Quotes About Logic

If Hegel had written the whole of his logic and then said, in the preface or some other place, that it was merely an experiment in thought in which he had even begged the question in many places, then he would certainly have been the greatest thinker who had ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic.

The question of whether history has a goal is one that falls in the domain of philosophy and rides on the back of logic. But the study of history has a definite goal: the search for truth.

Reason may catnap for a time, but the irrational is more often comatose. In the end it will be the irrational that is forever caged in dreams, while reason gains the day.

Was it possible that his fear of flying had been cured at exactly the moment at which it was perfectly rational to feel afraid?

Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. What if someone says, Well, that's not how I choose to think about water.? All we can do is appeal to scientific values. And if he doesn't share those values, the conversation is over. If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?

Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love

No atrocity was ever committed because people were being too reasonable, too skeptical, or too independently minded.

Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.

what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."15

Believing a given proposition is a matter of believing that it faithfully represents some state of the world, and this fact yields some immediate insights into the standards by which our beliefs should function. In particular, it reveals why we cannot help but value evidence and demand that propositions about the world logically cohere.

We cannot live by reason alone.

Choosing beliefs freely is not what rational minds do.

Christopher Hitchens for distilling, in a single phrase, a principle of discourse that could well arrest our slide toward the abyss: "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."15 Let us pray that billions of us soon agree with him.

Wherever there are right and wrong answers to important questions, there will be better or worse ways to get those answers and better or worse ways to put them to use.

In every chain of reasoning, the evidence of the last conclusion can be no greater than that of the weakest link of the chain, whatever may be the strength of the rest.

Humility enforces where neither virtue nor strength can prevail, nor reason.

...you think so logically...like a hawk soaring - I feel so chaotically...like a kite without a tail plummeting to earth...

A land ethic for tomorrow should...stress the oneness of our resources and the live-and-help-live logic of the great chain of life.

I learn something new every day - to edit, to take out all the extraneous matter and stress form, logic, and content. I try to play beautiful music.

Methodical thinking is of more use in Chess than inspiration

Success is not a mystery. It is a science.

Believe nothing, No matter where you read it, Or who has said it, Not even if I have said it, Unless it agrees with your own reason And your own common sense.

Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.

We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions