What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness - a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian a gun misfires and kills a bystander. Better to have some rational cause and effect between incident and injury. And if cause and effect aren't possible better that there at least be some reward for all the suffering.

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.

Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.

You never know when some small thing will lead to a big idea. Travel is very inspirational - but it's in the ordinary that I find my themes of love and work and family.

Being a Barrymore didn't help me other than giving me a great sense of pride and a strange spiritual sense that I felt OK about having the passion to act. It made sense because my whole family had done it and it helped rationalise it for me.

Faith is an act of rational choice which determines us to act as if certain things were true and in the confident expectation that they will prove to be true.

What is faith? If you believe something because you have evidence for it or rational argument that is not faith. So faith seems to be believing something despite the absence of evidence or rational argument for it.

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

When I go to my live shows it's often a multigenerational audience a family bonding experience.

No one ever pretended that shopping for anything is a rational experience. If it were would there be Fluffernutter? Laceless sneakers? Porkpie hats? Would the Chia Pet even exist?

Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.

I add this that rational ability without education has oftener raised man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

I love my early movies but naturalism is an artist's early style. Now I want to deal with feelings dreams an acceptance of irrationality.

'Do What You Gotta Do' is a positive inspirational song that says no matter what it is whether you're up against challenges or trying to get your dreams and aspirations met you should do what whatever you have to do shy of killing yourself or someone else.

I approve designs not because I think I am more gifted or somebody who can see ahead three or four years from now but just to make sure that the design is a logical rational decision taken after analyzing pros and cons.

People could rationally decide that prolonged relationships take up too much time and effort and that they'd much rather do other kinds of things. But most people are afraid of rejection.

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries dating and religion.

Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational.

My dad was an absentee dad so it was always important to me that I was part of my daughter's life and she deserved two parents which is part of the rationale behind us staying married for 30 years.

My father was the most rational and the most dispassionate of men.

There is a measure needing courage to adopt and enforce it which I believe to be of virtue sufficient to redeem the nation in this its darkest hour: one only I know of no other to which we may rationally trust for relief from impending dangers without and within.

My purpose is to make a movie to make you warm. To give you some heat. Now this rational world has become a place where only what is cool is good. Do you cut the movie on the basis of the beat of modernity or the basis of the beat of your own heart?

I think if there's something one needs to change with oneself it doesn't have to happen in the New Year. You can do that any time you please - not that it's not a good inspirational tactic for the people that it works for.

Every song has a composer every book has an author every car has a maker every painting has a painter and every building has a builder. So it isn't irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.