Quotes About Fallacy

Our life stories are at one and the same time reality, fallacy and fantasy...

But all was false and hollow; through his tongueDropp'd manna, and could make the worse appearThe better reason.

The foam is not cruel.… The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings… produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the "Pathetic Fallacy."

And one of the commonest forms of fallacious reasoning arising from ambiguity, is that of arguing from a metaphorical expression as if it were literal; that is, as if a word, when applied metaphorically, were the same name as when taken in its original sense: which will be seen more particularly in its place.

It was wrong. It was like arresting the gun for murder.

Every falsity is something we can convince ourselves of, and when we have done so it seems to us to be the truth:

House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own.

You can't recover memories of a missing event. That's a fallacy.

He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in no danger of succumbing to it. He realized, nevertheless, that it ought never to have occurred to him. The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.

think, therefore I am wrong

It's a fallacy that people think that today's teenagers are shallow or somehow less intelligent than in the past.

And the gap between what people think is wrong and what is actually wrong can be quite far indeed.

An expert is a man who doesn't make the slightest error on the road to the Grand Illusion.

The ability to detect fallacy is one of the things that makes democratic life decent.

Lack of the power to discriminate is no less evident in the sciences, namely in the tenacious life of false and refuted theories. Once come into general credit, they continue to defy truth for centuries. - On Various Subjects

Os caprichos advindos do instinto sexual são totalmente análogos aos fogos fátuos: enganam do modo mais vivo, mas, se os seguimos, eles conduzem-nos a um pântano e desaparecem.

the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth.

human beings commonly imagine patterns (whether good or bad) where really there are none.

He was seeing the final contradiction, the grotesque absurdity at the end of the irrationalists' game

We have believed in any number of things - the tooth fairy, cold fusion, and benefits of smoking, the free lunch - that turn out not to exist. We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are.

He fell prey to a common fallacy. He wanted to philosophize, that is, to play God; for what is philosophy, in the end, but the desire to understand things to a degree greater than science permits?

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another... All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim.

an illustration of the fallacy of Platonic thinking applied to evolutionary principles.

The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy.