Propositions Quotes - Page 4

• Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and comercials.

  Neil Postman

  Ideas, Looks, Arguing

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• Then I will tell you something. I do not believe in it. Forty years among men has consistently taught me that they are not amenable to commonsense. Show them the red tail of a comet, fill them with black terror, and they will all come running out of their houses and break their legs. But tell them one sensible proposition, and support it with seven reasons, and they will simply laugh in your face.

  Bertolt Brecht

  Running, Believe, Men

  "Plays: The Caucasian chalk circle. The threepenny opera. The trial of Lucullus. The life of Galileo".

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• Nature does not teach. A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will help to show what it means.

  C. S. Lewis

  Philosophy, Mean, Doe

  C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.32, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman.

  Angela Carter

  Men, Space, One Time

  Angela Carter (1977). “The Passion of New Eve”, Harcourt

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• Willem, I suspect deep down you know exactly why you're here, exactly what you want, but you're unwilling to the wanting, let alone the having. Because both of those propositions are terrifying.

  Gayle Forman

  Want, Knows, Suspects

  FaceBook post by Gayle Forman from Mar 20, 2014

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• It is fairly clear that many of the arguments against proposition testing are really arguments against propositions themselves.

  Stephen King

  Business, Argument, Clear

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• I think we must attack -- wherever we meet it -- the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true.

  C. S. Lewis

  God, Thinking, Ideas

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “God in the Dock”, p.102, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• Don't be a cynic, and bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. Set down nothing that will help somebody.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Happiness, Beauty, Rejection

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude”, p.157, Harvard University Press

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• It was a needed instrument to spread abroad the truth of a new gospel to woman, and I could not withhold my hand to stay the work I had begun. I saw not the end from the beginning and dreamed where to my propositions to society would lead me.

  Amelia Bloomer

  Hands, History, Saws

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• The essential difference between that knowledge which is, and that which is not conclusive evidence of Christian character, lies in this: the object of the one is the agreement of the several parts of a theological proposition; the object of the other is moral beauty, the intrinsic loveliness of God and Divine things. The sinner sees and hates; the saint sees and loves.

  Gardiner Spring

  Christian, Hate, Lying

  Gardiner Spring (1819). “Essays on the distinguishing traits of Christian character”, p.25

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• Communism is a proposition to structure the world more reasonably, a proposition for changing the world. As such, we have to analyze it and, if we deem it reasonable, act upon it.

  Friedrich Durrenmatt

  Literature, World, Communism

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• The California proposition [Prop. 187] is one I would agree with. That's the easiest way to put it.

  Bob Dole

  California, Immigration, Way

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• The proposition that the meek (that is the adaptable and serviceable), inherit the earth is not merely a wishful sentiment of religion, but an iron law of evolution.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Science, Law, Iron

  KENNETH E. BOULDING (1953). “THE ORGANIZATIONAL REVOLUTION”

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• It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand.

  Carl Sagan

  Atheist, Mean, Religion

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.393, Ballantine Books

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• My faith in the proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own lies at the foundation of the sense of justice there is in me.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Lying, Men, Justice

  Address on the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise, delivered 16 October 1854, Peoria, Illinois

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• Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Humorous, Sarcasm, Science

  The Sign of the Four ch. 1 (1890)

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• Happiness isn't a one-size-fits-all proposition. You must define what it looks like for you and then make a conscious effort to access whatever gets you to your unique definition of joy.

  Phil McGraw

  Inspirational Life, Unique, Effort

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• I have carefully examined the evidences of the Christian religion, and if I was sitting as a juror upon its authenticity I would unhesitatingly give my verdict in its favor. I can prove its truth as clearly as any proposition ever submitted to the mind of man.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Christian, Patriotic, Men

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• Science, in its ultimate ideal, consists of a set of propositions arranged in a hierarchy, the lowest level of the hierarchy being concerned with particular facts, and the highest with some general law, governing everything in the universe. The various levels in the hierarchy have a two-fold logical connection, travelling one up, one down; the upward connection proceeds by induction, the downward by deduction.

  Bertrand Russell

  Science, Law, Two

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Scientific Outlook”, p.38, Routledge

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• Accordingly, we find Euler and D'Alembert devoting their talent and their patience to the establishment of the laws of rotation of the solid bodies. Lagrange has incorporated his own analysis of the problem with his general treatment of mechanics, and since his time M. Poinsôt has brought the subject under the power of a more searching analysis than that of the calculus, in which ideas take the place of symbols, and intelligent propositions supersede equations.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Science, Intelligent, Ideas

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• The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Real, School, Government

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• It is sometimes asserted that a surgical operation is or should be a work of art ... fit to rank with those of the painter or sculptor. ... That proposition does not admit of discussion. It is a product of the intellectual innocence which I think we surgeons may fairly claim to possess, and which is happily not inconsistent with a quite adequate worldly wisdom.

  Wilfred Trotter

  Art, Science, Thinking

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• Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. Genuine ignorance is profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open-mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, can't terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas.

  John Dewey

  Success, Perseverance, Humility

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• By this we may understand, there be two sorts of knowledge, whereof the one is nothing else but sense, or knowledge original (as I have said at the beginning of the second chapter), and remembrance of the same; the other is called science or knowledge of the truth of propositions, and how things are called, and is derived from understanding.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Knowledge, Science, Two

  Thomas Hobbes (1750). “The Moral and Political Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury: Never Before Collected Together : To which is Prefixed, the Author's Life, Extracted from that Said to be Written by Himself, ...”, p.12

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• It is going to be necessary that everything that happens in a finite volume of space and time would have to be analyzable with a finite number of logical operations. The present theory of physics is not that way, apparently. It allows space to go down into infinitesimal distances, wavelengths to get infinitely great, terms to be summed in infinite order, and so forth; and therefore, if this proposition [that physics is computer-simulatable] is right, physical law is wrong.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Distance, Science, Finite Number

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