Selected logic quotes

1. Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

2. People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament.

3. Reason gains all people by compelling none.

4. You can't have it both ways. Either our rights come from God, as our Declaration of Independence says, or they come from human choice. If they come from human choice, then our whole way of life is meaningless, it has no foundation.

5. What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.

6. The best reason for having dreams is that in dreams no reasons are necessary.

7. One possible reason that I don't believe in fate is that I wasn't fated to.

8. Caution! Be very careful of false, meaningless, self-contradictory, and not even very funny warnings, like this one.

9. Your argument is sound, nothing but sound.

10. The exercise of authority over the same area by two States is a contradiction.

11. Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

12. The rules of logic are to mathematics what those of structure are to architecture.

13. In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.

14. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

15. A great part of its theories derives an additional charm from the peculiarity that important propositions, with the impress of simplicity on them, are often easily discovered by induction, and yet are of so profound a character that we cannot find the demonstrations till after many vain attempts; and even then, when we do succeed, it is often by some tedious and artificial process, while the simple methods may long remain concealed.

16. I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.

17. When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.

18. Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.

19. I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I'd eat it, and I just hate it.

20. Reason, it is true, is DICTATOR in the Society of Mankind; from her there ought to lie no Appeal; But here we want a Pope in our Philosophy, to be the infallible Judge of what is or is not Reason.

21. To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.

22. In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.

23. Reality trumps rationality.

24. If your parents never had children, chances are you won't either.

25. The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.

26. Woman's inaptitude for reasoning has not prevented her from arriving at truth; nor has man's ability to reason prevented him from floundering in absurdity.

27. We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.

28. Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

29. Aristotle... a mere bond-servant to his logic, thereby rendering it contentious and well nigh useless.

30. The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search for truth. So it does more harm than good.

31. Since my logic aims to teach and instruct the understanding, not that it may with the slender tendrils of the mind snatch at and lay hold of abstract notions (as the common logic does), but that it may in very truth dissect nature, and discover the virtues and actions of bodies, with their laws as determined in matter; so that this science flows not merely from the nature of the mind, but also from the nature of things.

32. If what was supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief.

33. In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.

34. The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design.

35. Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

36. If the Cincinnati Reds were really the first major league baseball team, who did they play?

37. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

38. It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.

39. I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could - with 100 per cent certainty - know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.

40. It's true the Iraqis misbehaved and had no credibility but that doesn't necessarily mean that they were in the wrong.

41. The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is.

42. Dialectic generally means 'of the nature of the dialogue,' which is a conversation between two persons. Nowadays it means logical argumentation. It involves a technique of cross-examination, by which truth is arrived at.

43. Once it's stated that 'the dialectic comes before anything else,' this statement itself becomes a dialectical entity, subject to dialectical question.

44. Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible.

45. You can't say it's because we put troops in Iraq, over the no-fly zone, because they tried to blow up that same building back in '93, before all these skirmishes over the no-fly zone. You can't say that particular argument.

46. Is it any wonder that neo-Nazis are flocking to his campaign? But Paul is against the war in Iraq and he wants FREEDOM! So that must make his racism okay.

47. You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all, sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about that.

48. Vous tenez a l'exemple [de la peine de mort]. Pourquoi? Pour ce qu'il enseigne. Que voulez-vous enseigner avec votre exemple? Qu'il ne faut pas tuer. Et comment enseignez-vous qu'il ne faut pas tuer? En tuant.

49. For any truth, if overdone (as Dietzgen Senior put it), if exaggerated, or if carried beyond the limits of its applicability, can be reduced to absurdity.

50. Pair up in threes.

51. In a word, CLEANTHES, a man who follows your hypothesis is able perhaps to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: but beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance; and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him. You justly give signs of horror, DEMEA, at these strange suppositions; but these, and a thousand more of the same kind, are CLEANTHES's suppositions, not mine. From the moment the attributes of the Deity are supposed finite, all these have place. And I cannot, for my part, think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all.

52. There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception

53. Let n be an integer.

54. Ex nihilo nihil fit.

55. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1985)