Quotes About Logic

Stop derailing my plans with logic and reason,

I think it was Socrates who said if you can't win a one-way argument, just pretend that you can read your opponent's mind.

You are not right because people agree with you; you are right because your facts and reasoning are right.

What is the one thing that you'd never be able to sell in the market? Common sense! Those who have it wouldn't need to buy it. Those who don't have it wouldn't know what to do with it.

Arithmetic is the death of story.

You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic.

Just to keep our terminology straight, for Porter strategy always means "competitive strategy" within a business. The business unit, and not the company overall, is the core level of strategy. Corporate strategy refers to the business logic of a multiple-business company.

She fits her hand over his and presses. Her skin is soft, and the pressure makes his mouth form a smile. He can be furious with her and still be aware that he loves her at the same time. It took years for him to be able to accept the absence of logic in their love. Frustration plus a bad mood plus a particular smile of hers equaled a shot of joy in his belly.

This was perfect dictator-logic: we investigate you, therefore you are an enemy.

It was a condition of sanity both to accept 'GDR-logic' and to ignore it. 'If you took things as seriously as people in the west think we must have, we would have all killed ourselves!

anti-fascist protective measure'. I have always been fond of this term which has something of the prophylactic about it, protecting easterners from the western disease of shallow materialism. It obeys all the logic of locking up free people to keep them safe from criminals.

if we could act a little more according to common sense, and a good deal less according to fashion, we should find many things work easier;

She [Judith Butler] specifies the ways in which the logic of identity politics—which is to gather together similar subjects so that they can achieve shared aims by mobilising a minority-rights discourse—is far from natural or self-evident. Michael Warner makes a similar point about the cultural specificity of identity politics when observing that, because its 'frame ... belongs to Anglo-American traditions', it therefore 'has some distorting influences'.

Alexander Hamilton and John Adams] wanted to build democracy in America on the basis of rational debate, reason, and compromise. But they had no illusions about human nature: They knew that men could sometimes succumb to "passions," to use their old-fashioned word. They knew that any political system built on logic and rationality was always at risk from an outburst of the irrational.

Anger and reason are rarely partners

Az alámerülés az éj rohadt rubinjába a szabadság és a rossz logika versengésévé változott.

Our fears are not always reasonable

Johannes had once said that violence and cruelty were just a stupid person's way of making himself felt, because it was easer to use your hands to strike a blow than to use your brain to find a logical and just solution to the problem.

The angrier you were, the less likely you were to think clearly.

Absurdities exasperated her. At the same time, the slow process of patiently leading recalcitrant thinkers to better thoughts by artful persuasions seemed to her a waste of time--a logical argument, cogently expressed, was surely sufficient to convince, and if it did not convince, then the case might well be hopeless and not worth pursuing.

The moment a man uses a woman's sex to discredit her arguments, the thoughtful reader knows that he is unable to answer the arguments themselves.

Now for the bad news: Being smart doesn't make you less susceptible to the inside view. If anything, it makes it worse. It straps your beliefs into the driver's seat more firmly. Research across a variety of settings has shown that being smart makes you better at motivated reasoning, the tendency to reason about information to confirm your prior beliefs and arrive at the conclusion you desire.

But this is irrational. If you wouldn't buy a stock today, you ought not hold it today, because a decision to hold is the same as a decision to buy.

We did not evolve to solve tricky logic puzzles on our own, they point out, and so we shouldn't be surprised by the fact that we're no good at it, any more than by the fact that we're no good at breathing underwater. What we did evolve to do is persuade other people of our views, and to guard against being misled by others. Reasoning is a social activity, in other words, and should be practiced as such.