Sophistry Quotes

• Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.

  John Adams

  Party, Government, Unnecessary War

  John Adams (2016). “John Adams: Writings from the New Nation, 1784-1826”, p.814, Library of America

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• The juggle of sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Conclusion, Premises

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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

  Argument, Appearance, True Ones

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

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• Young men, terminate, I beseech you, in your own experience, the sad divorce which has too often existed between intellect and piety. Take your stand, unswerving, heroic, by the altar of truth; and from that altar let neither sophistry nor ridicule expel you. Let your faith rest with a child's trust, with a martyr's grip, upon the truth as it is in Jesus.

  William Morley Punshon

  Jesus, Children, Divorce

  William Morley Punshon (1857). “John Bunyan, a lecture”, p.24

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• Sophistry is the fallacy of argument.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Argument, Fallacy

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• If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

  David Hume

  School, Math, Numbers

  An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding sec. 12, pt. 3 (1748)

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• As creeping ivy clings to wood or stone, And hides the ruin that it feeds upon, So sophistry, cleaves close to, and protects Sin's rotten trunk, concealing its defects.

  William Cowper

  Ivy, Rotten, Stones

  'The Progress of Error' (1782) l. 285

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• Truth is strong enough to overcome all human sophistries.

  Aeschines

  Strong, Overcoming, Truth Is

  "Against Timarchus". Speech by Aeschines, 84 (107), c. 346 BC.

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• Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.

  Jacques Barzun

  Funny, Humor, Literature

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• It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot. Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly - I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads - The allotment of death.

  Ted Hughes

  Feet, Body, Creation

  'Hawk Roosting' (1960)

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• The American elite is almost beyond redemption. . . . Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush--sophistry washed down with Chardonnay. The ordinary citizens, thank goodness, still adhere to absolutes.... It is they who have saved the republic from creeping degradation while their 'betters' were derelict.

  Charles Dickens

  Class, Ordinary, Citizens

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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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• Men of great conversational powers almost universally practise a sort of lively sophistry and exaggeration which deceives for the moment both themselves and their auditors.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Men, Auditors, Deceiving

  "Essay, On the Athenian Orators" as quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations, p. 137, 1922.

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• Love supreme defies all sophistry.

  George Eliot

  Love, Supreme

  GEORGE ELIOT (1868). “THE SPANISH GYPSY”, p.213

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• We find sects and parties in most branches of science; and disputes which are carried on from age to age, without being brought to an issue. Sophistry has been more effectually excluded from mathematics and natural philosophy than from other sciences. In mathematics it had no place from the beginning; mathematicians having had the wisdom to define accurately the terms they use, and to lay down, as axioms, the first principles on which their reasoning is grounded. Accordingly, we find no parties among mathematicians, and hardly any disputes.

  Thomas Reid

  Philosophy, Party, Issues

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• There must be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible.

  Harriet Ann Jacobs

  Practice, Principles, Facts

  Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861). “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, p.85

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• No sophistry, no jugglery in figures can explain away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Eye, Skeletons, Naked

  Mahatma Gandhi (2005). “All Men Are Brothers”, p.122, A&C Black

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• Education without social action is a one-sided value because it has no true power potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy. Deeds uninformed by educated thought can take false directions. When we go into action and confront our adversaries, we must be as armed with knowledge as they. Our policies should have the strength of deep analysis beneath them to be able to challenge the clever sophistries of our opponents.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Clever, True Power, Expression

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• Religion is a thing to be lived. It is not merely sophistry.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Religion

  Surendra Varmā, Mahatma Gandhi (1970). “Metaphysical Foundation of Mahatma Gandhi's Thought”

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• Every work of art reaches man in his inner powers. It reaches him more profoundly and insidiously than any rational proposition, either cogent demonstration or sophistry. For it strikes him with two terrible weapons, Intuition and Beauty, and at the single root in him of all his energies... Art and Poetry awaken the dreams of man, and his longings, and reveal to him some of the abysses he has in himself.

  Jacques Maritain

  Dream, Art, Men

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• One of the great sophistries of our age, I think, is that merely because one has an inclination to do something, that therefore acting in accordance with that inclination is inevitable. That's contrary to our very nature as the Lord has revealed to us. We do have the power to control our behavior.

  Lance B. Wickman

  Thinking, Age, Acting

  Source: www.mormonnewsroom.org

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• Fire destroys all sophistry, that is deceit; and maintains truth alone, that is gold.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Fire, Gold, Deceit

  Leonardo Da Vinci, General Press (2016). “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci”, p.250, GENERAL PRESS

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• It is Satan's constant effort to misrepresent the character of God, the nature of sin, and the real issues at stake in the great controversy. His sophistry lessens the obligation of the divine law and gives men license to sin.

  Ellen G. White

  Hate, Real, Character

  "The Great Controversy".

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• So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people" or, if you like, "a clash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice.

  Arundhati Roy

  People, Justice, Damage

  "The algebra of infinite justice" by Arundhati Roy, www.theguardian.com. September 29, 2001.

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• There is no error which hath not some appearance of probability resembling truth, which, when men who study to be singular find out, straining reason, they then publish to the world matter of contention and jangling.

  Walter Raleigh

  Men, Errors, Matter

  Sir Walter Raleigh (1829). “The history of the world”, p.112

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