Roy Blount Jr. Quotes

Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.

Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart's content.

We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place.

The errors of the observer come from the qualities of the human mind.

When the subconscious mind must chose between deeply rooted emotions and logic, emotions will almost always win.

Emotion is a rotten base for politics.

Men can reason themselves into almost any sort of opinion if they are so inclined.

The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational. Until you understand that, hypnosis is hard to do... For me, it was this great awakening to understand that humans are deeply irrational, and it's probably the greatest influence on me in terms of my writing.

One who understands the relationships between the human heart and the human mind will always out-hack those who chase after an ever-changing technology.

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.

Humans are hard-wired to be irrational when it comes to financial decisions. We must understand that so we don't become the sucker at the poker table.

It's very personal to me and doesn't work for everybody, but what I have found in my experience is that when I make pro and con lists, it's usually because I am trying to talk myself out of a good idea or talk myself into a really bad one.

I'm disturbed when people let superstition, magical thinking, extreme conspiracy theories and so on blur their minds.

There are two methods of human activity - and according to which one of these two kinds of activity people mainly follow, are there two kinds of people: One use their reason to learn what is good and what is bad and they act according to this knowledge; the other act as they want to and then they use their reason to prove that that which they did was good and that which they didn't do was bad.

Logicians have but ill defined As rational the human mind; Reason, they say, belongs to man, But let them prove it if they can.

The obscurity is much oftener in the passions and prejudices of the reasoner than in the subject.

There are those who reason well, but they are greatly outnumbered by those who reason badly.

Some people throw a bit of their personality after their bad arguments, as if that might straighten their paths and turn them into right and good arguments-just as a man in a bowling alley, after he has let go of the ball, still tries to direct it with gestures.

A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first...A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images invoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed facts....Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images.

I no longer idolize reason. I have come to accept that ninety percent of what we do is irrational and that we spend what little rational thought we have in justifying our irrationality.

But there are some situations of the human mind in which good sense has very little power.

Reason is so unreasonable, that few people can say they are in possession of it.

Our native susceptibilities and acquired tastes determine which of the many qualities in an object shall most impress us, and be most clearly recalled. One man remembers the combustible properties of a substance, which to another is memorable for its polarising property; to one man a stream is so much water-power, to another a rendezvous for lovers.