Quotes About Reasoning

Users of slippery slope arguments should take skiing lessons—you really can choose to stop.

One must keep a store of common sense," said Tchitchikov, "and consult one's common sense at every minute, have a friendly conversation with it.

When it comes to the ever-elusive goal of achieving what is usually called "scientific literacy" for the general population, it is hard not to conclude that the task is hopeless.7b

With shaken confidence in the consistency and legitimacy of what they take to be scientific research, people revert to ancient and erroneous habits of thought-post hoc ergo propter hot- reasoning, reliance on anecdotal evidence, false analogy, and simple rumor chasing.

The great virtues were that mathematics remained rigorously free from emotional content, free from ethical content, and free from political content. It allowed people to try to rise to the top by being reasoning scientists and scholars, instead of being bullying politicians or priests.

mad, were not my perception and reasonings so clear; and this state of mind appears to have brought with it superior knowledge on all subjects.

Den Satz des Widerspruchs zu vernichten ist vielleicht die höchste Aufgabe der höheren Logik

Beat a man with the strength of your argument, not with the strength of your arm.

There are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and three-story intellects with skylights. All fact collectors with no aim beyond their facts are one-story men. Two-story men compare reason and generalize, using labors of the fact collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, and predict. Their best illuminations come from above through the skylight.

Logic is logic. That's all I say.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.Logic is logic. That's all I say.

Every man will speak as he thinks, or, more properly, without thinking, and consequently will judge the effects without attending to the causes.

Lottate, ragionate col vostro cervello, ricordate che ciascuno è qualcuno, un individuo prezioso, responsabile, artefice di se stesso, difendetelo il vostro io, nocciolo di ogni libertà, la libertà è un dovere, prima che un diritto è un dovere.

Thinking Christians think in believing and they believe in thinking.

Logic, inevitably, is the love of logic. It is not the love for living human beings.

There is always a contradiction between religion and common sense.

Logic, when used correctly and by an intellect that is not corrupted by the lower passions, may lead to one to the Transcendent itself.

All conscious nature has experiences of pleasure and pain. Man alone can deliberately will the repetition of an experience. And repetition, experienced as such, is at the heart, for good and evil, of his faculty of reasoning, and thus makes possible his language, his art, his morality, and indeed his humanity. Yet it is the enemy of life, for repetition is itself the principle, not of life but of mechanism.

Deliberation is made possible by our evolved reasoning capacities, and this explains why, as historians and political scientists have along observed, free and open deliberation generally leads to choices superior to those of autocratic and technocratic systems.

One of the things I always tell the police and families is that while everything is possible, not all things are probable. You can't waste a lot of investigative effort on an extremely unlikely scenario; you have to stay with what makes sense.

The evidence should guide you to a theory; you should not be allowing the theory to guide the evidence upon which you focus.

it is impossible to come to a sensible conclusion about anything when one is very tired

Ethos, Pathos, and Logos