Quotes on Logic

After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.

Any belief in Creators or Purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps ALL thinking is wishful, reactions of intense irritation give evidence that we are not dealing with logic but with faith.

People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.

In other words, the propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions. Accordingly we may say that philosophy is a department of logic. For we will see that the characteristic mark of a purely logical enquiry, is that it is concerned with the formal consequences of our definitions and not with questions of empirical fact.

We can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.

Arbitrary rules teach kids discipline: If every rule made sense, they wouldn't be learning respect for authority, they'd be learning logic.

Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.

The less we have, the more we give. Seems absurd, but it's the logic of love.

... this task entrusted to us by God the Creator requires us to grasp the rhythm and logic of creation. But we are often driven by pride of domination, of possessions, manipulation, of exploitation; we do not "care" for it, we do not respect it, we do not consider it as a free gift that we must care for.

Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.

From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.

When I consider this carefully, I find not a single property which with certainty separates the waking state from the dream. How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?

She was, in fact, quite a pleasant looking girl, even if her bosom had clearly been intended for a girl two feet taller; but she was not Her. The Egregious Professor of Grammar and Usage would have corrected this to "she was not she," which would have caused the Professor of Logic to spit out his drink.

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.

[Aristotle formal logic thus far (1787)] has not been able to advance a single step, and hence is to all appearances closed and completed.

Men are rather beholden ... generally to chance or anything else, than to logic, for the invention of arts and sciences.