Quotes About Analogy

If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost $100 and get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside.

When protests reached Lincoln he turned them aside with a medical analogy, pointing out that a limb must sometimes he amputated to save a life but that a life must never be given to save a limb; he felt, he said, "that measures, however unconstitutional, might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation.

It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.

Like will to like.

Just as we were misled into untenable ideas of the aether through trusting to an analogy with the material ocean, so we have been misled into untenable ideas of the attributes of the microscopic elements of world-structure through trusting to analogy with gross particles.

I invent by analogy. I thought, 'It's commonplace that you can mix colors, smear them together to get new emerging colors. Likewise, you can mix radio waves to get new frequencies.' So, I wondered, 'Why can't you mix sound to get new sounds?'

The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word.

This reminded me of the peril of applying analogies in geopolitics, best encapsulated in Mark Twain's line: "A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won't sit on a cold stove either.

All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy." —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Now it would obviously be absurd to press this analogy too far; it breaks down at many points. But I put it to you for this reason: What degree of co-operation or understanding would ever be possible between human beings and termites? When there is no conflict of interest, we tolerate each other. But when either needs the other's territory or resources, no quarter is given.

subtle yet powerful role of analogy in persuasion. Because while they often operate unnoticed, analogies aren't accidents, they're arguments—arguments that, like icebergs, conceal most of their mass and power beneath the surface. In many arguments, whoever has the best analogy wins.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

An intermediate case is that of a name used analogically or metaphorically; that is, a name which is predicated of two things, not univocally, or exactly in the same signification, but in significations somewhat similar, and which being derived one from the other, one of them may be considered the primary, and the other a secondary signification.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator.

As I think through the issue of funding the rebuilding of Iraq, I think about the analogy of a bankruptcy proceeding. There is no doubt that Iraq as a country is bankrupt.

I reckon I would be able compare anything to anything else if you gave me enough time.

Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea.

Outside of our relationship with the Lord, marriage is right next to it. It's an important relationship and you hear that analogy all the time. There's no better one than that for sure.

And in that sliver of time, I felt the power around me coalesce, malice-hard and sharp as crystal. That this analogy occurred to me should have been a warning.

Associations vary in explicitness from concepts highly embedded in our thought processes (simple aesthetic associations) to overt analogies and visual metaphors.

String theory is rather like plumbing, in a way.

Your Plan and the stuff that comes out of my asshole bear a suspicious resemblance to each other.

analogies may be scientifically important; they may serve, psychologically, to illuminate a dry exposition or to dispel a puzzlement; and they may be useful, methodologically, in suggesting a synthesis or provoking a generalization. But they have no inferential status: argument 'from analogy' is one of the numerous species of bad argument. (pp 56)

Morality is like taste in many ways—an analogy made long ago by Hume and Mencius.