A.J. Ayer Quotes

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• We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.

  A.J. Ayer

  Ifs And, Significant, Given

  'Language, Truth, and Logic' (2nd ed., 1946) p. 35

  48 Copy quote

• No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.

  A.J. Ayer

  Ethics, Morality, Divine

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• But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.

  A.J. Ayer

  Philosophy, May, Blind

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• If 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that 'God exists' is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance.

  A.J. Ayer

  Religion, Atheism, True Or False

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• The only possible basis for a sound morality is mutual tolerance and respect: tolerance of one another’s customs and opinions; respect for one another’s rights and feelings; awareness of one another’s needs.

  A.J. Ayer

  Rights, Tolerance, Feelings

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• I do not believe in God. It seems to me that theists of all kinds have very largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible; and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it.

  A.J. Ayer

  Atheist, Believe, Thinking

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• Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?

  A.J. Ayer

  Mind, Should, Shows

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• It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

  A.J. Ayer

  Effort, Insightful, Trying

  In Observer 17 Aug. 1986

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• Even logical positivists are capable of love.

  A.J. Ayer

  Logical, Capable

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• The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge...Unless he can formulate this 'knowledge' in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself.

  A.J. Ayer

  Religious, Views, People

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• No moral system can rest solely on authority.

  A.J. Ayer

  Insightful, Morality, Authority

  Humanist Outlook (1968) introduction

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• The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.

  A.J. Ayer

  Ignorance, People, Choices

  "The Meaning of Life and Other Essays" by A.J. Ayer, ("The Concept of Freedom"), 1990.

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• It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.

  A.J. Ayer

  Branches, Ethics, Sociology

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• I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.

  A.J. Ayer

  Book, Saws, Opinion

  "Did atheist philosopher see God when he 'died'?". National Post, March 3, 2001.

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• Theism is so confused and the sentences in which "God" appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.

  A.J. Ayer

  Confused, Atheism, Impossible

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• If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.

  A.J. Ayer

  Atheist, Atheism, Nonsensical

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• The misfortunes which God is represented in the book of Job as allowing Satan to inflict on Job, merely to test his faith, are indications, if not of positive malevolence, at least of a suspicious and ruthless insecurity, which is characteristic more of a tyrant than of a wholly powerful and benevolent deity.

  A.J. Ayer

  God, Religious, Jobs

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• If one takes full account of the persecution of heretics, the frequency and savagery of the religious wars which Christianity had endangered, the harm caused, especially to children, by the pernicious doctrine of original sin, a case could be made for saying that the world would have been better off without Christianity.

  A.J. Ayer

  Religious, Children, War

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• A prevalent fallacy is the assumption that a proof of an afterlife would also be a proof of the existence of a deity. This is far from being the case. If, as I hold, there is no good reason to believe that a god either created or presides over this world, there is equally no good reason to believe that a god created or presides over the next world, on the unlikely supposition that such a thing exists.

  A.J. Ayer

  Believe, Afterlife, World

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• While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

  A.J. Ayer

  May, Facts, Moral

  "The Meaning of Life and Other Essays" by A.J. Ayer, ("The Meaning of Life"), 1990.

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• The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.

  A.J. Ayer

  Philosophical, Philosopher, Disputes

  "Language, Truth, and Logic" by A.J. Ayer, (Ch. 1), 1936.

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• There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.

  A.J. Ayer

  Rivals, Tests, Claims

  "Philosophy in the Twentieth Century" by A.J. Ayer, (p. 133), 1982.

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• To make our position clearer, we may formulate it in another way. Let us call a proposition which records an actual or possible observation an experiential proposition. Then we may say that it is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premises alone.

  A.J. Ayer

  Numbers, Finite Number, May

  "Language, Truth, and Logic" by A.J. Ayer, (p. 20), 1936.

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• It is possible to be a meta-physician without believing in a transcendent reality; for we shall see that many metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire on the part of their authors to go beyond the limits of experience.

  A.J. Ayer

  Believe, Reality, Errors

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• It is time, therefore, to abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction. The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future.

  A.J. Ayer

  Past, Superstitions, Way

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