Irrationality

Irrationality is thinking, talking or acting without adequate use of reason.

Quotes

• I, the obsessed rationalist, was the only one who knew what I wanted: I was not going to submit to irrationality for its own sake, to the narcissist and passive irrationality others practiced. I would do completely the opposite. I would fight for the “conquest of the irrational.” In the meantime my friends would let themselves be overwhelmed by the irrational, succumbing, like so many others, Nietzsche included, to that romantic weakness.
  • Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius (1964), p. 9

• This irrationality of reason has been precipitated in cunning, as the adaptation of bourgeois reason to any unreason which confronts it as a stronger power.
  • Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, E. Jephcott, trans., p. 48

• We are again confronted with one of the most vexing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality.
  • Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964), p. 9

• He is irrational, however well he may be able to reason, who does not clearly see that good is good and truth truth.
  • Coventry Patmore, in Basil Champneys, Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore (London: George Bell and Sons, 1900), p. 73

• Irrationalism will use reason too, but without any feeling of obligation.
  • Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1971), vol. 2 p. 240