Fallacy Quotes - Page 7

• Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.

  William A. Dembski

  Ignorance, Serendipity, Use

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• The question of naturalism is a fallacy, it does not exist... The photographic image replaces naturalistic experience.

  Sid Grossman

  Doe, Naturalism

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• Unquestionably the truth or fallacy of the theory of the survival of the soul is by far the most tremendous question that can exercise the human mind. The more you think of it, the more all other questions seem to sink into utter insignificance, for only if survival be true, can the Universe be rationalized at all.

  Ernest MacBride

  Exercise, Thinking, Soul

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• One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true - they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, "You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love." They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

  John Fowles

  Love, Time, Couple

  John Fowles (1968). “The Magus”, Pan

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• It is a fearful mistake for us to neglect the study of the Bible to investigate theories that are misleading, diverting minds from the words of Christ to fallacies of human production.

  Ellen G. White

  Mistake, Mind, Study

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• The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Technology, Guy, Noise

  "Nassim Taleb: 'Big corporations will always fail'". Interview With Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. June 19, 2010.

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• It's a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done.

  Jodi Picoult

  Writing, Ivory Tower, Three

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• Obamacare is collapsing. It's dead. It's gone. There's nothing to compare anything to because we don't have health care in this country. You just look at what's happening. Aetna just pulled out. Other insurance companies are pulling out. We don't have health care. Obamacare is a fallacy. It's gone.

  Donald Trump

  Country, Care, Compare

  Remarks by President Trump and President Santos of Colombia in Joint Press Conference, www.whitehouse.gov. May 18, 2017.

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• What does one have to do today to reconcile France? Distribute public money - that's what some expect, especially the radical left. They think that you help people by handing them money. But that is a fallacy because it is not me distributing the money, but rather future generations.

  Emmanuel Macron

  Thinking, People, Today

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• I think it's a total fallacy for people to say, "You couldn't make those old movies today." I think there's more ways to get a movie made today than ever in the history of the entertainment industry. It's a very exciting time to work in movies, if you're a creative person looking to make a very personal, weird vision.

  Edward Norton

  Thinking, People, Creative

  Source: film.avclub.com

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• The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.

  Daniel Kahneman

  Outcomes, Planning, Assuming

  "The Truth About How We Think". Interview with Jennifer Robison, www.gallup.com. March 20, 2012.

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• For me with art and all that stuff - I like abstraction. I like contortion. I mean, it's still truth. But it's truth through the center of the individual. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's fallacies or falsehoods. It just happens to be one perception of what's happening.

  Q-Tip

  Art, Mean, Stuff I Like

  Interview with Paul D. Miller, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!

  Thomas Merton

  Life, Wisdom, Real

  Thomas Merton (1998). “The Seven Storey Mountain”, p.387, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalize the free play of ideas.

  H. L. Mencken

  Play, Ideas, Democracy

  In Defense of Women, rev. ed., introduction (1922)

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• If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Education, Time, Evil

  Whitney v. California (concurring opinion) (1927) See OliverWendell Holmes, Jr. 29

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• The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Mother, Children, Believe

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• One of the overriding points of Liberal Fascism is that all of the totalitarian "isms" of the left commit the fallacy of the category error. They all want the state to be something it cannot be. They passionately believe the government can love you, that the state can be your God or your church or your tribe or your parent or your village or all of these things at once. Conservatives occasionally make this mistake, libertarians never do, liberals almost always do.

  Jonah Goldberg

  Mistake, Believe, Love You

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• It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.

  H. L. Mencken

  Running, Classic, Moron

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• The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true.

  Richard Flanagan

  Grief, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We have a cultural notion that if children were not engineered, if we did not manipulate them, they would grow up as beasts in the field. This is the wildest fallacy in the world.

  Joseph Chilton Pearce

  Children, Growing Up, Learning

  Joseph Chilton Pearce (1980). “Magical child: rediscovering nature's plan for our children”

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• Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine - the special pleading of selfish interests.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Selfish, Men, Medicine

  Henry Hazlitt (2010). “Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics”, p.11, Crown Business

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• The General Theory was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.

  Murray Rothbard

  Jargon, Revolutionary, Theory

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• You're never in control. That - that is the greatest fallacy of the - you know, there's over 200 people that it requires to make a film. And there's people who are in control of how you look, what your performance is, what takes are used, what - you're only in control of how you say no.

  Sandra Bullock

  People, Looks, Film

  "Sandra Bullock: Just Really Happy To Be Nominated". "Morning Edition" with Linda Wertheimer, www.npr.org. February 19, 2010.

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• It is a fallacy of the old schools to divide man into parcels, elements, thoughts, emotions, intuitions, etc.  All human faculties consist of an interconnected whole.

  Alfred Korzybski

  Old School, Men, Intuition

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• There is an old song which asserts 'the best things in life are free.' Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted...and get it without toil, without sweat, without tears. Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Song, Pain, Believe

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Starship Troopers”, p.76, Penguin

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