Quotes About Logic

In spite of being complicated people choose superstitions over common sense.

Sometimes an act of common sense is indistinguishable from an act of genius.

Pragmatism is good prevention for problems.

Rationality and common sense never goes out of fashion.

It's only in Algebra that two negatives make a positive

There is no logical reason why thoughts, which have no substance, should have so much power over you, nor is there any reason why you should become their slave

I believe in opportunity and the power of reason to seize upon it.

Oratory is the power of beating down your adversary's arguments and putting better in their place.

Transcendental [numbers], They transcend the power of algebraic methods.

Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.

Variant: When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

Besides language and music, mathematics is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind.

Common sense ain't common.

It's not that I liked lunacy for the sake of lunacy, but if a writer can truly surprise me without throwing logic completely out the window, then that writer has me for good. Most book surprises aren't surprising at all but follow a formula, like the dead body that's certain to lurch out of a wreck being explored by deep-sea divers in just about every book that involves wrecks and divers.

is a 'story processor', writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, 'not a logic processor'.

Story is what brain does. It is a 'story processor', writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, 'not a logic processor'. Story emerges from human minds as naturally as breath emerges from between human lips. You don't have to be a genius to master it. You're already doing it. Becoming better at telling stories is simply a matter of peering inwards, at the mind itself, and asking how it does it.

Een oude theologische strijdmethode: een stelling poneren, zo belachelijk en dom, dat oppositie ertegen automatisch even belachelijk en dom wordt.

Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the "chance-of-the-gaps fallacy." Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.

Faith is a continuation of reason.

Fantastic plays, which assume an order of things more or less exempt from the limitations of physical reality, ought nevertheless to be logically faithful to their own assumptions.

Stoic philosophy is like a fertile field, with "Logic being the encircling fence, Ethics the crop, Physics the soil.

reason tends to be the servant rather than the master of desire.

The Stoics became experts on argument forms, such as "If A, then B; but A, therefore B" or "Either A or B; but not A, therefore B." These argument forms, which are called modus ponens and modus tollendo ponens, respectively, are still used by logicians.