Fallacy Quotes

The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should insist on the need to engage in a meaningful debate on the entire issue of the truth or falsity (or probability or improbability) of religious tenets, without being subject to accusations of impiety, immorality, impoliteness, or any of the other smokescreens used by the pious to deflect attention from the central issues at hand.

I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.

Christopher Hitchens

If proof were the standard of truth, fallacies would constitute the ultimate reality.

Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; and there are probably more people really interested in mathematics than in music. Appearances suggest the contrary, but there are easy explanations. Music can be used to stimulate mass emotion, while mathematics cannot; and musical incapacity is recognized (no doubt rightly) as mildly discreditable, whereas most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity

G H Hardy

For Paley, a watch is purposeful and thus must have been created by a being with a purpose. A watch needs a watchmaker, just as a world needs a world-maker—God. Yet both Wallace and Paley might have heeded the lesson from Voltaire's Candide (1759), in which Dr. Pangloss, a professor of "metaphysico-theology-cosmolonigology," through reason, logic, and analogy "proved" that this is the best of all possible worlds: '"Tis demonstrated that things cannot be otherwise; for, since everything is made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end. Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches" (1985, p. 238). The absurdity of this argument was intended on the part of the author, for Voltaire firmly rejected the Panglossian paradigm that all is best in the best of all possible worlds. Nature is not perfectly designed, nor is this the best of all possible worlds. It is simply the world we have, quirky, contingent, and flawed as it may be.

Michael Shermer

We are most often inspired and motivated by fallacy rather than logic.

It does bear emphasis that slippery-slope arguments are notoriously invalid.

Every barber thinks everybody needs a haircut.

Yesterday I got a credit card application from a major bank with a variable rate of 12.99% to 20.99%. Such a deal. And what if I fall on hard times and lose my job? So, I wrote them a return letter:Dear major bank, Thank you for the opportunity to express how I really feel about your corporation. What I do appreciate, is that there is no stamp required for your return envelope. After tearing off all my personal information, so some dumpster diver doesn’t fill out your application for me, and find out he picked the wrong target; I just wanted to make one comment: Your practice of usury is despicable, along with crashing the global economy.Danny - I think I have my grandmother’s charm and wit. Too bad she’s not here to share it with. Maybe if every disgruntled person would use that free envelope and apply their creative talent, they might get the picture that we’re tired of this bullshit. Marcie, there are so many people you could visit and test your information extraction program on, so what are you people doing here? Is this just a practice run? Well, you wanted to know what I was thinking. And you wonder why I look to God for solutions. Wake me up when it’s over.Marcie - You are a crazy SOB. You want me to use my system to play Robin Hood.Danny - You’d make an excellent Robin Hood, make sure you get your merry band to sign on. Maybe that’s the reason we were connected by design. How much materialism do you really need? Some people take what they need from the orchard and other people pick the orchard clean.Marcie - You’re wondering what I’m thinking. I don’t want to mess your mind up with what I’m thinking, so let me simply say, I don’t approve of what some of these people have been doing for decades. Who do you think I am?Danny - Someone who frustrates me, don’t we have enough guessing games in life?Marcie - Marcie is a miracle worker, so what does that tell you? You do not even know what to make of me, someone who keeps coming back for you, someone who won’t let go of you.Danny - Why is it that there’s only a handful of words for truth and over 100 synonyms and derivatives for deception?Marcie - Are you surprised?Danny - It puts it in a different light when you start reading through the list. You may as well add amygdala hijacking.Marcie - Has Danny been bamboozled?Danny - You picked one with an unknown origin.Marcie - That is the best way to start a mind game.Danny - Okay, just for kicks, try saying synonym - cinnamon 10 times as fast as you can.From - "The Mind Game Company - The Players

Some people take what they need from the orchard, and other people pick the orchard clean."From - "The Mind Game Company - The Players

As if it were Injustice to sell dearer than we buy; or to give more to a man than he merits. The value of all things contracted for, is measured by the Appetite of the Contractors: and therefore the just value, is that which they be contented to give.

One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)

I've spent a life-time attacking religious beliefs and have not wavered from a view of the universe that many would regard as bleak. Namely, that it is a meaningless place devoid of deity.However I'm unwilling simply to repeat the old arguments of the past when, in fact, God is a moving target and is taking all sorts of new shapes and forms. The arguments used against the long bow are not particularly useful when debating nuclear weapons, and the simple arguments against the old model gods are not sufficient when dealing with the likes of Davies et al.For example, the notion that God didn't exist, doesn't exist but may come into existence through the spread of consciousness throughout the universe is too clever to be pooh-poohed along Bertrand Russell lines. And if I had the time I could give you half a dozen other scientific theologies that will need snappier footwork from the atheist of the future.

It hurts so badly when you grow up and understand that everything you believed in and devoted yourself were just fallacy and stupidity.

Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an action, by causing us to feel them; and we cannot fail to finish by knowing that fire burns, if we have burned ourselves. For this rough teacher, I should like, if possible, to substitute a more gentle one. I mean Foresight. For this purpose I shall examine the consequences of certain economical phenomena, by placing in opposition to each other those which are seen, and those which are not seen.

Frédéric Bastiat

I cannot give up on my values and beliefs for the sake of respecting someone else’s values and morals. Because those values explain who am I. I prefer struggling and even dying for what I believe and what I don’t believe. Silence is not respect; it is not condemning brutality and cruelty, and neglecting your own existence as human being. I will be killed and so many others because of standing against the fallacy and misleading notion of religions. They will torture us and cut us in pieces alive and even won’t stop disrespecting our death bodies; that is how these monsters have been governing for hundreds thousands of years.

People strive hardest to save face, when the beauty they value is solely extrinsic.

Justin K. McFarlane Beau

The vanity of intelligence is that the intelligent man is often more committed to 'one-upping' his opponent than being truthful. When the idea of intelligence, rather than intelligence itself, becomes a staple, there is no wisdom in it.

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

To base the unexplainabilty and the immense wonder of nature onto an other miracle (God) is unnecessary and not acceptable for any serious th

To be acknowledged that we do not believe in their misleading notion and fallacy, today, tomorrow and forever even if it costs us our life. They have suffocated people for hundreds of years and if we don’t stop them today no one else would do it tomorrow.

The fallacy in Peter's mind was this: he believed his relationship was dependent on his consistency in producing the qualities he thought had earned him the Lord's approval.

Lloyd John Ogilvie

A common fallacy in much of the adverse criticism to which science is subjected today is that it claims certainty, infallibility and complete emotional objectivity. It would be more nearly true to say that it is based upon wonder, adventure and hope.

Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

The power of collective memory does not lie in its accurate, systematic, or sophisticated mapping of the past, but in establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance.

What a paradox it is, the sane causes more problems than the insane! It is! The real problems of the world do not come from the insane but, the sane!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with the natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress.- Science and Religion (1941)

Albert Einstein

Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe.

Thomas Clifford Allbutt

The more intense the belief, the less likely that reason and evidence can dislodge it.

Linda Elder Richard Paul

it seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which they are similar than to the ways in which they differ. Asked to assess dissimilarity, they become more concerned with differences than with similarities. In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked

Thomas Gilovich

When examining evidence relevant to a given belief, people are inclined to see what they expect to see, and conclude what they expect to conclude. Information that is consistent with our pre-existing beliefs is often accepted at face value, whereas evidence that contradicts them is critically scrutinized and discounted. Our beliefs may thus be less responsive than they should to the implications of new information

Thomas Gilovich

...There are also those who inadvertently grant power to another man's words by continuously trying to spite him. If a man gets to the point where he can simply say, 'The sky is blue,' and people indignantly rush up trying to refute him saying, 'No, the sky is light blue,' then, whether they realize it or not, he has become an authority figure even to such adversaries.

It is only by ignoring fact, science, and reason that one can support current Republican positions.

Death would not surprise us as often as it does, if we let go of the misbelief that newborns are less mortal than the elderly.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.

Chögyam Trungpa

Whenever we want to combat our enemies, first and foremost we must start by understanding them rather than exaggerating their motives.

A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow.In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze.I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge;' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning., 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.

Psychobabble attempts to redefine the entire English language just to make a correct statement incorrect. Psychology is the study of why someone would try to do this.

A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow.In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze.I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge;' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning., 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.

Psychobabble attempts to redefine the entire English language just to make a correct statement incorrect. Psychology is the study of why someone would try to do this.

People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe