Fallacy Quotes

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  Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

  Milton Friedman

  Party, Pie, Liberty

  Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman (1990). “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement”, p.31, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy.

  Benito Mussolini

  Beautiful, Democracies Have, Practice

  to Edwin L James of the New York Times, 1928.

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• Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

  Thomas Huxley

  Science, Common Sense, Logic

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1902). “An Introduction to the Study of Zoology, Illustrated by the Crayfish”

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• The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded on fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older.

  William Lyon Phelps

  Life, Thinking, Interesting

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• I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called "scientific" mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Mistake, Ideas, People

  Quoted in Francis Klagsbrun's TheFirst Ms. Reader We are the Crazy Lady and Other Feisty Feminist Fables (p. 67)

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• Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Fashion, Atheist, Catholic

  "The Illustrated London News" Magazine, April 19, 1930.

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• I think it's a fallacy that the harder you practice the better you get.

  Buddy Rich

  Thinking, Practice, Harder

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• It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.

  Steven Pinker

  Men, Illusion, Skepticism

  Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.209, Penguin

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• Before we can study the central issues of life today, we must destroy the prejudices and fallacies born of previous centuries.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Issues, Prejudice, Today

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• Science is simply common sense at its best.

  Thomas Huxley

  Motivational, Math, Science

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1902). “An Introduction to the Study of Zoology, Illustrated by the Crayfish”

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• Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe.

  Clifford Allbutt

  Believe, Science, Errors

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• The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Mistake, Moving, Knowledge

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

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• The idea that a war can be won by standing on the defensive and waiting for the enemy to attack is a dangerous fallacy, which owes its inception to the desire to evade the price of victory.

  Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig

  War, Ideas, Waiting

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• Common sense is science exactly in so far as it fulfills the ideal of common sense; that is, sees facts as they are, or at any rate, without the distortion of prejudice, and reasons from them in accordance with the dictates of sound judgment. And science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

  Thomas Huxley

  Science, Common Sense, Sound

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1920). “An Introduction to the Study of Zoology”, Concept Publishing Company

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• Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.

  Niklaus Wirth

  People, Style, Looks

  "The Awakening of Global Consciousness: A Guide to Self-Realization and Spirituality". Book by Jawara D. King, 2010.

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• All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.

  John Ruskin

  Fake People, Judging, Feelings

  John Ruskin (2013). “Selections and Essays”, p.117, Courier Corporation

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• A smattering of everything is worth little. It is a fallacy to suppose that an encyclopaedic knowledge is desirable. The mind is made strong, not through much learning, but by the thorough possession of something.

  Louis Agassiz

  Strong, Learning, Knowledge

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• A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy, yet there are very fine minds incapable of following mathematical demonstrations.

  Henri Poincare

  Mind, Guilty, Logical

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• The moment-of-conception fallacy implies that fertilization is a simple process with never a doubt as to whether it has or has not happened.

  George C. Williams

  Simple, Doubt, Moments

  George C. Williams (2014). “The Pony Fish's Glow: And Other Clues To Plan And Purpose In Nature”, p.159, Basic Books

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• See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.

  Wole Soyinka

  Strong, Men, World

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• The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn't work.

  Harold Washington

  Action, Affirmative, Thirds

  Harold Washington, Alton Miller (1988). “Climbing a Great Mountain: Selected Speeches of Mayor Harold Washington”

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• The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public . . . Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.

  William Osler

  Book, Thinking, Dragons

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• There is nothing in England that exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination than the lingerings of the holiday customs and rural games of former times. They recall the pictures my fancy used to draw in the May morning of life, when as yet I only knew the world through books, and believed it to be all that poets had painted it; and they bring with them the flavour of those honest days of yore, in which, perhaps with equal fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more home-bred, social, and joyous than at present.

  Washington Irving

  Morning, Book, Home

  Washington Irving (1843). “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Esq. (Wasington Irving)”, p.172

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• We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It's very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy - where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system. That's clearly not the case when it comes to social systems.

  Nicholas A. Christakis

  Thinking, Order, Humanity

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• The supposed astronomical proofs of the theory [of relativity], as cited and claimed by Einstein, do not exist. He is a confusionist. The Einstein theory is a fallacy. The theory that ether does not exist, and that gravity is not a force but a property of space can only be described as a crazy vagary, a disgrace to our age.

  Charles Lane Poor

  Crazy, Science, Space

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