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Among all the liberal arts, the first is logic, and specifically that part of logic which gives initial instruction about words. ... [T]he word "logic" has a broad meaning, and is not restricted exclusively to the science of argumentative reasoning. [It includes] Grammar [which] is "the science of speaking and writing correctly-the starting point of all liberal studies."
John of SalisburyThe difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.
Robert GravesI think everyone must love life more than anything else in the world.' 'Love life more than the meaning of it?' 'Yes, certainly. Love it regardless of logic, as you say. Yes, most certainly regardless of logic, for only then will I grasp its meaning. That's what I've been vaguely aware of for a long time. Half your work is done, Ivan: you love life. Now you must try to do the second half and you are saved.
Fyodor DostoevskyBeneath words and logic are emotional connections that largely direct how we use our words and logic.
Jane RobertsWhy all this insistence on the senses? Because in order to convince your reader that he is THERE, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture. If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won. The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events. He cannot refuse, then, to participate. The logic of events always gives way to the logic of the senses.
Ray BradburyArithmetic is where the content lies, and not logic; but logic prompts certainty, and not arithmetic.
David BerlinskiTo know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy.
George OrwellYou are a white. The Imperial Wizard. Now, if you don't think this is logic you can burn me on the fiery cross. This is the logic: You have the choice of spending fifteen years married to a woman, a black woman or a white woman. Fifteen years kissing and hugging and sleeping real close on hot nights. With a black, black woman or a white, white woman. The white woman is Kate Smith. And the black woman is Lena Horne. So you're not concerned with black or white anymore, are you? You are concerned with how cute or how pretty. Then let's really get basic and persecute ugly people!
Lenny BruceI think the world on the other side of fossil fuel is more local - the logic of sun and wind is diffuse and spread out, not concentrated like the logic of coal and oil.
Bill McKibbenThe beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance ... or change. Once such incantatory phrases as "we see now through a glass darkly" and "mysterious are the ways". He chooses His wonders to perform" are mastered, logic can be happily tossed out the window". Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world's vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it's all on purpose.
Stephen KingThe minute you take away somebody the public's voting for, you're screwing with the program. There's no logic to it.
Nigel LythgoeI told him that I thought it was law logic - an artificial system of reasoning, exclusively used in Courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else.
John Quincy AdamsPresident Bush Sr. and Secretary Baker, way back when, told Gorbachev, "We are not going to advance NATO into Eastern Europe. We're not going to - we're not going to advance NATO into East Germany, if you allow the unification of Germany." Where is that pledge? Where is the logic behind a military alliance, devised in the time of communism, before the Berlin Wall fell, now being in the Ukraine, in Poland, in Estonia, in Latvia and Lithuania? I don't understand.
Rashid KhalidiAtlantis: Fabled. Mystical. Golden. Mysterious. Glorious and magical. There are those who claim that it never was. But then there are also those who think they are safe in this modern world of technology and weapons. Safe from all the ancient evils. They even believe that wizards, warriors, and dragons are long dead. They are fools clinging to their science and logic while thinking it will save them. (Thrylos)
Sherrilyn KenyonEvery song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a painter, and every building has a builder. So it isn't irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.
Ray ComfortThere is no difference between religion and politics. Both involve lies and fanatical beliefs that generaly defy logic... Just like rock climbing.
David SchullerAs a science, logic institutes an analysis of the process of the mind in reasoning, and investigating the principles on which argumentation is conducted; as an art, it furnishes such rules as may be derived from those principles, for guarding against erroneous deductions.
Richard WhatelyMathematics does not grow through a monotonous increase of the number of indubitably established theorems but through the incessant improvement of guesses by speculation and criticism, by the logic of proofs and refutations.
Imre LakatosThe anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.
Junot DiazAs in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice--there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.
Thomas KuhnYou need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
Alain de BottonThis means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.
Jean PiagetI learned early that you'd better know what you're talking about. You'd better realize that certain issues are going to be so hot - no matter what reason, what logic you apply to it - you're going to be met with an opposition just because their viewpoint is different, and there's no way they're going to accept your reasoning. Furthermore, they're going to attack you because you will be portrayed as not being credible: "You're an actor. What do you know?"
Robert RedfordThe environment forces you to be utterly dependent between "action" and "cut" because the environment is perfect on your fellow actor. So as an acting exercise, it's absolutely thrilling that the focus that we had to bring to each other echoed in life, echoed in art. And when you get that parallel, it's really thrilling and it's full of surprises, but it all has a logic.
Ben KingsleyThere may be organic life out there, or maybe machines created by long-dead civilizations, but any signals, even if they are difficult to decode, would tell us that the concepts of logic and physics are not limited to the hardware in human skulls, and will transform our view of the universe.
Martin ReesMy Master... Say all you wish of me. It does not matter to me:Shallow.. Stupid.. Crazy.. Simple minded. It does not concern me anymore. For whoever writes about her concerns. in the logic of Men is called a stupid woman. and didn't I tell you in the beginning that I am a stupid woman?
Nizar QabbaniWhen a person does something, it has the man or woman look about it. It drips with humanity. You can follow the logic of it and see the meaning behind it.
Charles R. SwindollThe "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.
Susan SontagFirst, those who disagree with market efficiency simply assert that it stands to common sense that greater effort to get facts and greater acumen in analyzing those facts will pay off in better performance somehow measured. (By this logic, cure for cancer must have been found by 1955).
Paul SamuelsonImpulse is, after all, the best linguist; its logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, cannot fail to be most convincing.
Henry David ThoreauThe fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.
A. N. WilsonBoth fact and logic seem to me to support the view that savings invested in privately owned economic tools of production amount to an act of charity. And further, I believe it to be - as a type - the greatest economic charity of all.
F. A. HarperI love Logic Audio and have been using it for years. All my track outputs used to come up on my old board in the same order as in the old Mac G4 - 1 through 32, came up as 1 through 32, for instance.
Tony ViscontiThe way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane - maybe very narrow - which is the path of the historian of thought.
Michel FoucaultPerhaps there really are managers who can outperform the market consistently - logic would suggest that they exist. But they are remarkably well-hidden.
Paul SamuelsonThe rejection of all abstract formalism. Materialism reminds every science of its real source: the world men transform. No science can, whether in its history or its object, grasp its own origins within itself or constitute itself as a closed world, exhaustively defined by internal rules. Materialism refers every science and every activity to the reality they depend on, even if this dependence is masked by a great many abstract mediations: mathematics as well as logic, aesthetics as well as ethics and politics.
Louis AlthusserIn laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.
John DeweyIn life two negatives don't make a positive. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse.
Robert McKeeA régime [Nazism] which invented a biological foreign policy was obviously acting against its own best interests. But at least it obeyed its own particular logic.
Albert CamusHearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness.
Greil MarcusNo one who was not by nature a lover of logic, and an extreme precisian in the use of words and phrases, could have written the two "Alice" books.
Stuart Dodgson CollingwoodAlmost all thinking people agree that you should not have probability 1 (or 0) for any event, other than one demonstrable by logic, like 2 x 2 = 4.
Dennis Lindley