Ayer Quotes

Ayer may be considered a practical atheist: one who sees no reason to worship an invisible deity. ~ James A. Haught

You hear again and again that audiences want to see movies that are different, and critics say we make the same thing again and again in Hollywood, then you go and make something different, and you get kicked in the gut for it. ~ David Ayer

I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions. ~ A.J. Ayer

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

I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one's existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable. ~ A.J. Ayer

It was a distortion, a mercenary decision to create this parallel history in order to drive the movie for an American audience, Both my grandparents were officers in World War Two, and I would be personally offended if somebody distorted their achieve. ~ David Ayer

When you talk to people who have been in combat, there's a sensory overload that happens. The color becomes vivid. Sounds become more pronounced. People talk about how, for them, the war was technicolor and real life was black and white after the war. ~ David Ayer

For me, I like to show what guys are like when no one is looking and how we really are, and that we can be emotional and have these emotional lives. I think it would be great to do a film where we see some females and what's going on there when we're not around. ~ David Ayer

When you put a movie together, you're continually screening it for yourself and you're screening it for other people. It's like a video game power meter. When the power bar starts going down, you've gotta look at what's going on. ~ David Ayer

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them. ~ A.J. Ayer

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

You make a movie and it's like convincing people to go on an expedition with you. You think you know where it's going to end up, and you're hoping and guessing. But, when people trust you and get involved, based on that trust, it's a really nice feeling to be able to have everything pay off. ~ David Ayer

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

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

It's important for me to take very famous, well-known people and not have them play themselves and not have them be seen as themselves. ~ David Ayer

The most terrifying thing in my life is a blank sheet of paper. ~ David Ayer

Resisted temptations become lost opportunities ... ~ Margaret Ayer Barnes

Actors want to act. I think a lot of times what happens is that they're expected to bring it all. Probably because I'm a writer, I'm not telling them what to do. I just provide them with as much as I can. ~ David Ayer

I'm a big fan of Italian neo-realism and all of that stuff. ~ David Ayer

That's the world of policing. I've met some bad-ass female cops, who are very cool people. ~ David Ayer

You can't go back. Once it's done, it's done. I'm sure there will be things that I would love to change, in the future, but each movie is a snapshot of its time and the resources, and you do your best on it. ~ David Ayer

In other words, the propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions. Accordingly we may say that philosophy is a department of logic. For we will see that the characteristic mark of a purely logical enquiry, is that it is concerned with the formal consequences of our definitions and not with questions of empirical fact. ~ A.J. Ayer

It's a great shame that the world was organized with two sexes. It makes for a lot of trouble. ~ Margaret Ayer Barnes

My father died when I was really young, on Christmas Day. ~ David Ayer

The movie has to be going somewhere. Other than that, you want it to be entertaining, but people usually disagree on what entertaining is and everybody has different tastes. ~ David Ayer

A movie is a certain thing by definition. There's nothing wrong with knocking out a good genre picture. ~ David Ayer

I'm not a film-school guy. I was a high-school dropout. I was on a nuclear submarine. I was an electrician. I was a house painter. ~ David Ayer

The worst part of directing is always seeing the first assembly. It's devastating. It really is. It's like going into the delivery room and you can't wait to see your baby, and it's a crocodile. ~ David Ayer

[If] you want to learn something about somebody, get into a fistfight. You'll learn more in five minutes than you will in five weeks of conversations. It's basic. ~ David Ayer

Genre expectations can kill creativity. If you do something different, it will get hated. The best filmmakers can do everything on the approval list and knock it out of the park. For me, I have a hard time being creative when I have to color in between the lines. ~ David Ayer

- Question. Would you die for me?
- Yes.
- That's too easy. Will you... Would you live for me? ... Hmm?
- Yes.
- Careful! Do not say this oath thoughtlessly! ... Desire becomes surrender, surrender becomes power. You want this?
- I do.
- Say it. Say it. Say it! Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty...
- Please?!
- Mm, God, you're so... good!
― Joker & Harley Quinn ~ Suicide Squad (2016 Movie Directed By David Ayer)

It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved ... [A]ll utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical. ~ A.J. Ayer

All wars are crusades, or we're made to feel they are. That's just what's so wicked about them. We're made to feel - not think - and people can't think when they feel. ~ Margaret Ayer Barnes

There's nothing in all the world as much fun as talk. When you're talking, that is, with the right person. ~ Margaret Ayer Barnes

It is an undoubted truth that the neck and throat of a highbred woman are incomparably more beautiful than in the woman of lower origin. Blood will tell; there is no disputing it. ~ Harriet Hubbard Ayer

...the fact that a conclusion does not follow from its putative premise is not sufficient to show that it is false. ~ A.J. Ayer

Actors are insanely competitive and they hold back on each other. They are like magicians and none of them want to show their tricks. ~ David Ayer

I've been in the game long enough to know what elements you have to package together to get a movie into production. ~ David Ayer

I'm a veteran, and I come from a family of veterans and people who served in that war. And the stories that I heard were a hell of a lot different than the movies that I was seeing, so I wanted to make a movie about the people that were really there. ~ David Ayer

I think nothing has been filmed as much as World War II. ~ David Ayer

'Colors' is pretty good. It takes you inside the cop car bit. I like reality myself. I like reality-based kind of movies. ~ David Ayer

I think a good director can embrace any genre and it's the kind of thing where you always want to do something different. You always want to challenge yourself. ~ David Ayer

The trouble with education is that we always read everything when we're too young to know what it means. And the trouble with life is that we're always too busy to re-read it later. ~ Margaret Ayer Barnes

Curious, isn't it that "talking with the right people" means something so different from "talking with the right person"? ~ Margaret Ayer Barnes

It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology. ~ A.J. Ayer

Both my grandparents were officers in World War Two, and I would be personally offended if somebody distorted their achievements. ~ David Ayer

Southeast Asia food uses many different types of spices which are quite new to me, like the curry leaves which I saw at the Kreta Ayer wet market in Chinatown. With such spices used in cooking, this usually imparts a strong aroma to Southeast Asian food, which appeals to the senses. ~ Joel Robuchon

The hardest thing, as a director, is that it's never right. Nothing you do is ever right. It's never exactly how you envision it. Making a movie is about making it better. ~ David Ayer

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

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

The trouble with education is,' said Jimmy cheerfully, 'that we always read everything when we're too young to know what it means. And the trouble with life is that we're always too busy to reread it later. There's more sense in books, Cicily, than you'd really believe. Though, of course, they don't teach you anything vital that you can't learn for yourself. ~ Margaret Ayer Barnes

I went to Samuel Ayer High School, which is now Milpitas High School. ~ Grant Show

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

No moral system can rest solely on authority. ~ A.J. Ayer

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

I like to do stuff real and practical and in camera, as much as possible. I like old school filmmaking. ~ David Ayer

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts. ~ A.J. Ayer

Actors are like kids, they need to play a little bit. And that's the nature of their job, they need to shake off some energy and then you as the director get them back on track. When you do loosen up the reins, you get some amazing things, but you have to wring out the performances for every last good drop. ~ David Ayer

Every movie is different. Every movie requires its own sort of photographic voice. ~ David Ayer

Riches make cowards of us ... ~ Margaret Ayer Barnes

Character comes before scholarship. ~ Margaret Ayer Barnes

Where is any author in the world Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye? - Love's Labor Lost. The eyes appears to be more immediately connected with the soul than any other organ. A woman reflects every emotion, almost every thought from her two wonderful, priceless eyes, and no feature of her face is more a telltale of her nature. "Show me," says the old Chinese proverb, "a man's eyes, and I will tell you what he might have been. Show me his mouth, and I will tell you what he has been." The same is true of women. Up to thirty or thirty-five a woman may be actress enough to make her eyes tell one tale, while her life would reveal another; but little by little the true state of a woman's soul stands forth in the expression, the frankness, the furtiveness, the candor, or the boldness ~ Harriet Hubbard Ayer

'Sabotage' was an opportunity. That was journeyman work, but the irony is I learned more off that movie on what filmmaking is and isn't than everything else combined. A lot of lessons, and it will impact me for the rest of my career. ~ David Ayer

I've almost come to feel that it doesn't make much difference what you believe in - the thing that's important is a state of belief. It's much better to believe in nonsense than in nothing ... ~ Margaret Ayer Barnes

Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are? ~ A.J. Ayer

'Sabotage' was a work for hire. It wasn't my original idea or script or anything. ~ David Ayer

As a writer, you have to be willing to kill your darlings, and I'm a writer first. As a director, I've got no problem cutting the scenes. ~ David Ayer

You never know what you have until you put it in front of an audience. That's the truth. That's the truth of filmmaking and that's why you make movies, for an audience to, hopefully, enjoy it. ~ David Ayer

The worst pressure is the pressure I put on myself. ~ David Ayer

All banks should be under government control. Deposits guaranteed, dividends reduced, officials turned into state servants taking their orders from Washington ... ~ Margaret Ayer Barnes

'Fury' whetted my appetite for a bigger canvas and this idea of world creation. You can do amazing things as a filmmaker if you have the proper tools, and those are time and money. ~ David Ayer

Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man. ~ A.J. Ayer

We shall maintain that no statement which refers to a 'reality'transcending the limits of all possible sense- experience can possibly have any literal significance. ~ A.J. Ayer

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

Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of peole who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand when in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it. Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A.J. Ayer. ~ Ernest Gellner

I feel like, as a filmmaker, I'm at my strongest when I write the script and when it comes from me, out of whole cloth. My best work has always been self-generated. ~ David Ayer

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

When I make a movie, it's almost a relief to get shooting 'cause the hell is over, or part of the hell is over. ~ David Ayer

Well, as far as film, either you're making a film or you're making videos. Digital capture is always trying to emulate the range and look of film. I believe personally that film has more. ~ David Ayer

No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine. ~ A.J. Ayer

The principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else. And the reason for this is that we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves, without sinning against the rules which govern the use of language, and so making our utterances self-stultifying. In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies. ~ A.J. Ayer

For me, directing is like writing with meat. I can write live, in real time, and change things and be confident that I'm helping the movie. ~ David Ayer

The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. ~ A.J. Ayer

I'm a Veteran. I was in the Navy, in the submarine corps. I come from a military family. Both of my grandparents were in World War II and retired as officers. One fought in the Pacific and one fought in Europe. The whole family was in the war. I grew up exposed to it and hearing the stories, but the stories I heard weren't kind of the whole "Rah, rah, rah! We saved the world!" They were about the personal price and the emotional price. ~ David Ayer