Propositions Quotes - Page 12

• I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Writing, Intelligent, Two

  Interview with Brian Lamb, Booknotes C-SPAN, November 13, 1994.

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• Wisdom and understanding are synonymous words; they consist of two propositions, which are not distinct in sense, but one and the same thing variously expressed.

  John Tillotson

  Wisdom, Two, Understanding

  John Tillotson (1819). “The wisdom of being religious”, p.2

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• To fear the examination of any proposition apears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever.

  George Eliot

  Fear, Intellectual, Examination

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.6448, Delphi Classics

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• I never thought I was doing anyone a favour by bringing children into the world. With people as cruel to each other as they are, it's a terrible proposition. The best of lives are sad and tragic. The best of them. My general conclusion is that it's not a nice thing to do. The world doesn't need it. The kid doesn't need it.

  Woody Allen

  Children, Nice, Kids

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• The graphic emphasis placed on those first lines is rather hard to square with the proposition that the monument expresses no particular religious preference.

  John Paul Stevens

  Religious, Squares, Atheism

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• A willingness to engage in the give and take of argument displays a commitment to cognitive egalitarianism - the proposition that all people should be treated as intellectual equals, and that no individual can legitimately claim a privileged immunity from the burden of proof.

  George H. Smith

  Commitment, Burden Of Proof, Egalitarianism

  George H. Smith (2000). “Why Atheism?”, Pyr Books

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• As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital.

  Katha Pollitt

  Christian, Country, Teaching

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• It is almost always the unhappiness of a victorious disputant to destroy his own authority by claiming too many consequences, or diffusing his proposition to an indefensible extent.

  Samuel Johnson

  Unhappiness, Authority, Controversy

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”, p.115

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• Our opposition will never understand the Democratic Party. Our Party is--to the unpracticed eyes of the old Republican Tories--a mysterious contraption that usually seems to be moving in a thousand directions. What they don't know is what hurts them. For all that movement in the Democratic Party is caused by the internal combustion of creative ferment, of ideas, of people vigorously committed to the proposition that change and social progress are not only to be desired; they are necessities of twentieth-century America.

  Hubert H. Humphrey

  Hurt, Moving, Party

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• I am a political recidivist. An incorrigible, repeat voter. A career lever-pusher. My electoral rap sheet is as long as your arm. Over the course of three decades, I have voted for presidents and school board members. I have voted in high hopes and high dudgeon. I have voted in favor of candidates and merely against their opponents. I have voted for propositions written with such complexity that I needed Noam Chomsky to deconstruct their meaning. I have been a single-issue voter and a marginal voter. I have even voted for people who ran unopposed. Hold an election and I'll be there.

  Ellen Goodman

  Rap, School, Careers

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• It is frequently said that speech that is intentionally provocative and therefore invites physical retaliation can be punished or suppressed. Yet, plainly no such general proposition can be sustained. Quite the contrary.... The provocative nature of the communication does not make it any the less expression. Indeed, the whole theory of free expression contemplates that expression will in many circumstances be provocative and arouse hostility. The audience, just as the speaker, has an obligation to maintain physical restraint.

  Thomas I. Emerson

  Integrity, Communication, Responsibility

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• If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.

  Elizabeth Janeway

  Country, Past, History

  Elizabeth Janeway (1987). “Improper behavior”, William Morrow

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• Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.

  Karen Armstrong

  Religion, Twenties, Breakfast

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• There are ... other business societies - England, Holland, Belgium and France, for instance. But ours [the United States] is the only culture now extant in which business so completely dominates the national scene that sports, crime, sex, death, philanthropy and Easter Sunday are money-making propositions.

  Margaret Halsey

  Sports, Easter, Sex

  Margaret Halsey (1952). “The Folks at Home”

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• I have never had much trouble simultaneously entertaining diametrically opposed propositions, and welcome the possibility that this is not because I have one mind and am out of it, but because I have lots of them, all beavering away on their own.

  Alice Thomas Ellis

  Mind, Welcome, Trouble

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• It is not true that a man can believe or disbelieve what he will. But it is certain that an active desire to find any proposition true will unconsciously tend to that result by dismissing importunate suggestions which run counter to the belief, and welcoming those which favor it. The psychological law, that we only see what interests us, and only assimilate what is adapted to our condition, causes the mind to select its evidence.

  George Henry Lewes

  Running, Believe, Men

  George Henry Lewes (1874). “Problems of Life and Mind”, p.429

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• Marriage isn't a 50-50 proposition very often. It's more like 100-0 one moment and 0-100 the next.

  Billie Jean King

  Marriage, Next, Moments

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• It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions.

  Thomas Huxley

  Believe, Men, Atheism

  Thomas Henry Huxley (2012). “Lectures and Essays”, p.247, tredition

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• If it is to be established that there is a God, then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so. Until and unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing; and in that situation the only reasonable posture must be that of either the negative atheist or the agnostic. So the onus of proof has to rest on the proposition of theism.

  Antony Flew

  Atheist, Believe, Atheism

  Antony Flew, John Shosky (1998). “Philosophical Essays”, p.6, Rowman & Littlefield

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• I think there is a potential civic culture in Arab countries that can lead to democratic institutions and I think Iraq is probably the best place to put that proposition to the test Well, you're going to find a disproportionate number of Jews in any sort of intellectual undertaking.

  Richard Perle

  Country, Thinking, Iraq

  "Richard Perle: The Making of a Neoconservative". "Think Tank" with Ben Wattenberg, www.pbs.org. November 14, 2002.

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• The proposition of Mr. Ricardo, which states that a rise in the price of labour lowers the price of a large class of commodities, has undoubtedly a very paradoxical air; but it is, nevertheless, true, and the appearance of paradox would vanish, if it were stated more naturally and correctly.

  Thomas Malthus

  Class, Air, Appearance

  Thomas Robert Malthus (1836). “Principles of Political Economy: Considered with a View to Their Practical Application”, p.88

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• I was trying to show colour, but I realized at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all these surfaces of different colours, they responded far more to the inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the elements of a decorative polychromy.

  Yves Klein

  Views, Trying, Different

  "Yves Klein, 1928-1962". Book by Yves Klein, p. 30, 1974.

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• All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.

  Anne Carson

  Mean, Two, Patterns

  Anne Carson (2009). “The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos”, p.31, Vintage

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• If one denies that, when the meaning is true, then the meant is what is so, one rejects propositional truth. If the rejection is universal, then it is the self-destructive proposition that there are no true propositions. If the rejection is limited to the dogmas, then it is just a roundabout way of saying that all the dogmas are false.

  Bernard Lonergan

  Self, Rejection, Way

  Bernard Lonergan (2016). “A Second Collection”, p.16, University of Toronto Press

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• History is filled with examples of men and women who rendered highly effective performance without the conventional badges of accomplishment in terms of certificates, diplomas, or degrees. Diplomas and tests are useful servants, but Congress has mandated the commonsense proposition that they are not to become masters of reality.

  Warren E. Burger

  Reality, Men, Degrees

  Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424, (432), 1971.

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