Logic Quotes

Logic is neither a science nor an art but a dodge.

Grammar is the logic of speech even as logic is the grammar of reason.

The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth.

G.K. Chesterton

The past is behind us unless we fail to learn from it.

L.M. Fields

I'm who i wasn't yesterday and who i won't be tomorrow.

Emmanuel Aghado

Annie clouded up. For a second, he thought she was going to erupt, and flinched. She saw that...and got control of herself with an visible effort. She took three deep breaths, each longer than the last, and her features became serene.All at once it seemed totally clear to Mike that she was right and he was nuts - that his ingenius theory was nonsense, childish, fantasty bullshit. His conviction evaporated, and he was ashamed. He felt his cheeks grow hot, groped for words with which to backtrack -"I have to admit I have no better explanation for the the facts," Annie said slowly.Again, Mike did an emotional instant 180. "Holy shit -"She held up a hand. "I am going to think now. Very hard, for a long time. You will be as quiet as possible while I do." She got up from the computer, went to the bed, and lay down. "Think yourself, or read, or play games with the headphones on, or go Topside if you like." She clasped her hands on her belly, closed her eyes and appeared to go to sleep

Spider Robinson

The expression e=mc2 is the ultimate statement in bounce per ounce.

Nigel S. Hey

Where logic reaches, religion leaves.

M.F. Moonzajer

What do you think science is? There's nothing magical about science. It is simply a systematic way for carefully and thoroughly observing nature and using consistent logic to evaluate results. Which part of that exactly do you disagree with? Do you disagree with being thorough? Using careful observation? Being systematic? Or using consistent logic?

Steven Novella

All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.

Woody Allen

There was no logic or any sense of purpose except that I knew I had to do something other than what I was doing, or I might not make it through this.

J.A. Redmerski

So each one of you agrees to disagree with whatever the other one agrees with, but if you both disagree with the same thing, aren't you really in agreement?

Norton Juster

I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else

Cornelius Van Til

Turing attended Wittgenstein's lectures on the philosophy of mathematics in Cambridge in 1939 and disagreed strongly with a line of argument that Wittgenstein was pursuing which wanted to allow contradictions to exist in mathematical systems. Wittgenstein argues that he can see why people don't like contradictions outside of mathematics but cannot see what harm they do inside mathematics. Turing is exasperated and points out that such contradictions inside mathematics will lead to disasters outside mathematics: bridges will fall down. Only if there are no applications will the consequences of contradictions be innocuous. Turing eventually gave up attending these lectures. His despair is understandable. The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the system to be proved true (and also proved false). When Bertrand Russel pointed this out in a lecture he was once challenged by a heckler demanding that he show how the questioner could be proved to be the Pope if 2 + 2 = 5. Russel replied immediately that 'if twice 2 is 5, then 4 is 5, subtract 3; then 1 = 2. But you and the Pope are 2; therefore you and the Pope are 1'! A contradictory statement is the ultimate Trojan horse.

John D. Barrow

There is a circularity here I do not doubt. I am defending the Bible by the Bible. Circularity of a kind is unavoidable when one seeks to defend an ultimate standard of truth, for one's defense must itself be accountable to that standard.

John M. Frame

Cursed luck! —said he, biting his lip as he shut the door, —for man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, —and have a wife at the same time with such a head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction.

Laurence Sterne

[The laws of logic] were placed in our minds by the Creator during the act of creation. We speak because God has spoken. God is not the author of confusion, irrationality, or the absurd. Furthermore, his words are meant to be understood by his creatures, and a necessary condition for his creature's understanding of those words is that they are intelligible and not irrational.

R.C. Sproul

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

Logic was puny in the face of my wrath. Logic was puny and magic was mighty: I had just gotten rebirthed, refilled and renewed, and was fast on my way to resentful.

C.E. Murphy

The only reason I'm writing this down is to show how human reason, even very sharp and exact human reason, can get crazily confused and thrown off the track.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

But...that doesn't make any sense...!''It does if you're a goat.

Linda Medley

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one

Ludwig Wittgenstein

So,” Marasi said, “you traded a dead man’s scarf for another dead man’s gun. But…the gun itself belonged to someone dead, so by the same logic—”“Don’t try,” Waxillium said. “Logic doesn’t work on Wayne.”“I bought a ward against it off a traveling fortune-teller,” Wayne explained. “It lets me add two ’n’ two and get a pickle.

Brandon Sanderson

When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line.

Samuel Beckett

Quentin was thin and tall, though he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first.

Lev Grossman

It's completely logical," explained the Dodecahedron. "The more you want, the less you get, and the less you get, the more you have. Simple arithmetic, that's all. Suppose you had something and added something to it. What would that make?""More," said Milo quickly."Quite correct," he nodded. "Now suppose you had something and added nothing to it. What would you have?""The same," he answered again, without much conviction. "Splendid," cried the Dodecahedron. "And suppose you had something and added less than nothing to it. What would you have then?""FAMINE!" roared the anguished Humbug, who suddenly realized that that was exactly what he'd eaten twenty-three bowls of.

Norton Juster

Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.

Damien Hirst

Life corrects the errors of logic.

Marty Rubin

Life teaches us that human thought almost never walks hand in hand with logic, and it is usually counterproductive to raise the point.

Jeff Lindsay

1. God is (by definition) a being than which no greater being can be thought.2. Greatness includes greatness of virtue.3. Therefore, God is a being than which no being could be more virtuous.4. But virtue involves overcoming pains and dangers.5. Indeed, a being can only be properly said to be virtuous if it can suffer pain or be destroyed.6. A God that can suffer pain or is destructible is not one than which no greater being can be thought.7.For you can think of a greater being, that is, one that is nonsuffering and indestructible.8. Therefore, God does not exist.

Douglas N. Walton

If a mathematician wishes to disparage the work of one of his colleagues, say, A, the most effective method he finds for doing this is to ask where the results can be applied. The hard pressed man, with his back against the wall, finally unearths the researches of another mathematician B as the locus of the application of his own results. If next B is plagued with a similar question, he will refer to another mathematician C. After a few steps of this kind we find ourselves referred back to the researches of A, and in this way the chain closes.

Alfred Tarski

Objectivity begins with the realization that one is subjective.

Donovan M. Neal

There were no footmarks.''Meaning that you saw none?''I assure you, sir, that there were none.''My good Hopkins, I have investigated many crimes, but I have never yet seen one which was committed by a flying creature. As long as the criminal remains upon two legs so long must there be some indentation, some abrasion, some trifling displacement which can be detected by the scientific searcher.

Arthur Conan Doyle

I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.

William James

Logic, it is often said, is the study of valid arguments. It is a systematic attempt to distinguish valid arguments from invalid arguments.

W.H. Newton-Smith

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

M.F. Moonzajer

Paradoxes are less paradoxical in their reference to truth than most of the most plausible axioms.

Raheel Farooq

Religion and philosophy have different logics, speak different languages. Their logics are mutually exclusive, languages sometimes overlapping. It is hard to find something really common in them. I think I---a man in totally unconditional pursuit of happiness, whatever it is, wherever it lies---am only supposed to consider which of them has more in common with life!

Raheel Farooq

Intellect is limited, but it has one great merit; it can recognise its limits!

Raheel Farooq

Questions don't have to make sense, Vincent," said Miss Susan. "But answers do.

Terry Pratchett

There is room for words on subjects other than last words.

Robert Nozick

The greatest of fools are those who fail to mark the invisible from the nonexistent.

Raheel Farooq

Intelligence is to spot paradoxes. Wisdom is to live by them.

Raheel Farooq

I'm fine," Kate said. "In fact, since my last two dates were so awful, things can only get better.""Bad deduction," Jessie said. "If that were true, I'd be dating Harrison Ford by now.

Jennifer Crusie

Ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce ‘proofs’ of immortality and the existence of God. They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors — Saint Thomas rejected Saint Anselm's proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes' — but they have supplied new ones of their own. In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deepseated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions.

Bertrand Russell

I have previously reduced the whole science of logic to two facts.The ﬁrst is that our perceptions being every thing for us, we areperfectly, completely, and necessarily sure of whatever we actually feel.The second is that consequently none of our judgments, separatelytaken, can be erroneous: inasmuch as we see one idea in another it isactually there; but their falsity, when it takes place, is purely relativeto anterior judgments, which we permit to subsist; and it consists inthis, that we believe the idea in which we perceive a new element tobe the same as that we have always had under the same sign, when itis really diﬀerent, since the new element which we actually see thereis incompatible with some of those which we have previously seen;so that to avoid contradiction we must either take away the former ornot admit the latter.

Antoine Destutt de Tracy

sometimes the most logical thought that come out from our head is far from "logic" in reality.

Dian Agung Yogantara

A great deal of thought is only a substitute for the thoughts that the individual would really find useful at the time.

Idries Shah

The world is full of people who will help you manufacture tornados in order to blow out a match.

Shaun Hick

Earlier fundamental work of Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Whorf, etc., as well as my own attempt to use this earlier thinking as an epistemological base for psychiatric theory, led to a series of generalizations: That human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction. These range in two directions from the seemingly simple denotative level (“The cat is on the mat”). One range or set of these more abstract levels includes those explicit or implicit messages where the subject of discourse is the language. We will call these metalinguistic (for example, “The verbal sound ‘cat’ stands for any member of such and such class of objects”, or “The word, ‘cat’ has no fur and cannot scratch”). The other set of levels of abstraction we will call metacommunicative (e.g., “My telling you where to ﬁnd the cat was friendly”, or “This is play”). In these, the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers. It will be noted that the vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit; and also that, especially in the psychiatric interview, there occurs a further class of implicit messages about how metacommunicative messages of friendship and hostility are to be interpreted.

Gregory Bateson

Comparison is the most abused intellectual tool of all. We compare men and women, man and God, good and bad, equal and unequal, forgetting that this sin only results in a punishment so severe that we can't even trace it back to its origins. All we're left with in the end is ambiguity, uncertainty, lethargy and and Kafka!

Raheel Farooq

Chélan had acted as imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being put off by empty words, but he had neglected to tell him that this habit was a crime in the person of no importance, since every piece of logical reasoning is offensive.

Stendhal

Questioning a genius with logic limits his imagination.

Vasilios Karpos

Eventually we will all wither and die in the wasteland of logic and science.

Julie Kagawa

Logic is the last scientific ingredient of Philosophy; its extraction leaves behind only a confusion of non-scientific, pseudo problems.

Rudolf Carnap

Like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware of all the principles underlying what they were doing. The real nature of the tools of their craft has become evident only within recent times A renaissance of logical studies in modern times begins with the publication in 1847 of George Boole’s 'The Mathematical Analysis of Logic'.

Ernest Nagel

At the time I thought the winner in an argument was the person who put forward the most logical support for his position. Of course, this isn't true. Human history, from gardening disputes to genocide, is full of examples of people with the most decent, well-argued stance ending up with their face in the mud in front of a naked display of power.

Mark Barrowcliffe

Five GOP representative candidates this session have shocked me to my soul at how blatant they have trivialized rape. My prayers were answered in their defeat!

Diane Chamberlain

I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical theorist builds up on certain assumptions and according to well understood logical rules, step by step, a stately edifice, while his imaginative power brings out clearly the hidden relations between its parts. A well constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production. A fine example is the famous Kinetic Theory of Maxwell. ... The theory of relativity by Einstein, quite apart from any question of its validity, cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art.

Ernest Rutherford

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