Reasoning Quotes - Page 27

• It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic.

  Thomas Sowell

  Believe, Thinking, People

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• Ideology on which the Kyoto Protocol is based, is a new form of totalitarian ideology, along with Marxism, Communism and socialism. We had doubts about the Kyoto Protocol, we wanted reasoning from our partners in the European Union, in the IPCC. Formal requests had been sent to these organizations. But we have not received responses yet, which suggests that no coherent answers can be offered. What we hear is 'it is not comprehensive responses that matter, we will not give them anyway; what is important is whether you believe us or not'.

  Andrey Illarionov

  Believe, Kyoto Protocol, Organization

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• For the flowers are great blessings. For the Lord made a Nosegay in the meadow with his disciples and preached upon the lily. For the flowers have great virtues for all senses. For the flower glorifies God and the root parries the adversary. For the flowers have their angels even the words of God's creation. For there is a language of flowers. For there is a sound reasoning upon all flowers. For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.

  Christopher Smart

  Flower, Angel, Blessing

  Christopher Smart, “Jubilate Agno: Fragment B, Part 3”

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• I said that he was my superior in observation and deduction. If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an armchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Art, Brother, Book

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, David Stuart Davies (1998). “The Best of Sherlock Holmes”, p.200, Wordsworth Editions

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• To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know.

  George Spencer-Brown

  Reading, Math, Thinking

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• It is rational to choose the right means to your ends to develop very elegant abstract formal theories of rational choice, and then turn these into what look like moral theories. Philosophers tend to be ravished by the formal beauty of such theories, and they don't pay much attention to the fact that our human limitations make them pretty useless in practice, while the simple point about instrumental reasoning is too shallow to be of much real moral interest.

  Allen W. Wood

  Real, Mean, Simple

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• A Heavenly Master governs all the world as Sovereign of the universe. We are astonished at Him by reason of His perfection, we honor Him and fall down before Him because of His unlimited power. From blind physical necessity, which is always and everywhere the same, no variety adhering to time and place could evolve, and all variety of created objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its original Creator, Whom I call the Lord God.

  Isaac Newton

  Fall, Order, Perfection

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• Scientists often talk of parsimony (as in "the simplest explanation is probably correct," also known as Occam's razor), but we should not get seduced by the apparent elegance of argument from parsimony; this line of reasoning has failed in the past at least as many times as it has succeeded.

  David Eagleman

  Past, Razors, Lines

  David Eagleman (2011). “Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain”, p.177, Canongate Books

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• [My father] was also a lawyer in his bank and specialized in tax law. He would have to do the tax returns for all the Harvard profs because they were buffaloed by that kind of reasoning. Professors in the economics department, even they knew nothing about it.

  Paul Laffoley

  Father, Law, Return

  Source: www.paranoiamagazine.com

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• What mankind needs today is liberation from the rule of nonsensical slogans and a return to sound reasoning.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Sound, Needs, Today

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• One of the tragedies of our day is that too many boys are growing up without guidance of a father, or another man, to show them what it looks like to do away with that boyhood stuff. As a result, they often move into adolescence and then adulthood looking like men but still speaking, reasoning, and behaving like boys.

  Dennis Rainey

  Growing Up, Father, Moving

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• We cannot predict the effects of our actions, especially our collective actions over generations or centuries, to use instrumental reasoning toward these big final ends to tell us what we ought to do.

  Allen W. Wood

  Finals, Generations, Use

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.

  John Dos Passos

  Art, Block, Past

  John Dos Passos (1964). “Occasions and protests”

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• It is contrary to reasoning to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing.

  Rene Descartes

  Space, Vacuums, Contrary

  Principia Philosophiae pt. 2, sec. 16 (1644)

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• Body. Soul. Mind. Sensations: the body. Desires: the soul. Reasoning: the mind.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Soul, Mind, Desire

  Marcus Aurelius (2002). “Meditations: A New Translation”, p.34, Modern Library

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• Learn to take losses quickly and cleanly. There is something about inside information which seems to paralyze a man's reasoning powers. Beware of barbers, beauticians, waiters - or anyone - bringing gifts of 'inside' information or tips. Don't try to be a jack of all investment. Stick to the field you know best.

  Bernard Baruch

  Loss, Men, Trying

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• The understanding of it [absolute] is very important as a beginning point. Then you can use meditation, further reasoning, long-term familiarity etc., you can use all kinds of methods to deepen this understanding and to have it counter the instinctual sense of being an absolute you.

  Robert Thurman

  Long, Meditation, Understanding

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

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• There have been studies done on people who meditate and they have found that they actually have increased grey matter in certain parts of their brain and more neural conductivity, meaning more connections between certain parts of the brain. They have increased capacity for, in some cases, memory, or reasoning.

  Jennifer Ashton

  Memories, Grey Matter, People

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• I had always been an overachiever, so I felt I could just "wing it," reasoning that if I don't set clear, written goals I wouldn't have to account for anything if I failed. Now I'm the opposite! I am always setting goals, and I get very specific about where I'm going and take the time to learn the steps needed to take to get there.

  Edwina Findley

  Opposites, Wings, Goal

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• So this is my attempt to give a preliminary - probably far too crude - account of how philosophy by showing can really teach us. The attempts we make to work through problems by reasoning always presuppose starting points, and even the most self-critical philosophers adopt some of those starting points simply by picking them up from the social environments in which they grow up.

  Philip Kitcher

  Growing Up, Philosophy, Self

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Brilliant thoughts flow with a life of their own to a dedicated reasoning predator up in a tree with a bow and arrow half the year meditating soulfully in anticipation to kill unsuspecting meat-infested herbivores.

  Ted Nugent

  Arrows, Years, Tree

  Source: www.usatoday.com

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• Much of the Constitution is remarkably simple and straightforward - certainly as compared to the convoluted reasoning of judges and law professors discussing what is called 'Constitutional law,' much of which has no basis in that document....The real question [for judicial nominees] is whether that nominee will follow the law or succumb to the lure of 'a living constitution,' 'evolving standards' and other lofty words meaning judicial power to reshape the law to suit their own personal preferences.

  Thomas Sowell

  Real, Simple, Law

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• This - where we are now - is where a culture gets to, when it has chosen, for many years, banality over intelligence, the literal over the immaterial or complex, materialism over spirituality. This is the result of many years of disrespecting the intellectual project - of a collective acceptance of the idea that thinking and reasoning and reading deeply in difficult text and being respectful of history are somehow "wimpy" or secondary.

  George Saunders

  Reading, Acceptance, Thinking

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• Moral truth, resting entirely upon the ascertained consequences of actions, supposes a process of observation and reasoning.

  Frances Wright

  Morality, Action, Process

  Frances Wright (1850). “A few days in Athens: being the translation of a Greek manuscript discovered in Herculaneum”, p.176

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• The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning.

  John Stuart Mill

  Philosophy, Reason, Theory

  John Stuart Mill (1856). “A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation”, p.448

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