Fallacy Quotes - Page 5

• Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective.

  Craig Venter

  Information, Medical, Privacy

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• [No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Numbers, Political, Pay

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• By committing the scientific method to religious claims you're committing a logical fallacy

  Francis Collins

  Religious, Scientific Method, Logical

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• Life may be miraculous in its unlikelihood in the universe, but it would be a fallacy to suggest that its rareness makes it inextinguishable.

  John Hodgman

  May, Would Be, Miraculous

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• The more time, toil, and sacrifice spent by a population in producing medicine as a commodity, the larger will be the by-product, namely, the fallacy that society has a supply of health locked away which can be mined and marketed.

  Ivan Illich

  Sacrifice, Medicine, Toil

  Ivan Illich (1982). “Medical nemesis: the expropriation of health”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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• It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Overnight success is a fallacy. It is preceded by a great deal of preparation. Ask any successful person how they came to this point in their lives, and they will have a story to tell.

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational Life, Successful, Preparation

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• When I saw the sun bears at the Oakland Zoo, I immediately was drawn to them. Not to be ornery, but regarding what you said about the speaker identifying with the bear: I'm not sure it's exactly right to say that the speaker feels that the bear must share his sadness, or whatever else he is feeling. That would be classic pathetic fallacy, which is certainly generative for poetry, but here the speaker appears actually to be rejecting that idea.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Zoos, Sadness, Oakland

  Source: therumpus.net

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• One thing has not changed: to doubt the worth of minority students' achievement when they succeed is really only to present another face of the prejudice that would deny them a chance to even try. It is the same prejudice that insists all those destined for success must be cast from the same mold as those who have succeeded before them, a view that experience has already proven a fallacy.

  Sonia Sotomayor

  Views, Achievement, Doubt

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• It may seem to your conceited to suppose that you can do anything important toward improving the lot of mankind. But this is a fallacy. You must believe that you can help bring about a better world. A good society is produced only by good individuals, just as truly as a majority in a presidential election is produced by the votes of single electors. Everybody can do something toward creating in his own environment kindly feelings rather than anger, reasonableness rather than hysteria, happiness rather than misery.

  Bertrand Russell

  Believe, Conceited, Hysteria

  Bertrand Russell, John Greer Slater, Peter Köllner (1996). “A Fresh Look at Empiricism: 1927-42”, p.642, Psychology Press

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• I don't think that those things [so called common practice] ever truly existed in the way that we like to believe that they do, the way we learn about them in music history class. Those things are defined at least decades after they happen. And even then, it's a fallacy because when you're in the moment, when you're in a thriving scene of musicians, inevitably everyone is going to be doing something completely different from everyone else

  Missy Mazzoli

  Believe, Thinking, Practice

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Before he (Francis Bacon) came along, people conducted all their arguments through a series of logical fallacies or simply shouting louder than the other guy, or, if they did use facts, they only selected ones that reinforced their prejudices and advanced their ideas.” Oberon replies “don’t they still do that?

  Kevin Hearne

  Ideas, People, Guy

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• I think that what I do is a form of pathetic fallacy, the literary trope in which nature is in sympathy with the mood of the story. I connect the physical setting and props in the story to the emotional state of the characters.

  Elizabeth Wein

  Character, Emotional, Thinking

  Source: www.hbook.com

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• Darwin and his successors have railed against the fallacy of confusing the current utility of a trait with the reason the trait evolved. For example, Darwin argued that skull sutures in mammals did not evolve because they facilitate live birth; the sutures were in place well before live birth evolved. Checking the chronological order in which different traits evolved in a lineage is one way to test an adaptive hypothesis; the fact of common ancestry is what makes that checking possible.

  Elliott Sober

  Skulls, Order, Confusing

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I very much believe in the Intentional Fallacy. If Donald Trump lies and dopes and bumbles and staggers his way into peace in the middle east, he gets credit for it. He owns it.

  Gene Weingarten

  Lying, Believe, Dope

  Source: live.washingtonpost.com

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• There is this fallacy about how women are catty, that we're all in competition with each other. I'd say: As opposed to getting swept up in jealousy, use that pang to give you an indication of what you are looking for.

  Alicia Keys

  Giving, Competition, Use

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.

  Freya Stark

  Evil, Tolerance, May

  Freya Stark (2013). “Perseus In The Wind: A Life of Travel”, p.137, Tauris Parke Paperbacks

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• Sophistry, like poison, is at once detected and nauseated, when presented to us in a concentrated form; but a fallacy which, when stated barely in a few sentences, would not deceive a child, may deceive half the world, if diluted in a quarto volume.

  Richard Whately

  Children, Poison, Half

  Richard Whately (1861). “Logic”, p.65

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• It is a fallacy to believe that a Republic of any kind can be won through the shackled Free State. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The Free State is British created and serves British Imperialist interests. It is the buffer erected between British Capitalism and the Irish Republic.

  Liam Mellows

  Believe, Ears, Republic

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• You are not seeking to attain some future state. That is the fallacy of many spiritual seekers. They have an image of some state - enlightenment, or whatever they call it - they want to achieve.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Spiritual, Enlightenment, Want

  Source: rayhemachandra.com

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• Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, "If science can't do something therefore religion can.

  Richard Dawkins

  Mean, Writing, Simple

  "Richard Dawkins at the Sydney Writers' Festival". "Science Show" with Robyn Williams, www.abc.net.au. September 8, 2007.

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• I am a person who recognizes the fallacy of humans.

  George W. Bush

  Humor, Political, Funny Bush

  "George W. Bush, in his own write" by Jaime O'Neill, www.sfgate.com. January 29, 2006.

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• There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically through the ears, as it were, of a skeptic.

  Margaret Oliphant

  Weakness, Ears, Assumption

  Margaret Oliphant (1876). “Phoebe, Junior0: A Last Chronicle of Carlingford : in Two Volumes”, p.40

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• Somehow even a popular fallacy has an aspect of truth when it suits one's own case.

  Margaret Oliphant

  Truth, Suits, Cases

  Margaret Oliphant (2015). “Delphi Works of Margaret Oliphant with Complete Stories of the Seen and Unseen”, p.2308, Delphi Classics

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• Wrong is wrong; no fallacy can hide it, no subterfuge cover it so shrewdly but that the All-Seeing One will discover and punish it.

  Antoine Rivarol

  Subterfuge, Seeing

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• Half the world's troubles come from men not being trained to resent a fallacy as much as an insult.

  Mary Renault

  Truth, Men, Half

  Mary Renault (1964). “The Last of the Wine”

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