Quotes About Logic

When the twins asked what cuff-links were for—"To link cuffs together," Ammu told them—they were thrilled by this morsel of logic in what had so far seemed an illogical language. Cuff + link = cuff-link . This, to them, rivaled the precision of logic and mathematics. Cuff-links gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language.

If there is a credo in practical medicine, it is that the important thing is to be sensible.

The goal is to use explicit, logical, statistical thinking instead of just your gut.

Such successes are not quite the result of logical thinking. But they are not the result of mere luck, either.

He likes things that make sense, and this word explains everything he knows about me. It makes perfect sense. Unless you don't know me, in which case it's delusional, irrational, and absurd.

Motion, according to him, is an illusion, because we can demonstrate that it does not actually exist; the same for the multiplicity of existing things, which are in his logic, a single being, infinite, eternal, unchangeable. Like Heraclitus, Parmenides too, had his radical disciple, named Zeno. The latter had the habit of telling two stories to prove the inexistence of motion.

Rationalization is a process of not perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions.

Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.

In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.

There are no evil thoughts except one; the refusal to think.

There are no contradictions. If you find one, check your premises.

Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don't have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy.

I'll give you a hint. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

A Conformist is a man who declares, It's true because others believe it - but an Individualist is NOT a man who declares, It's true because I believe it. An Individual declares, I believe it because I see in reason that it is true.

The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone.

Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.

Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality

Now you see, Dr. Stadler, you're speaking as if this book were addressing to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn't. It's addressed to the public.

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

to rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies- that one has no rational arguments to offer.

To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call 'human nature,' the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct.

Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable?

Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

There's no way to make the irrational work.