Deduction Quotes

For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not blue the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and the softcymballing, round the harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers. ~ Herman Melville

The true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience. We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy. It is with science as with ethics,
we cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the Baconian is as false as any other, and with all the helps of machinery and the arts, the most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest man, and possess a more perfect Indian wisdom. ~ Henry David Thoreau

My first encounters with faith came about the time I was a Boy Scout, at about 14 or 15. I made the logical deduction that they operate the same way; I treated my faith like earning a merit badge, and everything about Christianity was about earning merit badges. ~ Max Lucado

Both induction and deduction, reasoning from the particular and the general, and back again from the universal to the specific, form the essence to scientific thinking. ~ Hans Christian Von Baeyer

True deduction can only be obtained through a certain amount of self annihilation. ~ Joe Riggs

Induction for deduction, with a view to construction. ~ Auguste Comte

I should have brought her up stupid, " said the doctor at last. "When women acquire powers of deduction there's no knowing where trouble can end. ~ Louis De Bernieres

In philosophy, when we make use of false principles, we depart the farther from the knowledge of truth and wisdom exactly in proportion to the care with which we cultivate them, and apply ourselves to the deduction of diverse consequences from them, thinking that we are philosophizing well, while we are only departing the farther from the truth; from which it must be inferred that they who have learned the least of all that has been hitherto distinguished by the name of philosophy are the most fitted for the apprehension of truth. ~ Rene Descartes

Two weird people sitting weirdly explaining weird bits of deduction was, Misora worried, a scene of overwhelming weirdosity.
(pg. 87, DEATHNOTE: Another Note, The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases) ~ NisiOisiN

When we find that God's ways always coincide with our own ways, it's time to question who we're really worshipping, God or ourselves. The latter moves the nature of godliness from the King to our servant to a slave, a deduction into the realm of selfhood and then the lower, slavehood. It's a spiritual mathematics in that men who need God in his godhood are humble yet strong and spiritually ambitious while men who need a slave in their selfhood are ultimately paralyzed and will remain paralyzed. ~ Criss Jami

No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience. ~ John Fowles

Intuition is the undoubting conception of a pure and attentive mind, which arises from the light of reason alone, and is more certain than deduction. ~ Rene Descartes

Anything is easy to the man who sees ... The open eye of the open mind
that has more to do with real detective work than all the deduction and induction and analysis ever devised. ~ Samuel Hopkins Adams

Paperchase. And it is on a deduction drawn from ~ John Dickson Carr

We have not noticed how fast the rest has risen. Most of the industrialized world--and a good part of the nonindustrialized world as well--has better cell phone service than the United States. Broadband is faster and cheaper across the industrial world, from Canada to France to Japan, and the United States now stands sixteenth in the world in broadband penetration per capita. Americans are constantly told by their politicians that the only thing we have to learn from other countries' health care systems is to be thankful for ours. Most Americans ignore the fact that a third of the country's public schools are totally dysfunctional (because their children go to the other two-thirds). The American litigation system is now routinely referred to as a huge cost to doing business, but no one dares propose any reform of it. Our mortgage deduction for housing costs a staggering $80 billion a year, and we are told it is crucial to support home ownership, except that Margaret Thatcher eliminated it in Britain, and yet that country has the same rate of home ownership as the United States. We rarely look around and notice other options and alternatives, convinced that "we're number one. ~ Fareed Zakaria

In one of the earlier Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Arthur Conan Doyle (not yet a Sir) made an observation on logical deduction. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
There is, however, a specific flaw in that maxim. It assumes people can recognize the difference between what is impossible and what they believe is impossible. ~ Peter Clines

That there was no God was a given, as far as Hope was concerned, and being nice to people and making the most of your life struck her as a reasonable enough conclusion to draw from it, and in any case what she wanted to do. But besides the spires of theology and the watch-towers of ideology, it seemed a very shaky hut indeed, and not one that offered her much shelter or would stand up in court.
She couldn't see a way to make her objection to the fix a deduction from any body of thought. It came from a body of flesh, her own, and that was enough for her. She doubted that this would be enough for anyone else. ~ Ken MacLeod

The New Atheists are not open or willing to go where the evidence leads, unless that evidence sustains their own naturalistic assumptions. They have covertly reduced all philosophical thought and deduction to
ironically-fait h! ~ Ravi Zacharias

Even tax breaks that are supposed to help the middle class too often skew toward the wealthy. Consider the mortgage interest deduction. While political leaders in both parties have long considered it untouchable, it actually helps those at the top of the income scale far more than those at the bottom. ~ Dee Dee Myers

He did not dissociate his thought from himself; he thought integrally, with the whole of his body; and each logical deduction forthwith became real to him - as happens only with very healthy or direct persons who have not yet turned thought into a pastime. ~ Leonid Andreyev

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again. ~ E.L. Doctorow

Only an idiot guesses or reasons or deduces,' the Professor said, patiently. ~ Kim Newman

Everything you do, everything you sense and say is experiment. No deduction final. Nothing stops until dead and perhaps not even then, because each life creates endless ripples. Induction bounces within and you sensitize yourself to it. Deduction conveys illusions of absolutes. Kick the truth and shatter it! ~ Frank Herbert

The most common anxiety I hear about learning to program is that people think it requires a lot of math. Actually, most programming doesn't require math beyond basic arithmetic. In fact, being good at programming isn't that different from being good at solving Sudoku puzzles. To solve a Sudoku puzzle, the numbers 1 through 9 must be filled in for each row, each column, and each 3x3 interior square of the full 9x9 board. You find a solution by applying deduction and logic from the starting numbers. For ~ Albert Sweigart

Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

A man," he gathered his ideas, "A man should strive to do something larger than himself. To cure disease, or eradicate hunger or poverty or crime." "Ah!" I said. "Noble thoughts." I fancied that I could hear the lovely voice of Miss Lucy earnestly saying that, or something similar, to Holmes within the week. When a man is suddenly struck by noble ambitions it is usually a woman who does the striking. But I thought it would be wiser not to mention this deduction, ~ Michael Kurland

His thoughts gravitated to
the twisty, swirling riptides where he submerged in waters of

subzero ruminations.

His mind raced around the notion of–– the ultimate subtraction of oneself,

and deduction-dwelling inside uninhabitable white. ~ Steven Leonardo Clifford

I look at things and think about them,' Folly replied. 'And use my intuition, of course, and deduction and induction, as well as any historical or theoretical models that seem to apply. ~ Jim Butcher

All science is based on models, and every scientific model comprises three distinct stages: statement of well-defined hypotheses; deduction of all the consequences of these hypotheses, and nothing but these consequences; confrontation of these consequences with observed data. ~ Maurice Allais

So let the unjust make his unjust attempts in the right way, and lie hidden if he means to be great in his injustice: (he who is found out is nobody:) for the highest reach of injustice is, to be deemed just when you are not. Therefore I say that in the perfectly unjust man we must assume the most perfect injustice; there is to be no deduction, but we must allow him, while doing the most unjust acts, to have acquired the greatest reputation for justice. ~ Plato

The law, right now, permits companies that close down American factories and offices and move those jobs overseas to take a tax deduction for the costs associated with moving the jobs to China or India or wherever. ~ Sheldon Whitehouse

Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense. ~ Hans Christian Von Baeyer

when this original intellectual deduction is confirmed point by point by quite a number of independent incidents, then the subjective becomes objective and ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Impressive deduction," Ryan murmured. "You certainly look deeper than most." He brushed back a strand of my hair, and I screwed my eyes shut. He was doing this on purpose. "But let me give you some advice." His lips were right next to my ear. "I wouldn't peer too far. Even the clearest window can cast back your own reflection. ~ Sam Dogra

In a well-balanced, reasoning mind there is no such thing as an intuition - an inspired guess! You can guess, of course - and a guess is either right or wrong. If it is right you can call it an intuition. If it is wrong you usually do not speak of it again.
But what is often called an intuition is really impression based on logical deduction or experience. When an expert feels that there is something wrong about a picture or a piece of furniture or the signature on a cheque he is really basing that feeling on a host of a small signs and details. He has no need to go into them minutely - his experience obviates that - the net result is the definite impression that something is wrong. But it is not a guess, it is an impression based on experience. ~ Agatha Christie

Rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of far-flung territories with heterogeneous populations and for a policy of oppression. Its efficiency is superior simply because it ignores all intermediary stages between issuance and application, and because it prevents political reasoning by the people through the withholding of information. It can easily overcome the variety of local customs and need not rely on the necessarily slow process of development of general law. It is most helpful for the establishment of a centralized administration because it overrides automatically all matters of local autonomy. If rule by good laws has sometimes been called the rule of wisdom, rule by appropriate decrees may rightly be called the rule of cleverness. For it is clever to reckon with ulterior motives and aims, and it is wise to understand and create by deduction from generally accepted principles.

Government by bureaucracy has to be distinguished from the mere outgrowth and deformation of civil services which frequently accompanied the decline of the nation-state - as, notably, in France. There the administration has survived all changes in regime since the Revolution, entrenched itself like a parasite in the body politic, developed its own class interests, and become a useless organism whose only purpose appears to be chicanery and prevention of normal economic and political development. There are of course many superficial similarities between the two typ ~ Hannah Arendt

To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate; but He remains personally unknown to the individual. ~ A.W. Tozer

Once the housing market begins to recover, I would phase out the mortgage tax deduction. ~ Joshua A. Tucker

Thinking is seeing ... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things. ~ Honore De Balzac

The day before yesterday, in the woods of Touques, in a charming spot beside a spring, I found old cigar butts and scraps of pâté. People had been picnicking. I described such a scene in Novembre eleven years ago; it was entirely imagined, and the other day it came true. Everything one invents is true, you may be sure. Poetry is as precise as geometry. Induction is as accurate as deduction; and besides, after reaching a certain point one no longer makes any mistake about the things of the soul. ~ Gustave Flaubert

In every science, after having analysed the ideas, expressing the more complicated by means of the more simple, one finds a certain number that cannot be reduced among them, and that one can define no further. These are the primitive ideas of the science; it is necessary to acquire them through experience, or through induction; it is impossible to explain them by deduction. ~ Giuseppe Peano

Dullards would have you believe that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth ... but to a mathematical mind, the impossible is simply a theorem yet to be solved. We must not eliminate the impossible, we must conquer it, suborn it to our purpose. ~ Kim Newman

Emotional speculation is to deductive reasoning what weeds are to a garden – at first sight they appear to belong, but eventually they obscure that which one hopes will come into bud. ~ Lord Patterson Coats

Wow! So you're really smart, huh? This brilliant deduction was offered by a girl with a Marilyn Monroe voice who used glittery pens and wrote each letter of her name in a different color, surrounded by hearts and stars. I had dubbed her Sparkles. ~ Amy Harmon

Jesse Jackson's in trouble. They're going after this tax thing. Jesse said he will amend his taxes to show the money that he paid to his mistress. See, he has just one mistress. Jesse uses the standard mistress deduction. As opposed to Clinton, who had to itemize. ~ Jay Leno

I presume that few who have paid any attention to the history of the Mathematical Analysis, will doubt that it has been developed in a certain order, or that that order has been, to a great extent, necessary
being determined, either by steps of logical deduction, or by the successive introduction of new ideas and conceptions, when the time for their evolution had arrived. ~ George Boole

When it happeneth that a man signifieth unto us two contradictory opinions whereof the one is clearly and directly signified, andthe other either drawn from that by consequence, or not known to be contradictory to it; then (when he is not present to explicate himself better) we are to take the former of his opinions; for that is clearly signified to be his, and directly, whereas the other might proceed from error in the deduction, or ignorance of the repugnancy. ~ Thomas Hobbes

For a while, I decided to worship God. It was a God I arrived at through a method of logical deduction. If there is a God, what would he be like? I asked. He would be a real person in my life, I reasoned, adhering to a literally anthropomorphic view of the sacred. He would be beautiful and I would desire him. Since a friend of mine named Trevor had all those attributes, I concluded that Trev was God. Having settled on him, I then further deduced God's other characteristics from Trevor's behaviour. He was narcissistic, perplexed, rather dispassionate, flawed in various ways, etc. So was God. At night I prayed to him by name. My entreaties seemed about as effective as other people's prayers to their Gods. And with Trevor there was the added advantage that if my prayers failed to reach him, I could always phone. ~ Stan Persky

Lacking the direct test of success or failure, the voter tends to turn, not to those politicians whose measures have the best chance of success, but to those with the ability to 'sell' their propaganda. Without grasping logical chains of deduction, the average voter will never be able to discover the error that the ruler makes. ~ Murray Rothbard

The sound of an English accent distracted her and lifted her spirits. She associated English accents with singing teapots, schools for witchcraft, and the science of deduction. ~ Joe Hill

Science proceeds by inference, rather than by the deduction of mathematical proof. A series of observations is accumulated, forcing the deeper question: What must be true if we are to explain what is observed? What "big picture" of reality offers the best fit to what is actually observed in our experience? American scientist and philosopher Charles S. Peirce used the term "abduction" to refer to the way in which scientists generate theories that might offer the best explanation of things. The method is now more often referred to as "inference to the best explanation." It is now widely agreed to be the philosophy of investigation of the world characteristic of the natural sciences. ~ Alister E. McGrath

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." There ~ G.K. Chesterton

I must begin with a good body of facts and not from a principle (in which I always suspect some fallacy) and then as much deduction as you please. ~ Charles Darwin

Correct observation followed by meticulous deduction and the precise visualization of goals is vital to the success of any enterprise. ~ Terry Pratchett

We are approaching a new age of synthesis. Knowledge cannot be merely a degree or a skill ... it demands a broader vision, capabilities in critical thinking and logical deduction without which we cannot have constructive progress. ~ Li Ka-shing

In your own case, from all that you have told me, it seems obvious that your faculty of observation and your peculiar facility for deduction are due to your own systematic training."

-John. Watson- ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

We may put it in this way: Deduction depends on Induction, if general propositions are only known to us through the facts: Induction depends on Deduction, because one fact can never prove another, except so far as what is true of the one is true of the other and of any other of the same kind; and because, to exhibit this resemblance of the facts, it must be stated in a general proposition. ~ Carveth Read

I'd left her in Sciences 442, after a long, trying day. The spectacularly bitchy text war she pitched with her brother wasn't even the worst of it. She didn't show me the original message she sent him, but I saw the ones he'd returned. No, you didn't find my spy, he insisted. He's obviously still at large. For instance, I can tell you right now that you're wearing all black, and that Jamie Watson is annoyed with you. I have eyes watching you right now.
THAT IS NOT SPYING THAT IS SHODDY AMATEUR DEDUCTION AND IT IS INCORRECT, she replied furiously.
She was, of course, wearing all black. ~ Brittany Cavallaro

Whatever lies beyond the limits of experience, and claims another origin than that of induction and deduction from established data, is illegitimate. ~ George Henry Lewes

That man has been standing there flipping that goddam quarter since I don't know when. How many consecutive head outcomes do you have to see to make the brilliant deduction that the coin is fixed? ~ Edward Drobinski

This method of deduction ... is often called "combinatory". Its usefulness is not exhausted at this stage, but it does even at the outset lead to some valuable conclusions. ~ John Chadwick

The real world was far too real to leave neat little hints. It was full of too many things. It wasn't by eliminating the impossible that you got at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities. ~ Terry Pratchett

A greater tax deduction for students is not a handout. On the contrary, it helps those who are willing to meet the challenges of higher education to invest in our collective future. ~ Charles B. Rangel

Contemplation does not arrive at reality after a process of deduction, but by an intuitive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive to its own existential depths, which open out into the mystery of God. For ~ Thomas Merton

You have a case, Holmes?" I remarked. "The faculty of deduction is certainly contagious, Watson," he answered. "It has enabled you to probe my secret. Yes, I have a case. After a month of trivialities and stagnation the wheels move once more. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Good hitters don't just go up and swing. They always have a plan. Call it an educated deduction. You visualize. You're like a good negotiator. You know what you have, you know what he has, then you try to work it out. ~ Dave Winfield

firstly, what "really" attracted me to Indo-European, as well as to English, Polish, and Russian philology, wasn't the seductive variety of linguistic forms, or the infinitely picturesque accidents that fill the histories of words and dialects, but rather the fact that these obey lays that can be rigorously described, and that these laws, such as Grimm's Law in Germanic philology, or the principles of Slavic palatalization, which lie behind all those wonderful alveolar fricatives in Russia and the Auvergne, promised to submit the irresistible and etrnal movement of languages no longer to mere chance, but to something that closely resembled calculation;
- and that, secondly, and consequently, the noblest aspect of linguistics (and if I had been familiar with Trouetzkoy's phonology and with Jakobson, this conclusion would have been even more obvious) was its power of deduction -- but that there remained something even nobler, which was the terrain of pure deduction, in other words, mathematics. And that it is why I absolutely had to become a mathematician. ~ Jacques Roubaud

larger deduction if you deduct the expenses. However, this creates a lot more records because you will need receipts for all car-related expenses, including gas and maintenance. ~ Kevin Amolsch

Last year I had difficulty with my income tax. I tried to take my analyst off as a business deduction. The Government said it was entertainment. We compromised finally and made it a religious contribution. ~ Woody Allen

The deduction of effect from cause is often blocked by some insuperable extrinsic obstacle: the true causes may be quite unknown. Nowhere in life is this so common as in war, where the facts are seldom fully known and the underlying motives even less so. ~ Carl Von Clausewitz

He has considerable gifts himself. He possesses two out of the three qualities necessary for the ideal detective. He has the power of observation and that of deduction. He is only wanting in knowledge; and that may come in time. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

When less than everything has been said about a subject, you can still think on further. The alternative is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction ( ... ) no effort on their part.
What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being? ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Intellect begins with the observation of nature, proceeds to memorize and classify the facts thus observed, and by logical deduction builds up that edifice of knowledge properly called science... But admittedly we also know by feeling, and we can combine the two faculties, and present knowledge in the guise of art. ~ Herbert Read

There is, after all, nothing inherently reasonable in the conviction that all of reality is simply an accidental confluence of physical causes, without any transcendent source or end. Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other. ~ David Bentley Hart

We also need the provisions in the tax bill that will permit working mothers to increase the deduction from income tax liability for costs incurred in providing care for their children while the mothers are working. In October the Commission on the Status of Women will report to me. This problem should have a high priority, and I think that whatever we leave undone this year we must move on this in January. ~ John F. Kennedy

Thus there is a need for analogical process of deduction of laws and rules in the decision making process by the UN at this juncture, where the world is facing innumerable human rights violation (reported and unreported) pretermitting antithetical implementation of what each nation or any disputing party understands, in its own misinterpreted version of international laws. There is a need for world comity. ~ Henrietta Newton Martin

We all remember the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst oil spill in U.S. history. What is less well known is that BP is claiming a 9.9 billion tax deduction on the money they had to spend cleaning up their own mess and paying for damages they caused. That is absurd. ~ Bernie Sanders

It was quite elementary,' returned the detective with a languid gesture of one hand. ~ Anthony Horowitz

There is also a psychological phenomenon at work here that I believe is particularly male. A woman or girl
presuming one could be induced to take part in this sort of activity in the first place
having burned her hair and eyebrows would conclude that she had been lucky and reduce the amount of gas she put into the balloon next time. The man doesn't come to the same conclusion at all. He, singed and blackened, arrives at the point of view that he still has a margin of error to play with. After all, he isn't dead, and he's hardly likely to burn his eyebrows off again. They've already gone, history; he's moved on. There can be but one deduction
the dose needs to be increased. ~ Mark Barrowcliffe

From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other. ~ Georges Perec

There can be no ultimate statements science: there can be no statements in science which can not be tested, and therefore none which cannot in principle be refuted, by falsifying some of the conclusions which can be deduced from them. ~ Karl Popper

He did not arrive at this conclusion by the decent process of quiet, logical deduction, nor yet by the blinding flash of glorious intuition, but by the shoddy, untidy process halfway between the two by which one usually gets to know things. ~ Margery Allingham

How careless of me!" By which she meant that she had deduced that he had found [them] in his pocket and pitied him for needing to be forever in the right. ~ Tom Holt

Model building is the art of selecting those aspects of a process that are relevant to the question being asked. As with any art, this selection is guided by taste, elegance, and metaphor; it is a matter of induction, rather than deduction. High science depends on this art. ~ John Henry Holland

The great changes in civilisation and society have been wrought by deeply held beliefs and passion rather than by a process of rational deduction. ~ Paul Keating

Indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible? - The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority of language. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

An important contributory factor to the loss of mental morale in the church has been a misguided conception of Christian charity. It has been assumed that the charitable man suppresses his views in the same way that he subordinates his personal interests. A wild fantasy has taken hold of many Christians. They have come to imagine that just as an unselfish man restrains himself from snatching another piece of cake, so too, he restrains himself from putting forward his point of view. And just as it is bad form to boast about your private possessions or loudly recapitulate your personal achievements, so too it is bad form announce what your convictions are.

By analogy with that charity of the spirit which never asks or claims but always gives and gives again, we have manufactured a false "charity" of the mind, which never takes a stand, but continually yields ground. It is proper to give way to other people's interests: therefore it is proper to give way to other people's ideas.

The damage done by this false deduction has been enormous. It is urgently necessary to clear the air on this matter. A man's religious convictions and understanding of the truth are not private possessions, in the sense that his suit and the contents of his brief case are private possessions.

Your beliefs as a Christian are not yours in the sense that you have rights over them, either to tamper with them or to throw them away. Of course, the very fact that we view conv ~ Harry Blamires

There is nothing distinctively scientific about the hypothetico-deductive process. It is not even distinctively intellectual. It is merely a scientific context for a much more general stratagem that underlies almost all regulative processes or processes of continuous control, namely feedback, the control of performance by the consequences of the act performed. In the hypothetico-deductive scheme the inferences we draw from a hypothesis are, in a sense, its logical output. If they are true, the hypothesis need not be altered, but correction is obligatory if they are false. The continuous feedback from inference to hypothesis is implicit in Whewell's account of scientific method; he would not have dissented from the view that scientific behaviour can be classified as appropriately under cybernetics as under logic. ~ Peter Medawar

These long chains of perfectly simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to carry out their most difficult demonstrations had led me to fancy that everything that can fall under human knowledge forms a similar sequence; and that so long as we avoid accepting as true what is not so, and always preserve the right order of deduction of one thing from another, there can be nothing too remote to be reached in the end, or to well hidden to be discovered. ~ Rene Descartes

What a lovely thing a rose is!"
He walked past the couch to the open window and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects.
"There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital. ~ Katha Pollitt

Knowledge is the accumulation of facts wisdom is the deduction from these facts of useful laws, a process which can only take place by comparing the facts in one compartment with those in all others, thus giving a vision of the whole. ~ Vera Stanley Alder

Logical reasoning may be a most convenient means of mental communication for covering short distances, but the curvature of the earth, alas, is reflected even in logic: an ideally rational progression of thought will finally bring you back to the point of departure where you return aware of the simplicity of genius, with a delightful sensation that you have embraced truth, while actually you have merely embraced your own self ... anything you might term a deduction already exposes the flaw: logical development inexorably becomes an envelopment. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Tax laws favor capital over labor, giving capital gains a lower rate than ordinary income. The rich get humongous mortgage interest deductions while renters get no deduction at all. ~ Robert Reich

True thought is pre-physical. This is the thinking-behind-the-thinking responsible for all the genuinely consequential choices we make in the world. A thinking that is not dependent on linear deduction, but that moves fast as lightning, making connections on different levels, bringing them together. ~ Eben Alexander

I'm fine," Kate said. "In fact, since my last two dates were so awful, things can only get better."
"Bad deduction," Jessie said. "If that were true, I'd be dating Harrison Ford by now. ~ Jennifer Crusie

Here is the tragedy of theology in its distilled essence: The employment of high-powered human intellect, of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction - studying nothing. In the Middle Ages, the great minds capable of transforming the world did not study the world; and so, for most of a millennium, as human beings screamed in agony - decaying from starvation, eaten by leprosy and plague, dying in droves in their twenties - the men of the mind, who could have provided their earthly salvation, abandoned them for otherworldly fantasies. ~ Andrew Bernstein

A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no 'atmospheric' preoccupations. Such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude. ~ S. S. Van Dine

In the beginning (if there was such a thing), God created Newton's laws of motion together with the necessary masses and forces. This is all; everything beyond this follows from the development of appropriate mathematical methods by means of deduction. ~ Albert Einstein

The precise point at which a tax deduction becomes a 'loophole' or a tax incentive becomes a 'subsidy for special interests' is one of the great mysteries of politics. ~ John Sununu