Axioms Quotes - Page 6

• We do everything by custom, even believe by it; our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Believe, Thinking, May

  Thomas Carlyle (1864). “Sartor Resartus”, p.158

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• Be guided by the axiom: There are no limits to the ability to contribute on the part of a properly selected, well-trained, appropriately supported, and, above all, committed person.

  Tom Peters

  Limits, Ability, Committed

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• School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

  Ivan Illich

  Education, Teaching, School

  Ivan Illich (1970). “The Dawn of Epimethean Man, and Other Essays”

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• There are two principles on which all men of intellectual integrity and good will can agree, as a 'basic minimum,' as a precondition of any discussion, co-operation or movement toward an intellectual Renaissance. . . . They are not axioms, but until a man has proved them to himself and has accepted them, he is not fit for an intellectual discussion. These two principles are: a. that emotions are not tools of cognition; b. that no man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others.

  Ayn Rand

  Integrity, Men, Two

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• Axiom : Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.

  E. M. Forster

  Character, Perfect, Patterns

  E. M. Forster (1987). “Commonplace Book”, p.6, Stanford University Press

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• What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. And I would vary Yeats's axiom so as to say: no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose "nerve and blood" are at peace in sceptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if.

  George Steiner

  Home, Creativity, Men

  George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.264, Faber & Faber

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• Talk can neither be verified nor falsified in any rigorous sense. This is an open secret which hermeneutics and aesthetics, from Aristotle to Croce, have laboured to exorcise or to conceal from themselves and their clients. This ontological, which is to say both primordial and essential axiom (or platitude) of ineradicable undecidability needs, none the less, to be closely argued.

  George Steiner

  Secret, Essentials, Needs

  "Real Presences". Book by George Steiner, 1986.

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• Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Hatred, Commencement, Bourgeois

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• Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong. However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man's perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency; that man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Motivation, Fall, Men

  "Who Is Man?". Book by Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1965.

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• There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that :;:;:;:;:;:; We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Way, Social, Analysts

  Jacob Bronowski (1965). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• It was an axiom of "containment" that no part of the known world could be considered neutral. "Neutralism" was among the Cold Warriors' gravest curse words, applied with caustic hostility to India and even France. Those who were not with were against, subjected to intense economic and ideological and sometimes military pressure to fall into line.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Military, Fall, Warrior

  Christopher Hitchens (2014). “For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports”, p.166, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• The old and oft-repeated proposition "Totum est majus sua parte" [the whole is larger than the part] may be applied without proof only in the case of entities that are based upon whole and part; then and only then is it an undeniable consequence of the concepts "totum" and "pars". Unfortunately, however, this "axiom" is used innumerably often without any basis and in neglect of the necessary distinction between "reality" and "quantity", on the one hand, and "number" and "set", on the other, precisely in the sense in which it is generally false.

  Georg Cantor

  Reality, Hands, Numbers

  "Cantor's Grundlagen and the paradoxes of Set Theory". Paper by William Tait, www.researchgate.net. June 2001.

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• the old axiom that 'all power corrupts' has doubtful validity, because it derives from our neglect of Plato's advice to find men carefully and train them by methods which make them fit for heroes.

  Oswald Mosley

  Plato, Hero, Men

  "Rules of the Game/Beyond the Pale". Book by Nicholas Mosley, 1982.

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• While the game of deadlocks and bottle-necks goes on, another more serious game is also being played. It is governed by two axioms. One is that there can be no peace without a general surrender of sovereignty: the other is that no country capable of defending its sovereignty ever surrenders it. If one keeps these axioms in mind one can generally see the relevant facts in international affairs through the smoke-screen with which the newspapers surround them.

  George Orwell

  Country, Games, Two

  George Orwell (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: In front of your nose, 1945-1950”

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• For an act may be wrong judged purely by itself, but when the motive that prompted the act is understood, it is construed differently. I lay it down as an axiom, that only that is criminal in the sight of God where crime is meditated.

  Elizabeth Keckley

  Sight, Criminals, May

  Elizabeth Keckley (2016). “Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House”, p.11, Enhanced Media Publishing

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• What government supports, government controls. This is an ancient axiom repeatedly ratified by experience. . . . Indeed, as is well known, acceptance of tax aid has led to the secularization of many church-related colleges and universities.

  Edd Doerr

  Acceptance, College, Government

  Edd Doerr, Albert J. Menendez (1991). “Church schools & public money: the politics of parochiaid”

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• There is a just Latin axiom, that he who seeks a reason for everything subverts reason.

  Epes Sargent

  Latin, Reason, Reason For Everything

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• It's an old axiom of mine: marry your enemies and behead your friends.

  Robert N. Lee

  Friends, Enemy, Mines

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• It is an axiom nowadays that no bank fails for lack of capital; unprofitable lending is always the underlying cause.

  James Grant

  Banking, Causes, Failing

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• Those reliable axioms about the taste and expectations of the mass movie audience are not so much laws of nature as artifacts of corporate strategy. And the lessons derived from them conveniently serve to strengthen a status quo that increasingly marginalizes risk, originality and intelligence.

  A. O. Scott

  Law, Expectations, Risk

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• The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind,' puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.

  Julius Evola

  Thinking, Mind, Kind

  "American 'Civilization'". Essay by Julius Evola (1945), published in his posthumous anthology "Civiltà americana. Scritti sugli Stati Uniti (1930–1968)", 2010.

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• The first axiom of the family vacation is that someone, possibly everyone, will get sick.

  Marni Jackson

  Family, Vacation, Sick

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• The basis of almost every argument or conclusion I can make is the axiom that the short story can be anything the author decides it shall be;...In that infinite flexibility, indeed lies the reason why the short story has never been adequately defined.

  H. E. Bates

  Lying, Reason Why, Stories

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• As soon as science has emerged from its initial stages, theoretical advances are no longer achieved merely by a process of arrangement. Guided by empirical data, the investigator rather develops a system of thought which, in general, is built up logically from a small number of fundamental assumptions, the so-called axioms. We call such a system of thought a theory. The theory finds the justification for its existence in the fact that it correlates a large number of single observations, and it is just here that the 'truth' of the theory lies.

  Albert Einstein

  Lying, Data, Numbers

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• The opinions that the price of commodities depends solely on the proportion of supply and demand, or demand to supply, has become almost an axiom in political economy, and has been the source of much error in that science.

  David Ricardo

  Errors, Political, Demand

  David Ricardo, John Ramsay McCulloch (1852). “The Works of David Ricardo. With a notice of the life and writings of the author: by J. R. McCulloch”, p.232

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