Robert McNamara Quotes

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

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.

By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There's no specific line, as you know.

I trust people to be human. Sometimes you do things that make amazing amounts of sense; sometimes you do things that don't make any sense whatsoever.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

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

Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

There is something insane about a lack of doubt. Doubt - to me, anyway - is what makes you human, and without doubt, even the righteous lose their grip, not only on reality but also on their humanity.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

I also doubt a man can give really clear reasons for anything.

The weakness of human reason appears more evidently in those who know it not than in those who know it.

Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency.

Faith means the purposeful suspension of critical thinking. It’s nothing to be admired.

I've gone through most of my life not believing anything. Either I know or I don't know, or I think.

Reason is the shepherd trying to corral life's vast flock of wild irrationalities.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

Man is a rational animal – so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents.

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

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.

Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.

Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know — the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.

But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.

Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.