Quotes by British Authors - Page 182

The word 'proof' should strictly only be used when we are dealing with deductive inferences.... Popper claimed that scientists only need to use deductive inferences.... So if a scientist is only interested in demonstrating that a given theory is false, she may be able to accomplish her goal without the use of inductive inferences.... When a scientist collects experimental data, her aim might be to show that a particular theory...is false. She will have to resort to inductive reasoning.... So Popper's attempt to show that science can get by without induction does not succeed.
Samir Okasha
A god that can be reduced to what reason can cope with is not a God that can be worshiped.
Alister E. McGrath
She plays chess from the passions and I play it from logic and she usually wins. Once, I took her queen and she hit me.”Though, he recalled, not sufficiently brutally to require that he tie her wrists together with his belt, force her to kneel and beat her until she toppled over sideways. She raised a strangely joyous face to him; the pallor of her skin and the almost miraculous lustre of her eyes startled and even awed him.
Angela Carter
Of course, there is no conceivable way of getting by reason from the proposition "I am losing interest in this" to the proposition "This is false.
C.S. Lewis
Captain Vimes believed in logic, in much the same way as a man in a desert believed in ice -- i.e., it was something he really needed, but this just wasn't the world for it.
Terry Pratchett
The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life. The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear plan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of life and the world. According to our temperaments, we shall prefer the contemplation of the one or of the other.
Bertrand Russell
Holmes,” I cried, “this is impossible.” “Admirable!” he said. “A most illuminating remark. It IS impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong. Yet you saw for yourself. Can you suggest any fallacy?
Arthur Conan Doyle
I went out into the corridor. I asked a nurse if she knew where the people with arthritis went. She said lots of them went to Ward 34 on the top floor. She said she thought that was a silly place to put people with bad bones who had such trouble walking and climbing stairs.
David Almond
I have researched aboriginal culture, Mayan hieroglyphics and the corporate culture of a Japanese car manufacturer, and I have written essays on the internal logic of various other societies, but I haven't a clue about my own logic.
Deborah Levy
Baby rats need rat milk, baby cats need cat milk, baby dogs need dog milk, baby humans need human milk, baby cows need cow milk, baby chimps need chimp milk.. Would anyone believe it if someone claimed adult giraffes need elephant milk? or adult horses need squirrel milk? or adult possums need goat milk? or adult humans need cow milk? oh, wait, no, that last one makes total sense.. NOT
Mango Wodzak
Sometimes I think humans have a common sense that completely defies logic.
Mango Wodzak
To be completely objective we must say:All men are mortal.Lionel Samaratunga's son is a man.Therefore Lionel Samaratunga's son is mortal.So stated, it is quite generally true, and is the concern of no-one in particular. It is so generally true that it would serve in a textbook of logic as an example of a syllogism in Barbara (though usually, instead of Lionel Samaratunga's son, it is Socrates whose mortality is logically demonstrated).But how many students of logic are going to shed tears when they read that Lionel Samaratunga's son is destined to die? How many have so much as heard of Lionel Samaratunga, let alone of his son? (And anyway, how many students of logic shed a tear even over the death of Socrates, of whom they may perhaps have heard?) But if you were to come across this syllogism unexpectedly, it is not impossible that you might feel emotionally moved (as perhaps at this very moment you may be feeling a little uncomfortable at my having chosen an example so near home). And why should this be so? Because you are fond of Lionel Samaratunga's son and cannot regard this syllogism in Barbara, which speaks of his mortality, quite so objectively as a student of logic. In other words, as soon as feeling comes in at the door objectivity flies out the window. Feeling, being private and not public, is subjective and not objective.And the Buddha has said (A. III,61: i,176) that it is 'to one who feels' that he teaches the Four Noble Truths. So, then, the Dhamma must essentially refer to a subjective aniccatā—i.e. one that entails dukkha—and not, in any fundamental sense, to an objective aniccatā, which we can leave to students of logic and their professors. (Feeling is not a logical category at all.)
Nanavira Thera
Takes more than combat gear to make a man Takes more than a license for a gun Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can A gentleman will walk but never run
Sting
There can never be surprises in logic.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
It seemed to me,' said Wonko the Sane, 'that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.
Douglas Adams
We must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception.
Arthur Conan Doyle
He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.
Julian Barnes
Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it shall perish by it.
Samuel Butler
Cynicism, like gullibility, is a symptom of underdeveloped critical faculties.
Jamie Whyte
If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
C.S. Lewis
Which came first, the phoenix or the flame?”"...I think the answer is that a circle has no beginning.""Well reasoned.
J.K. Rowling
Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory---let the theory go.
Agatha Christie
Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.
Douglas Adams
The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.
Douglas Adams
When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth.
Arthur Conan Doyle
A leaf cannot return to the bud- bluestar to fireheart and greystripe
Erin Hunter
I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.
George Gordon Byron
Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.
Lewis Carroll
drugs, hard. Under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, the law was changed in the United Kingdom to ensure that the production and supply of dangerous drugs should henceforth be in the hands of criminal organisations. Some people have argued that this is not an ideal arrangement.
William Donaldson
However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a 'bad trip'. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if one's stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. 'Undetachable,' I remember, was a word which somehow 'came along' with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course i never took LSD again.
Iris Murdoch
Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again.
Ian Fleming
You’ve been smoking again, haven’t you? Your eyes look like road maps and you’re in full bastard mode.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.
Ned Beauman
Who needs drugs when you have Takeshi's Castle?
Craig Charles
I think it is important for our society to wonder why it has lately become so ready to accept that human woe can be cured or soothed by chemicals. These chemicals do not alter or reform the ills of our civilisation. They adapt the human being to them.
Peter Hitchens
Wiggy & I were drug buddies. There is no tighter compact for friendship. There is no greater potential for deceit.
Pete Townshend
No more junk talk, no more lies. No more mornings in the hospital getting bad blood drained out of me. No more doctors trying to analyse what makes me a drug addict. No more futile attempts at trying to control my heroin use. No more defending myself when I know I am practically indefensible. No more police using me as practice. No more ODs, no more losses. No more trying to take an intellectual position on my heroin addiction when it takes more than it gives. No more dope-sick mornings, no more slow suicide, no more pain without end.No more AA. No more NA. No more mind control. No more being a victim, no more looking for reasons in childhood, in God in anything but what exists in HERE. No more admitting I am powerless. Down the dusty Los Angeles sidewalks, down the urine stained London back alleys … there goes the connection fading into the crowd like a 1960’s Polaroid.“Business…?”“Whachoo need…?”“Chiva…?
Tony O'Neill
She it is, she, that found meIn the morphia honeymoon;With silk and steel she bound meIn her poisonous milk she drowned me,Even now her arms surround me
Aleister Crowley
Until you've got your mouth full of cocaine, you don't know what kissing is. One kiss goes on from phase to phase like one of those novels by Balzac and Zola and Romain Rolland and D. H. Lawrence and those chaps. And you never get tire. You're on fourth speed all the time, and the engine purrs like a kitten, a big white kitten with the stars in its whiskers.
Aleister Crowley
Isn't it obvious in in today's world from people's preoccupation with self-medication, drug and alcohol use, rationalization and avoidance distraction that the truth doesn't just hurt, it's extremely painful.
James Turner
Does not people's preoccupation these days with drugs, alcohol, medication and self deception prove that the truth not only hurts, but it is torture to bear?
James Turner
The Classic Notting Hill junkie, i.e; Armani underwear, Pink’s shirt and Burberry belt tourniquets
Tyne O'Connell
One of the things that strikes me most though is how some people don't realise they're self-harming. The phrase 'self-harm' brings up thoughts of 'cutting', but that's only a small portion of it. When you drink excessively to drown your sorrows to the point you throw up and can't see straight and/or, like a girl at my school, ended up being driven to hospital to have her stomach pumped, you've brought harm to yourself. If you take drugs to feel numb and it becomes an addiction that you can't break, you've self-harmed. When you starve yourself or binge eat to fit the latest fashions, you're pushing your body further than it can go.We need to start treating ourselves how we deserve to be treated, even if you feel that no one else does. Prove to the world you ARE worth something by treating yourself with the utmost respect and hope that other people will follow your example. And even if they don't, at least one person in the world is treating you well: YOU.
Carrie Hope Fletcher
Nothing could exceed his energy when the working fit was upon him: but now and again a reaction would seize him, and for days on end he would lie upon the sofa in the sitting- room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night. On these occasions I have noticed such a dreamy, vacant expression in his eyes, that I might have suspected him of being addicted to the use of some narcotic, had not the temperance and cleanliness of his whole life forbidden such a notion.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Many educators are loth to admit that the pursuit of pleasure might be a valid reason for drug use, or to recognize young people's curiosity, their need to experiment, to take risks and define their own boundaries.
Tom Feiling
The war on drugs thrives on ignorance of drugs and misplaced faith in the power of the law to regulate human vice.
Tom Feiling
The youth of Idaho falls should be encouraged to take drugs in order to cope up with the fact that there is plutonium in their drinking water.
Bill Bryson
Now, I don’t think I’m a stupid guy. I’m just an average guy who doesstupid things.
Chris Thrall
He puffed out his pigeon chest and waddled across the room towards me. With his feet pointing outwards, he looked like a fat duck with a grievance.
Chris Thrall
Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?
Sebastian Faulks
Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opes a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space.
Melvin Burgess
Scott glanced at his watch but didn't register what it said. The notion of time had become as absurd as the quietly glowing trees.
R.D. Ronald
LSD was an incredible experience. Not that I’m recommending it for anybody else; but for me it kind of – it hammered home to me that reality was not a fixed thing. That the reality that we saw about us every day was one reality, and a valid one – but that there were others, different perspectives where different things have meaning that were just as valid. That had a profound effect on me.
Alan Moore
It wasn't a love story." -Tar's dadIt was a love story. Me, Gemma, and junk." -Tar
Melvin Burgess
A lady that I know just came from Colombia. She laughed because I did not understand. She held out some marijuana uh-huh, said it was the finest in the land. I said, no-no-no-no, i dont smoke it no more. It only makes me fall on the floor.No thank you please, it only makes me sneeze, and then it makes it hard to find the door. A lady that i know just came from Morrocco, Spain. She laughed because i did not understand. She held out a ten-pound bag of cocaine, said it was the finest in the land. I said no-no-no-no, i don't *sniff* no more, it only makes me fall on the floor. No thank you please, it only makes me sneeze, and then it makes it hard to find the door.A lady that i know just came from Tennesee. She laughed because i did not understand. She held out a jug of moonshine, uh-huh, said it was the finest in the land. I said no-no-no-no, i don't drink it no more, it only makes me fall on the floor. No thank you please, it only makes me sneeze, and then it makes it hard to find the door.Ringo Starr's No-No Song
Ringo Starr
What does it do?" said Loeser. "You feel as if you're being sucked down this fathomless, gloomy tunnel. Or to put it another way, it's as if all the different weights and cares of the world have been lifted from your shoulders to he replaced by a single, much larger sort of consolidated weight. Your limbs stop working and you can't really talk. If you take enough then it can last for hours and hours, but it seems like even longer because time slows down." Hildkraut smiled wistfully. "It's fantastic." At their feet, somebody groaned softly as if in enthusiastic assent. "And it makes Wagner sound really good.
Ned Beauman
Sometimes he missed the numbed, walking-underwater feeling feel that the cocktail of narcotics used to give him. But if a situation went down in here, he was going to need all of his wits to get out of it.
R.D. Ronald
That was when I realised a sad but incontrovertible truth: I was a geek, and there was no getting around it. I could dress in Kate’s clothes, but it didn’t make me Kate.
Sharon Sant
She ran from the shame, slammed his door behind her and ran, away from the pain and the moment when he had been so close to her mouth he could have kissed her, the thought that made her feel like her heart would burst.
Laure Eve
It was while bent over, trying to breathe through the pain of bruised ribs, with the sensation of spit running down his cheek that Jason decided he was going to die.
Paul W.S. Bowler