Fallacy Quotes - Page 2

• All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.

  John Ruskin

  Fake People, Judging, Feelings

  John Ruskin (2013). “Selections and Essays”, p.117, Courier Corporation

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• The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.

  Timothy Dwight V

  Happy Birthday, Happiness, Insperational

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• The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Simple, Men, Expression

  "The Everlasting Man". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton (Part I: On the Creature Called Man, Chapter VII: The War of the Gods and Demons), 1925.

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• There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.

  Irving Kristol

  Children, People, Adults

  "Origin of the Specious" by Ronald Bailey, reason.com. July 1997.

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• A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy, yet there are very fine minds incapable of following mathematical demonstrations.

  Henri Poincare

  Mind, Guilty, Logical

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• We are easily deceived about government because we are inclined to accept the following fallacies: (a) Anything legal is also moral. (b) We are not individually responsible for government action. (c) A different moral law applies to men in concert than it does when they act alone.

  H. Verlan Andersen

  Men, Law, Doe

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• For they (capitalists) hold as their chief heresy, in a coarser form, the fundamental falsehood that things are not made to be used but made to be sold. All the collapse of their commercial system in their own time has been due to that fallacy of forcing things on a market where there was no market; of continually increasing the power of supply without increasing the power of demand; of briefly, of always considering the man who sells the potato and never considering the man who eats it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Demand, Potatoes

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• I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context.

  John Dewey

  Thinking, Venture, Neglect

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, Sidney Ratner (2008). “The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925 - 1953: 1931-1932, Essays, Reviews, and Miscellany”, p.5, SIU Press

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• The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn't work.

  Harold Washington

  Action, Affirmative, Thirds

  Harold Washington, Alton Miller (1988). “Climbing a Great Mountain: Selected Speeches of Mayor Harold Washington”

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• See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.

  Wole Soyinka

  Strong, Men, World

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• The moment-of-conception fallacy implies that fertilization is a simple process with never a doubt as to whether it has or has not happened.

  George C. Williams

  Simple, Doubt, Moments

  George C. Williams (2014). “The Pony Fish's Glow: And Other Clues To Plan And Purpose In Nature”, p.159, Basic Books

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• A smattering of everything is worth little. It is a fallacy to suppose that an encyclopaedic knowledge is desirable. The mind is made strong, not through much learning, but by the thorough possession of something.

  Louis Agassiz

  Strong, Learning, Knowledge

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• The supposed astronomical proofs of the theory [of relativity], as cited and claimed by Einstein, do not exist. He is a confusionist. The Einstein theory is a fallacy. The theory that ether does not exist, and that gravity is not a force but a property of space can only be described as a crazy vagary, a disgrace to our age.

  Charles Lane Poor

  Crazy, Science, Space

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• The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public . . . Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.

  William Osler

  Book, Thinking, Dragons

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• There is nothing in England that exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination than the lingerings of the holiday customs and rural games of former times. They recall the pictures my fancy used to draw in the May morning of life, when as yet I only knew the world through books, and believed it to be all that poets had painted it; and they bring with them the flavour of those honest days of yore, in which, perhaps with equal fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more home-bred, social, and joyous than at present.

  Washington Irving

  Morning, Book, Home

  Washington Irving (1843). “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Esq. (Wasington Irving)”, p.172

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• We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It's very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy - where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system. That's clearly not the case when it comes to social systems.

  Nicholas A. Christakis

  Thinking, Order, Humanity

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• The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

  Milton Friedman

  Party, Believe, Simple

  Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman (1990). “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement”, p.31, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When a false argument puts on the appearance of a true one, then it is properly called a sophism or fallacy.

  Isaac Watts

  Sophistry, Argument, Appearance

  Isaac Watts (1813). “The Works of the Rev. Isaac Watts D.D. in Nine Volumes”, p.495

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• Logic invents as many fallacies as it detects; it is a good weapon, but as liable to be used in a bad as in a good cause.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Weapons, Causes, Logic

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• No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Life, Wise, Wisdom

  Ernest Hemingway (2014). “Farewell to Arms: The Hemingway Library Edition”, p.258, Simon and Schuster

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• Thus, cases of injustice, and oppression, and tyranny, and the most extravagant bigotry, are in constant occurrence among us every day. It is the custom to trumpet forth much wonder and astonishment at the chief actors therein setting at defiance so completely the opinion of the world; but there is no greater fallacy; it is precisely because they do consult the opinion of their own little world that such things take place at all, and strike the great world dumb with amazement.

  Charles Dickens

  Dumb, Words Of Wisdom, Injustice And Oppression

  Charles Dickens (2006). “Nicholas Nickleby: Easyread Edition”, p.2, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds; it is a fallacy that must be exposed: War is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst.

  Carl von Clausewitz

  Art, Kindness, War

  Carl von Clausewitz, Michael Howard, Peter Paret (1989). “On War”, p.75, Princeton University Press

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• The mind is seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the dread of pain. We do not disturb ourselves with the detection of fallacies which do us no harm.

  Samuel Johnson

  Pain, Mind, Harm

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1837). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq”, p.373

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• The terrible, tragic fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man's troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell.

  Martyn Lloyd-Jones

  Change, Men, Thinking

  David Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1959). “Studies in the Sermon on the Mount”

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• People exaggerate their confidence in their plans - something we call the planning fallacy... The existence of the plan tends to induce overconfidence.

  Daniel Kahneman

  Confidence, People, Planning

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