David Stove Quotes

• People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx.

  David Stove

  Religious, Powerful, Plato

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• We set ourselves to achieve a society that would be maximally tolerant. But that resolve not only gives maximum scope to the activities of those who have set themselves to achieve the maximally intolerant society. It also... paralyses our powers of resistance to them.

  David Stove

  Giving, Would Be, Resistance

  David Stove (2017). “On Enlightenment”, p.164, Routledge

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• A philosopher may try to prove the truth of something he believed before he was a philosopher, but even if he succeeds, his belief never regain the untroubled character, and the settled place in his mind, which it had at first.

  David Stove

  Character, Mind, Trying

  "The Rationality of Induction". Book by David Stove, p. 99, first paragraph, 1986.

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• But the stupidity which is common to all such "explanations" is, of course, simply that of proceeding as though the merits of a theory - such things as truth, or probability, or explanatory power - could not possibly be among the reasons for its currency.

  David Stove

  Stupidity, Libertarian, Merit

  David Stove (2013). “On Enlightenment”, p.17, Transaction Publishers

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• If a lack of empirical foundations is a defect of the theory of logical probability, it is also a defect of deductive logic.

  David Stove

  Foundation, Logic, Theory

  "The Rationality of Induction". Book by David Stove, Oxford: Clarendon, p. 176, 1986.

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