with, understand that wrestling is scripted entertainment. But they don’t want you to remind them of that.
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I’m always quite rational.
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I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us.
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Making recess appointments when the Senate isn’t in recess is neither rational nor moderate. It’s a raw misuse of executive power by a president whose love of government is his most vulnerable spot with the electorate.
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Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.
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Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn’t realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.
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The very essence of political philosophy is the carving out of an ethical system – strictly, a subset of ethics dealing with political ethics. Ethics is the one rational discipline that demands the establishment of a rational set of value judgments; political ethics is that subset applying to matters of State.
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Perceived value is paramount for most diners; a feeling of satisfaction that what you’ve paid for is commensurate with what you’ve received. That is, provided your expectations are rational.
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In the first period religious life appears as a form of discipline which the individual or a whole people must accept as an unconditional command without any rational understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of that command.
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Respect for another man‘s opinion is worthy. It is the realization that any opinion is valuable, for it is the sign of a rational being.
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You actually can be passionate about things like making rational decisions based on a thorough airing of the facts, a reasonable and informed debate, a respect for the Constitution that includes, um, knowing about it.
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In a way, one gets stability from being able to order the rational mind.
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I tend to write first drafts that are incredibly cognitive, very rational, very boring. They come off as justification. Like, ‘This is my idea and here’s all the reasons that it’s right.’ It doesn’t make for very compelling reading.
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A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.
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I know what I saw. And the rational explanation is… it was a UFO. There’s UFOs over New York, as the song goes. And I saw another one in the early ’80s, and I know other did people did too.
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Of course I am partisan in my politics, but my partisanship is rational – which, in my book, is not necessarily oxymoronic.
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The bedrock foundation of any rational immigration policy should be to benefit America rather than benefiting potential or existing immigrants, or any other specific group, whether favorable or antagonistic to them.
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Remember, taboos are just a map of what a society feels it’s acceptable to be neurotic about. Taboos aren’t rational.
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When you’re filming, not everything is rational.
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In the end, rational policy is always good.
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I’m quite a rational person, but I’m drawn to the irrational. I love coincidences, and I like to question that in fiction: ‘Is this random, or is there something working underneath?’
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I find religion and spirituality fascinating. I would like to believe this isn’t the end and there’s something more, but I can’t convince the rational part of me that that makes any sense whatsoever.
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There’s a degree to which music bypasses our rational brain and accesses our emotional core in a way that’s really visceral and allows you to make a strong impression on people without necessary delivering information.
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If I were surrounded by angels who were purely rational and had no inclinations at all, I couldn’t do anything for them. I couldn’t make them happy; I couldn’t make them sad, I would be entirely useless as a moral agent.
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To me, the question of inspiration is an exercise in hindsight. The truth is, inspiration is mysterious at the time. I don’t think it’s ever a rational process.
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Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.
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Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers.
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Strong moral arguments exist for why we should often try to ignore stereotypes or override them. But we shouldn’t assume they represent some irrational quirk of the unconscious mind. In fact, they’re largely the consequence of the mind’s attempt to make a rational decision.
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It is widely accepted and understood that consumer decisions are as much influenced by emotional attachments to a product or service as by factors like price and performance. So why is it that when it comes to most aspects of human transportation, the world still seems to believe people are rational machines?
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If we did not have rational souls, we would not be able to believe.
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The tremendous acquisition of basic knowledge will allow a much more rational treatment of cancer, viral infections, degenerative diseases and, most importantly, mental diseases.
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Ironically, from our perspective, Russia finds Iran a stabilizing force. This is because Iran provides a counterweight to all of the Sunni Muslim powers in the region, being predominantly Shia. And Putin actually sees, and the rest of the Russian leadership, sees Iran very much as a rational actor.
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Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional form and ceremonies.
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Pope John Paul II was a great presence on the stage. Pope Benedict is a much more gentle and refined person, and I think he benefits greatly from the television close-ups because he wants to engage in a dialogue, in conversation. He wants to put forward his views in a measured, eloquent, rational way.
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With writing, you really have to have faith. You have to have some sort of confidence that if you keep at it, you will get where you need to go, because there are so many points where a rational person would quit.
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At the constitutional level where we work, 90 percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.
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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.
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There are a lot of scientists or other people who can be very skeptical or rational within their field, but they may well not do that in other aspects of their lives, when it comes to things like religion, or what have you. People have this amazing gift for being selective with their curiosity and skepticism.
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What our leaders and pundits never let slip is that the terrorists – whatever else they might be – might also be rational human beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions.
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I guess law was always interesting to me because you deal with constants. I like to deal with constants, abstracts, constants and reason and ration, rational approaches to things. I don’t know, I never really thought why I wanted to study law. But if you ask me whether I would do it again, absolutely.
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I am a rational person. I am moderate. I am humble.
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A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.
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I’ll wager there isn’t a human being on earth who doesn’t believe in luck, however rational they pretend to be in public life. In reality, most of human life is luck – and, of course, its darker, more prevalent opposite. One only has to live long enough to experience both.
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I’m very rational. I tend to let my head rule my heart.
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How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?
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There are so many different kinds of motivation for investing or giving or parting with your money in whatever other way, and plain old financial return is obviously attractive. But people are not always rational and are not just looking for that.
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We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.
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I grew up Catholic, and when you’ve grown up, and these belief systems have been presented to you at a young, impressionable age, I don’t know that you can shake them. Even if your rational mind tells you something else, sometimes they’re so deeply ingrained that they are with you for the rest of your life.
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Sometimes, I work a little more from emotion than I do from rational thought.
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I’m not emotional about investments. Investing is something where you have to be purely rational and not let emotion affect your decision making – just the facts.
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The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.
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Be able to defend your arguments in a rational way. Otherwise, all you have is an opinion.
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The movement of many people through a building can be musical, if the movement is harmonious, rational, but full of life and feeling.
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At the heart of both democracy and capitalism is a simple assumption that, across the board, people make free and relatively rational decisions: that we are, to borrow a medical term, Gillick Competent.
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I think political parties can be funded in a perfectly rational way without being corrupt.
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How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesn’t believe that, about other possibilities?
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Washington‘s incredible wastefulness of tax dollars is abhorrent to any sense of fairness or rational thinking.
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Brits, Scandinavians, Finns, Estonians consider themselves rational, logical, unencumbered by emotional arguments; we are businesslike, stubborn, and hard-working.
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Every time a twenty-something CEO turns down a multibillion-dollar offer for a company that has little or no revenues, it hits a raw nerve in me. Unlike most professionals, I am not shocked by the seemingly bizarre behavior of those founders who pursue their vision beyond all rational thought or monetary reward.
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I think it’s rational to assume the best in other people because most people are pretty decent.
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You can’t ‘work through worry and fear rationally,’ because fear isn’t rational!
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When an entrant competitor attacks the low end of any market, the rational reaction of the incumbent firms is to abandon rather than defend it – because the low end is the least profitable of their possible investments.
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Unfortunately, most gun control advocates are not really interested in rational debate, and their political games simply send Alice chasing white rabbits down holes.
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The legitimacy of coercive acts in a democracy arises from the process by which they are justified and by the degree to which we regard decisions as rational. If the justifications proceed properly, through recognized public institutions, and if they make sense to us, they are legitimate.
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In the 1940s, economics started getting highly mathematical. It was basically because economists weren’t smart enough to write down models of real behavior that they started writing down models of highly rational behavior – and they kind of forgot about humans.
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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.
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Indeed, eventually, random outcomes all revert to the mean, meaning that streaks eventually end. Understanding this is a key part of intelligent and rational investing.
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Faith is an act of rational choice, which determines us to act as if certain things were true, and in the confident expectation that they will prove to be true.
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A number of politicians have failed to recognise the consistent truth of history: that we’re both an emotional and a rational species, and that we make decisions very emotionally.
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Learn computer science. It’s extraordinarily helpful. I like recommending learning economics as well so they think in terms of business, they have rational frameworks for looking at the world, but yeah, computer science is an amazing way to get into, even if you want to be CEO, having a tech background is helpful.
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I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
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It is only by the rational use of technology; to control and guide what technology is doing; that we can keep any hopes of a social life more desirable than our own: or in fact of a social life which is not appalling to imagine.
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People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
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Most astronauts are very down-to-earth people. Many of us, three-quarters, have an engineering degree, and we have a very Cartesian, rational approach to things.
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What the Khmer Rouge had in store was a radical agrarian revolution, one with the professed aim of completely renovating society while giving the peasants a better life, of evening the rewards and feeding the hungry, of bringing a rational and utilitarian nation-state into being.
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Rational anxiety is when you’re aware of the source of your anxiety. Like, if I have to host an award show or talk to millions of people on the radio, I’m going to feel anxious, and I know why. Irrational anxiety is when I’m leaving CVS, and there’s a car behind me, and I’m wondering if he’s following me home.
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In a rational society we would want our presidents to be teachers. In our actual society we insist they be cheerleaders.
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What has struck me about the political world, as opposed to the business world, is that rational discourse has become all but impossible. All too often, arguments are conducted not on the basis of facts but on the basis of emotion – and, honestly, it is no fun being abused in the pages of tabloid newspapers or online.
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As an engineer, I learned that a long time ago: you don’t want to get into a rational discussion about irrational subjects.
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Instead of exporting what they perceived to be rational, modern, humane government to their colonies, the British often found themselves propping up deeply unattractive and corrupt princelings and client rulers because this was the cheapest way of maintaining control.
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Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: ‘What is the scientific status of the claims?’ ‘What social or ideological needs do they serve?’
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Back in 1968, when I was 30, my entire life blew up. I had a life plan, and it collapsed for no rational reason.
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The notion of humans as inherently rational beings has been not only trashed in economics, but trashed in all the best research on moral decision-making.
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Many mathematicians derive part of their self-esteem by feeling themselves the proud heirs of a long tradition of rational thinking; I am afraid they idealize their cultural ancestors.
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As history reminds us again and again, wars are not always made on the basis of rational calculations: often the contrary.
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The word ‘tolerance‘ once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate.
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I believe there are two types of business people – risky and rational.
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Economists discount any factors that would not influence the thinking of a rational person.
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You could argue that war is always an irrational act, and yet many states enter into military conflict out of rational calculation or national interest or the stability or longevity of their regime.
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Some of the most powerful memories are those when you are very, very young. Adult life is seen through the reflection of complex, rational thought.
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The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational.
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The great advantage of being human is that we can employ rational thought and resolve to change our circumstances.
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We live in an epoch where rational reasoning associated with evidence isn’t universally accepted and is, in fact, in jeopardy. That worries me a lot.
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There is an overabundance of rational reasons to say no to factory-farmed meat: It is the No. 1 cause of global warming, it systematically forces tens of billions of animals to suffer in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs, it is a decisive factor in the development of swine and avian flus, and so on.
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When I was a very young author, I knew I needed to build myself a tower outside of Europe. Like when you’re a hunter, and build towers to watch the animals move. I knew I would never understand the world without that perspective. I came to Africa for that rational reason, although I love Mozambique now.
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Architecture is not an inspirational business, it’s a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that’s all.
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If you ask what you are going to do about global warming, the only rational answer is to change the way in which we do transportation, energy production, agriculture and a good deal of manufacturing. The problem originates in human activity in the form of the production of goods.
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Universities are the custodians not only of the many cultures of man, but of the rational process itself.
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My job is making irrational people do rational things.
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