Quotes About Logic

Humans are fundamentally irrational. They use what precious rationality they have justifying their irrational behavior. A

that quality in me. And I know it wasn't only logic that made me think: I'm never going to write about a crucial election, a pivotal moment in my subject's life, and say that no one's ever going to know if it was really stolen or not until I've done everything I can think of to find out if it was stolen or not.

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. Logic proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

The drive for power is even less logical than the sex urge . . . and stronger.

As for logic and internal consistency, these mundane rules do not apply to sacred writings and never have...

Some logics get nervous breakdowns. Overloaded phone system behaves like frightened child. Mike did not have upsets, acquired sense of humor instead. Low one. If he were a man, you wouldn't dare stoop over. His idea of thigh-slapper would be to dump you out of bed — or put itch powder in pressure suit.

I tried to dig out of the computer a call directory for Luna. But it was still sulking. I could not get it to list its own directory. So I tried some test problems on it. It insisted that 2 + 2 = 3.99999999999999999999999.... When I tried to get it to admit that 4 = 2 + 2, it became angry and claimed that 4 = 3.141592653589793238462643383279... So I gave up.

The fact that he had broken his oath more times than there were years intervening did not trouble him; his was not a small mind bothered by logic and consistency.

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything that didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

A magician is a rule-of-thumb engineer.

A paradox may be paradoctored.

This school is based on the idea that a man who can think correctly will automatically behave morally—or

Any conversation with Smith turned up at least one bit of human behavior which could not be justified logically, at least in terms that Smith could understand, and attempts to do so were endlessly time-consuming.

everything of any importance is founded on mathematics.

so many people have been hypnotized by Aristotelian ''yes/ no'' logic to the extent that any step beyond that Bronze Age mythos seems to them a whirling, dizzying plunge into a pit of Chaos and the Dark Night of Nihilism.

Non-Aristotelian logic deals with existencial/operacional probabilities. Aristotelian logic deals with certainties, and in the lack of certainties throughout most of life, Aristotelian logic subliminally programs us to ivent fictitious certainties. That rush for fictitious certainties explains most of the Ideologies and damn near all Religions on the planet, I think.

Back in the 1950s, mathematician Anatole Rapoport offered a four-valued logic which I often find useful, classifying statements as true, false, indeterminate (at this date) and meaningless (forever indeterminate, because no experience can either prove them or refute them.)

People ignore the quantum maybe because they have largely never heard of quantum logic or Transactional Psychology, but they also ignore it because traditional politics and religion have conditioned people for millenniums — and still train them today — to act with intolerance and premature certainty.

You asked me what linguistics I find most pernicious. I started with is. The either/or habit is very pernicious. It seems very pernicious to me, I mean. Two-valued situations are relatively rare, actually.

I suggest, following some ideas in semantics and modern logic, that Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman of her time should be considered a self-referential statement. That is, it refers to the nervous system of the speaker. Properly, it should be phrased as Marilyn Monroe seemed the most beautiful woman of her time to me. Stated thusly, it is true (unless we want to be so tricky as to assume the speaker is deliberately deceiving us).

The Prover is a much simpler mechanism. It operates on one law only: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.

In cold fact, all three statements [1, 2 and 3] contradict my actual ideas. I just wanted to remind you how easily humans can go from statement S1 to conclusion S5 without noticing that the inferences in between — S2, S3 and S4 — have no basis in logic, and result only from mechanical reflex. I already quoted Andre Gide about that. Now I quote the father of linguistic analysis, Josiah Warren; "It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly.

Non-Aristotelian logic deals with existential/operational probabilities. Aristotelian logic deals with certainties, and in the lack of certainties throughout most of life, Aristotelian logic subliminally programs us to invent fictitious certainties. That rush for fictitious certainties explains most of the Ideologies and damned near all the Religions on the planet, I think.