Axioms Quotes - Page 6

• We do everything by custom, even believe by it; our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Believe, Thinking, May

  Thomas Carlyle (1864). “Sartor Resartus”, p.158

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• The principal axiom in their theory was: Everything can be proved, and everything can be disproved; and in the process, one must profit as much from the folly of others, and from his own superiority, as he can.

  Moses Mendelssohn

  Process, Profit, Theory

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• How odd that Americans, and not just their presidents, have come to think of their Constitution as something separable from the government it's supposed to constitute. In theory, it should be as binding on rulers as the laws of physics are on engineers who design bridges; in practice, its axioms have become mere options. Of course engineers don't have to take oaths to respect the law of gravity; reality gives them no choice. Politics, as we see, makes all human laws optional for politicians.

  Joseph Sobran

  Thinking, Reality, Government

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• It cannot be that axioms established by argumentation should avail for the discovery of new works, since the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument. But axioms duly and orderly formed from particulars easily discover the way to new particulars, and thus render sciences active.

  Francis Bacon

  Science, Discovery, New Work

  Francis Bacon (2012). “The Great Instauration”, p.30, Simon and Schuster

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• Perhaps the truest axiom in baseball is that the toughest thing to do is repeat.

  Walter Alston

  Sports, Baseball, Psychology

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• Underlying the preaching of the Puritans are three basic axioms: 1. The unique place of preaching is to convert, feed and sustain, 2. The life of the preacher must radiate the reality of what he preaches, 3. Prayer and solid Bible study are basic to effective preaching.

  J. I. Packer

  Prayer, Unique, Reality

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• We're taught Lord Acton's axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believed that when I started these books, but I don't believe it's always true any more. Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.

  Robert Caro

  Believe, Book, Taught

  "Robert Caro: a life with LBJ and the pursuit of power". Interview with Chris McGreal, www.theguardian.com. June 9, 2012.

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• The development of mathematics toward greater precision has led, as is well known, to the formalization of large tracts of it, so that one can prove any theorem using nothing but a few mechanical rules... One might therefore conjecture that these axioms and rules of inference are sufficient to decide any mathematical question that can at all be formally expressed in these systems. It will be shown below that this is not the case, that on the contrary there are in the two systems mentioned relatively simple problems in the theory of integers that cannot be decided on the basis of the axioms.

  Kurt Gödel

  Simple, Two, Development

  "Kurt Gödel: Collected Works: Volume I: Publications 1929-1936".

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• They say that loving eyes can never see, but that's a fool's axiom. Sometimes, they see too much

  Stephen King

  Eye, Too Much, Fool

  Stephen King (2014). “A Good Marriage”, p.133, Simon and Schuster

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• ↑ top up position down The fact that I suspect I'm an asshole means I probably am not, because a real asshole doesn't think he's an asshole, does he? Therefore, by realizing that I'm an asshole, I am in fact negating that very realization, am I not? Descartes's Asshole Axiom: I think I am; therefor I'm not one.

  Jonathan Tropper

  Real, Mean, Thinking

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• Having a moment of clarity was one thing; I'd had moments like that before. It had to be followed with a dedicated push of daily exercise. It's a trite axiom, but practice DOES make perfect. If you want to be a strong swimmer or an accomplished musician, you have to practice. It's the same with sobriety, though the stakes are higher. If you don't practice your program every day, you're putting yourself in a position where you could fly out of the orbit one more time.

  Anthony Kiedis

  Strong, Inspiration, Exercise

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• Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.

  Margaret Atwood

  Country, Eye, Islands

  Margaret Atwood (1987). “Selected Poems, 1965-1975”, p.78, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There are two principles on which all men of intellectual integrity and good will can agree, as a 'basic minimum,' as a precondition of any discussion, co-operation or movement toward an intellectual Renaissance. . . . They are not axioms, but until a man has proved them to himself and has accepted them, he is not fit for an intellectual discussion. These two principles are: a. that emotions are not tools of cognition; b. that no man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others.

  Ayn Rand

  Integrity, Men, Two

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• Axiom : Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.

  E. M. Forster

  Character, Perfect, Patterns

  E. M. Forster (1987). “Commonplace Book”, p.6, Stanford University Press

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• What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. And I would vary Yeats's axiom so as to say: no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose "nerve and blood" are at peace in sceptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if.

  George Steiner

  Home, Creativity, Men

  George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.264, Faber & Faber

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• While the game of deadlocks and bottle-necks goes on, another more serious game is also being played. It is governed by two axioms. One is that there can be no peace without a general surrender of sovereignty: the other is that no country capable of defending its sovereignty ever surrenders it. If one keeps these axioms in mind one can generally see the relevant facts in international affairs through the smoke-screen with which the newspapers surround them.

  George Orwell

  Country, Games, Two

  George Orwell (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: In front of your nose, 1945-1950”

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• For an act may be wrong judged purely by itself, but when the motive that prompted the act is understood, it is construed differently. I lay it down as an axiom, that only that is criminal in the sight of God where crime is meditated.

  Elizabeth Keckley

  Sight, Criminals, May

  Elizabeth Keckley (2016). “Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House”, p.11, Enhanced Media Publishing

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• The old and oft-repeated proposition "Totum est majus sua parte" [the whole is larger than the part] may be applied without proof only in the case of entities that are based upon whole and part; then and only then is it an undeniable consequence of the concepts "totum" and "pars". Unfortunately, however, this "axiom" is used innumerably often without any basis and in neglect of the necessary distinction between "reality" and "quantity", on the one hand, and "number" and "set", on the other, precisely in the sense in which it is generally false.

  Georg Cantor

  Reality, Hands, Numbers

  "Cantor's Grundlagen and the paradoxes of Set Theory". Paper by William Tait, www.researchgate.net. June 2001.

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• It was an axiom of "containment" that no part of the known world could be considered neutral. "Neutralism" was among the Cold Warriors' gravest curse words, applied with caustic hostility to India and even France. Those who were not with were against, subjected to intense economic and ideological and sometimes military pressure to fall into line.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Military, Fall, Warrior

  Christopher Hitchens (2014). “For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports”, p.166, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that :;:;:;:;:;:; We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Way, Social, Analysts

  Jacob Bronowski (1965). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong. However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man's perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency; that man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Motivation, Fall, Men

  "Who Is Man?". Book by Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1965.

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• Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Hatred, Commencement, Bourgeois

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• Talk can neither be verified nor falsified in any rigorous sense. This is an open secret which hermeneutics and aesthetics, from Aristotle to Croce, have laboured to exorcise or to conceal from themselves and their clients. This ontological, which is to say both primordial and essential axiom (or platitude) of ineradicable undecidability needs, none the less, to be closely argued.

  George Steiner

  Secret, Essentials, Needs

  "Real Presences". Book by George Steiner, 1986.

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• the old axiom that 'all power corrupts' has doubtful validity, because it derives from our neglect of Plato's advice to find men carefully and train them by methods which make them fit for heroes.

  Oswald Mosley

  Plato, Hero, Men

  "Rules of the Game/Beyond the Pale". Book by Nicholas Mosley, 1982.

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• For somebody who's never run for office before, Donald Trump understands that old axiom, "Define yourself before you're defined."

  Kellyanne Conway

  Running, Office, Trump

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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