Howard Jacobson Quotes

Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason.

Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.

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.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.

Emotion is always the enemy of wise statesmanship.

Consider what you think justice requires, and decide accordingly. But never give your reasons; for your judgment will probably be right, but your reasons will certainly be wrong.

It's amazing how unwilling most people are to admit they don't know the answer to a question or a problem and instead charge forward on a 'gut instinct' that turns out to be crap.

Our prejudices are our mistresses; reason is at best our wife, very often heard indeed, but seldom minded.

The mind is always the patsy of the heart.

Passion often renders the most clever man a fool, and sometimes renders the most foolish man clever.

Passion and prejudice govern the world; only under the name of reason.

We should never listen to our feelings. They lead us astray.

People in the world pay little heed to reason where their own interests are involved.

There are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.

Its the difference between instinct and intuition.

Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits-a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.

It amazes me how people are often more willing to act based on little or no data than to use data that is a challenge to assemble.

All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiment.

The organ of perception acts more readily than judgment.

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.

There are idiots in every crowd.

I've never gone through an audition process or anything. In most of my decisions like that, I just kind of feel it out: You know, do I feel comfortable with this person?

If I were thinking straight, I'd take you home right now.