Unreason Quotes

“I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and irrational.”
― Dean Koontz, Forever Odd

“If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?”
― Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Three Trapped Tigers

“There are many of us here. A whole street. That's what it's called--Chernobylskaya. These people worked at the station their whole lives. A lot of them still go there to work on a provisional basis, that's how they work there now, no one lives there anymore. They have bad diseases, they're invalids, but they don't leave their jobs, they're scared to even think of the reactor closing down. Who needs them now anywhere else? Often they die. In an instant. They just drop--someone will be walking, he falls down, goes to sleep, never wakes up. He was carrying flowers for his nurse and his heart stopped. They die, but no one's really asked us. No one's asked what we've been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them.

But I was telling you about love. About my love...

-- Lyudmila, Ignatenko,
wife of deceased fireman, Vasily Ignatenko”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.”
― Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope

“Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.”
― Dean Koontz, Forever Odd

“The difficulty is that, so long as unreason prevails, a solution of our troubles can only be reached by chance; for while reason, being impersonal, makes universal co-operation possible, unreason, since it represents private passions, makes strife inevitable. It is for this reason that rationality, in the sense of an appeal to a universal and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme importance to the well-being of the human species.”
― Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays

“...Today the invisible hand seems confused and indecisive...Ideology and rhetoric increasingly guide policy decision, often bearing little relationship to factual reality. And the America we once knew seems divided and angry, defiantly embracing unreason.”
― Shawn Lawrence Otto, Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America

“There is nothing so consistent with reason as this denial of reason.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“How pleasant is the sound of even bad music and bad motives when we are setting out to march against an enemy!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

“The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity, and still hovers over it, is the eruption of madness— which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind's lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“Ultimately, confinement did seek to suppress madness, to eliminate from the social order a figure which did not find its place within it; the essence of confinement was not the exorcism of a danger. Confinement merely manifested what madness, in its essence, was: a manifestation of non-being; and by providing this manifestation, confinement thereby suppressed it, since it restored it to its truth as nothingness. Confinement is the practice which corresponds most exactly to madness experienced as unreason, that is, as the empty negativity of reason; by confinement, madness is acknowledged to be nothing.”
― Foucault Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“This isn't a reasoned response to a configuration of stars, but the heart cannot flourish on logic alone. Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you don't overdose”
― Dean Koontz, Forever Odd

“We have listened to the voices of hate, the voices of selfish unreason for far too long. Only the voices of peace will lead us where we need to be.”
― Laurence Overmire, New York Minute: An Actor's Memoir

“I continue not to believe, neither in God, nor in humanity. Since Phantom died I have worshipped His spirit. I talk to Him. I believe He hears me. I believe this not through an effort of the imagination, still less intelligence, but by engaging another faculty entirely, which we might call unreason.”
― José Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion

“Der Hauptgrund der Unvernunft ist das Unwissen, und die Aufklärung ist der Ausgang der Menschen aus ihrer selbstverschuldeten Unwissenheit.”
― Andrej Poleev, Harvest.

“It isn't just in distant galaxies that strange things are happening. Unreason has crept up on to us so insidiously that we've hardly been aware of it. But think of the things going on in our own country which you wouldn't have believed possible only a few years ago.”
― Madeline L'Engle, Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quintet (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Titling Planet, An Acceptable Time)