Quotes by Aldous Huxley

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

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