Quotes About Logic

I end with a word on the new symbols which I have employed. Most writers on logic strongly object to all symbols. ... I should advise the reader not to make up his mind on this point until he has well weighed two facts which nobody disputes, both separately and in connexion. First, logic is the only science which has made no progress since the revival of letters; secondly, logic is the only science which has produced no growth of symbols.

Love is not the absence of logic but logic examined and recalculated heated and curved to fit inside the contours of the heart.

What do you think science is? There is nothing magical about science. It is simply a systematic way for carefully and thoroughly observing nature and using consistent logic to evaluate results. So which part of that exactly do you disagree with? Do you disagree with being thorough? Using careful observation? Being systematic? Or using consistent logic?

Beneath words and logic are emotional connections that largely direct how we use our words and logic.

The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.

It is possible--indeed possible even according to the old conception of logic--to give in advance a description of all 'true' logical propositions. Hence there can never be surprises in logic.

If pressed to supplement Tweedledee's ostensive definition of logic with a discursive definition of the same subject, I would say that logic is the systematic study of the logical truths. Pressed further, I would say that a sentence is logically true if all sentences with its grammatical structure are true. Pressed further still, I would say to read this book.

Logic ridicules love, and love smiles knowingly at the whole foolishness of logic.

The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people's. I see what he means, and because I've learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that's always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained.

Promenade was totally driven by the context. The internal relationships of measurement and placement related to the central axis of the site. The placement of the rectangular plates followed a strict logic in that the plates tilted away and towards the center line in an asymmetrical counterpoint. However, the perception of the sculpture contradicts the logic of its relation to the site. As you walk inbetween the plates you see fragments, you see the work in part, you cannot grasp the whole.

Logic is justly considered the basis of all other sciences, even if only for the reason that in every argument we employ concepts taken from the field of logic, and that ever correct inference proceeds in accordance with its laws.

What sets imperialism of the capitalist sort apart from other conceptions of empire is that it is the capitalist logic that typically dominates, though ... there are times in which the territorial logic comes to the fore. But this then poses a crucial question: how can the territorial logics of power, which tend to be awkwardly fixed in space, respond to the open spatial dynamics of endless capital accumulation? And what does endless capital accumulation imply for the territorial logics of power?

Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.

Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art.

The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.

It was the most convulted, ridiculous piece of logic I'd heard in awhile... It was something I would have come up with.

There can never be surprises in logic.

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

Developing a compiler was a logical move; but in matters like this, you don't run against logic - you run against people who can't change their minds.

Mathematics and logic have been proved to be one; a fact from which it seems to follow that mathematics may successfully deal with non-quantitative problems in a much broader sense than was suspected to be possible.

I want people to read them and enjoy the experience and feel entertained. A lot of the best stories revolve around strange people, people whose decisions and logic and circumstances are not easily understood.

Every moment of living has its own logic, its own meaning.

The true Logic for this world is the Calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability.

I've already written a section in the annual report for next year explaining why I think in one case that the figures on our balance sheet as calculated are wrong. But it's the standard way of doing it. It's holy writ. The SEC wants us to do it that way, and we'll do it that way, and I'll explain why I think it's wrong and shareholders can read it and see whether they agree with my logic or don't.

It is perplexing to see the flexibility of the so-called 'exact sciences' which by cast-iron laws of logic and by the infallible help of mathematics can lead to conclusions which are diametrically opposite to one another.

The devil has a Ph.D. in perfect logic.

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

A critic is a man who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative men. There is logic in this; he is unbiased, he hates all creative people equally.

If the opponent offers keen play I don't object; but in such cases I get less satisfaction, even if I win, than from a game conducted according to all the rules of strategy with its ruthless logic.

Originality doesn't consist of saying it first, originality consists of saying it in a way that is specifically tailored to the moment in which you are addressing - and at the moment when the complications arise, challenging the logic of what you're doing.

Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.

It is a simple logic truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death –rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.

I just saw Titanic, which is a $200 million film about a real-life disaster at sea, but according to Hollywood Logic, none of the actual passengers was interesting enough, so the writer-director had to invent a Romeo and Juliet-style fictional couple to heat up the catastrophe. This seems a tiny bit like giving Anne Frank a wacky best friend, to perk up that attic.

After all, man is a complicated being, why should he be explainable by logic?

I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to it.

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

Normal and I parted ways when Pateir1ch strolled into my life. Patch has seven inches on me, operates on cold, hard logic, moves like smoke, and lives alone in a supersecret, superswanky studio beneath Delphic Amusement Park. The sound of his voice, low and sexy, can melt my heart in three seconds flat. He’s also a fallen angel, kicked out of heaven for his flexibility when it comes to following rules. I personally believe Patch scared the pants off normal, and it took off running for the far side of the world.

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

No 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.

In chess the most unbelievable thing for me is that it's a game for everybody: rich, poor, girl, boy, old, young. It's a fantastic game which can unite people and generations! It's a language which you'll find people "speak" in every country. If you reach a certain level you find a very rich world! Art, sport, logic, psychology, a battlefield, imagination, creativity not only in practical games but don't forget either how amazing a feeling it is to compose a study, for example (unfortunately that's not appreciated these days but it's a fantastic part of chess!).

Ronald Reagan was an actor. Not at all a factor, Just an employee of the country's real masters. Just like the Bushes, Clinton and Obama, Just another talkin' head tellin' lies on teleprompters. If you don't believe the theory, then argue with this logic: Why did Reagan and Obama both go after Gaddafi? We invaded sovereign soil, goin' after oil Takin' countries as a hobby paid for by the oil lobby, Same as Iraq and Afghanistan. And Ahmadinejad sayin' they comin' for Iran.

The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.

Almost 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.

Hope doesn't require a massive chain where heavy links of logic hold it together. A thin wire will do...just strong enough to get us through the night until the winds die down.

There's definitely, definitely, definitely, no logic to human behaviour . . . There's no map And a compass Wouldn't help at all

I think that children have a power to imagine that is almost magical when compared to the adult imagination, and this is something irrevocable that a child loses when he or she becomes bound by logic. We adults continue to have our children

And human instinct is ancient and reliable, utterly mysterious and possibly capable of great genius. I believe that refined, fluent instincts are a person's most valuable asset. My own instincts have repeatedly guided me against the grain of logic and probability. When I have trusted and followed their direction, they have never been wrong. I don't know how or why. But I know that every significant experience-positive or negative-sharpens them and makes them more accurate.

He would be laughed at, that should go about to make a fine dancer out of a country hedger, at past fifty. And he will not have much better success, who shall endeavour, at that age, to make a man reason well, or speak handsomely, who has never been used to it, though you should lay before him a collection of all the best precepts of logic or oratory.