Quotes About Logic

The Nazis played the same games against Jews that today’s left plays against 'Eurocentrism,' 'whiteness,' and 'logocentrism.' When you hear a campus radical denounce 'white logic' or 'male logic,' she is standing on the shoulders of a Nazi who denounced 'Jewish logic' and the 'Hebrew disease'...The white man is the Jew of liberal fascism.

Kurt Godel's achievement in modern logic is singular and monumental - indeed it is more than a monument, it is a landmark which will remain visible far in space and time. ... The subject of logic has certainly completely changed its nature and possibilities with Godel's achievement.

People knew there were two ways of coming at truth. One was science, or what the Greeks called Logos, reason, logic. And that was essential that the discourse of science or logic related directed to the external world. The other was mythos, what the Greeks called myth, which didn't mean a fantasy story, but it was a narrative associated with ritual and ethical practice but it helped us to address problems for which there were no easy answers, like mortality, cruelty, the sorrow that overtakes us all that's part of the human condition. And these two were not in opposition, we needed both.

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.

Since my logic aims to teach and instruct the understanding, not that it may with the slender tendrils of the mind snatch at and lay hold of abstract notions (as the common logic does), but that it may in very truth dissect nature, and discover the virtues and actions of bodies, with their laws as determined in matter; so that this science flows not merely from the nature of the mind, but also from the nature of things.

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.

My life isn’t theories and formulae. It’s part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I’ve absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone… from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazine, from the laws of life and health and nature.

Logic obviously is important. You need to be able to figure things out, to go to the end of a particular problem. But intuition is very important because it references things that logic alone cannot.

Many teachers will tell you to believe; then they put out your eyes of reason and instruct you to follow only their logic. But I want you to keep your eyes of reason open; in addition, I will open in you another eye, the eye of wisdom.

The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.

How do you get from, "We do not know whether this is protectable human life," to "Therefore, we will not protect it?" Wouldn't the logic just as likely (some would say far more likely) be, "Since we do not know whether this is protectable human life, therefore we will protect it?" Why does the judicial uncertainty about the humanity of the unborn lead to unbridled license to destroy it?

The message I hope to have sent is just the example of being yourself. I tell this to my students: It's not about copying me or my logic systems. It's about allowing yourself to be yourself.

When quite young I can remember I had no thought or wish of surpassing others. I was rather taken with a liking of little arts and bits of learning. My mother carefully fostered a liking for botany, giving me a small microscope and many books, which I yet have. Strange as it may seem, I now believe that botany and the natural system, by exercising discrimination of kinds, is the best of logical exercises. What I may do in logic is perhaps derived from that early attention to botany.

Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

My father was very political. But he told me, "Be very careful when you get into politics, because there's no black and white. There's an in-between in everything. So look at that side, don't take one point, because then you are negating half of the other people. Try to find the logic on a problem, something that you believe, and take the position that you believe, but be very careful about it." So I was very well trained in that aspect.

We're not all the same. A common liberal refrain is that differences between individuals are statistically more significant than those between cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. I don't see why the fact of inter-individual differences would nullify inter-group variance. That's liberal logic for you.

Atlantis: 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)

As 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.

It’ll probably be brutal, too. They might even feed you to the dog. He doesn’t have a dog. Yeah, well, he might get one just to feed you to it. She’d never been the kind of person to let something as ridiculous as rational logic interfere with her fear.’ (Alix)

As far as I know, the question of whether and how it could be strategically or morally justified was never the subject of open debate in Germany after 1945, no doubt mainly because a nation which had murdered and worked to death millions of people in its camps could hardly call on the victorious powers to explain the military and political logic that dictated the destruction of the German cities.

I can predict with some sense of certainty how life will feel in a month. I can with the same logic remember with the same element of reality or truth what life was like a month ago. All perspectives on the past are entirely relative.

It's very disconcerting to have a camera shoved in your face. It's really discombobulating. If you're the least bit nervous you forget what you just said, you can't find your way through, you can't follow the logic of your own statements sometimes. It's a weird sensation. And I think that really helps to lock people in place.

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.

If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you're not going to get very far. You simply won't.

Sex and children are the two things that delude logic the most in this society.

Art's supposed to build logic structures.

The first race of mankind used to dispute, as our ordinary people do now-a-days, in a kind of wild logic, uncultivated by rule of art.

The theatre has always been to me a place where beautiful lies are told, and playwrighting the orchestration of platitudes around a central flaw in logic or a ridiculous idea. Acting — the disguise and impersonation — is an art of deception.

When money, instead of man, is at the center of the system, when money becomes an idol, men and women are reduced to simple instruments of a social and economic system, which is characterized, better yet dominated, by profound inequalities. So we discard whatever is not useful to this logic; it is this attitude that discards children and older people, and is now affecting the young.

My 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?

You have to play the logic of a character.

The plant never lapses into mere arid functionalism; it fashions and shapes according to logic and suitability, and with its primeval force compels everything to attain the highest artistic form.

What I like about the jokes, to me it's a lot of logic, no matter how crazy they are. It has to make absolute sense, or it won't be funny.

Once we admit that there is room for newness - that there are vastly more conceivable possibilities than realized outcomes - we must confront the fact that there is no special logic behind the world we inhabit, no particular justification for why things are the way they are. Any number of arbitrarily small perturbations along the way could have made the world as we know it turn out very differently.

There is another method of obtaining money... It does not presuppose the existence of accumulated results of previous development, and hence may be considered as the only one which is available in strict logic. This method of obtaining money is the creation of purchasing power by banks. The form it takes is immaterial.

First, 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).

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.

Logic is one thing and commonsense another.

Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.

Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

There's something real in women's intuition. It's an accurate signpost for decision making, but it usually bumps up against man's logic. So we have to put ego aside and listen to them.

It's a simple exercise; a little logic, a little taste, and the will to cooperate.

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.

The 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.

Hunches are a kind of subterranean logic shorthand.

We should start being intolerant to those who are intolerant to us. This is not modern logic, this is not extreme, this is common sense.

When you look at your freelance career, it's really like a mall. And if you look at a mall, it's a self-contained system that has a flow and logic to it. You'll probably have one or two really bigger jobs, those are like your anchor stores.

Pleasure has no logic; it never treads in its own footsteps.