Quotes About Logic

He liked 97 because it was the largest two-digit prime number, and he loved 81 because it was absolutely the only number out of all the literally infinite possibilities whose square root was also the sum of its digits. Square root of eighty-one was nine, and eight and one made nine. No other nontrivial number in the cosmos had that kind of sweet symmetry. Perfect.

You can't be real-world smart and real-world dumb, all at the same time. You can't be rational and irrational. You can't deal with reality and simultaneously not deal with it.

If you hear hoof beats, you look for horses, not zebras.

They're shrinks. You said so yourself. They overcomplicate things. If you hear hoof beats, you look for horses, not zebras.

No reason to look for complications. You hear hoof beats, you look for horses, not zebras.

To be afraid of a survivable thing was irrational.

This is not rocket surgery.

Without having navigated waters shallow enough for us to see bottom, we'll be easy prey to mystifiers who want to sell us radical metaphysical fantasies in the guise of science.

Of course, there really is no chicken and egg problem; certainly there were eggs long before there were chickens.)

Any good scientist will tell you there is one important rule: follow the evidence wherever it leads you...Good science is objective —that means it looks only at the evidence, even if the evidence points to something we don't want to believe.

As we look out at the billions of stars that constitute our Milky Way galaxy," I said, "can't we logically assume that planets teeming with life are strewn all over the place?" "No," he said unequivocally, "that's not a logical assumption based on the evidence.

Serce ma swoje racje, o których nic nie wie rozum - Pascal

Logos without nous: that is in a way what modern science wants to be. Nous without logos is mysticism.

The appeal of many conspiracy theories depends on the misunderstanding of this logic. That is, it depends on confusing the probability that a series of events would happen if it were the product of a huge conspiracy with the probability that a huge conspiracy exists if a series of events occurs.

Believing in what you desire to be true and then seeking evidence to justify it doesn't seem to be the best approach to everyday decisions.

at a time when mystical incantation was more valued than mathematical calculation.

Induction means really the process of coming to conclusions on the basis of observation. Deduction is the process of coming to conclusions on the basis of earlier abstractions.

The pre-Greek civilizations, never discovering the field of epistemology, had no explicit idea of a cognitive process which is systematic, secular, observation-based, logic-ruled; the medievals for centuries had no access to most of this knowledge. The dominant, mystical ideas of such cultures represent a nonrational approach to the world, not an antirational approach.

When the leading voices of the emotionalist Republic championed "feeling," it was not as a source of knowledge or of human happiness, but of freedom: the freedom from objectivity, method, logic, fact. It was feeling not as an alleged means to truth, but as the nullification of thought.

Thus three elements unite to define the Objectivist concept of reason: perception,† conception, and logic.

the first requirement of expanding his knowledge is induction, which is in essence the process of inferring a generalization from observations.

A necessary complement to induction is deduction, the standard example of which is: "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal." The

Knowledge is a hierarchy; it consists of integrations, each level making the next possible and in due course necessary. Thinking, we can say, consists of integrating integrations.

Qua dogmatist, the Nazi holds faith to be superior to logic. Qua activist, he dismisses logic in favor of action. Qua pragmatist, he is free to endorse contradictions, provided they "work." Qua relativist, he rejects the absolutism of the Law of Identity. And, qua subjectivist, the Nazi simply wipes out logic by giving its name to his random, "Aryan" feelings.