Iron Logic Quotes

Man makes history; woman is history. The reproduction of the species is feminine: it runs steadily and quietly through all species, animal or human, through all short-lived cultures. It is primary, unchanging, everlasting, maternal, plantlike, and cultureless. If we look back we find that it is synonymous with life itself. ~ Oswald Spengler

Suddenly all those individuals who yesterday felt that "we" meant only their families, their professions, or perhaps their communities, become men of the nation. Their emotions and thoughts, their egos, that "something" within them, all are transformed: they have become historical. ~ Oswald Spengler

An era was over and a new Europe was being born. This much was obvious. But with the passing of the old order many longstanding assumptions would be called into question. What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air. The Cold-War confrontation; the schism separating East from West; the contest between 'Communism' and 'capitalism'; the separate and non-communicating stories of prosperous western Europe and the Soviet bloc satellites to its east: all these could no longer be understood as the products of ideological necessity or the iron logic of politics. They were the accidental outcomes of history - and history was thrusting them aside.
Europe's future would look very different - and so, too, would its past. In retrospect the years 1945-89 would now come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century. Whatever shape Europe was to take in the years to come, the familiar, tidy story of what had gone before had changed for ever. It seemed obvious to me, in that icy central-European December, that the history of post-war Europe would need to be rewritten. ~ Tony Judt

When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of Nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against Nature must lead to their own downfall. ~ Adolf Hitler

Story creates meaning. Coincidence, then, would seem our enemy, for it is the random, absurd collisions of things in the universe and is, by definition, meaningless. And yet coincidence is a part of life, often a powerful part, rocking existence, then vanishing as absurdly as it arrived. The solution, therefore, is not to avoid coincidence, but to dramatize how it may enter life meaninglessly, but in time gain meaning, how the anti-logic of randomness becomes the logic of life-as-lived. ~ Robert McKee

From time immemorial, some men supposed to deal in one-valued 'eternal verities'. We called such men 'philosophers' or 'meta-physicians'. But they seldom realized that all their 'eternal verities' consisted only of words, and words which, for the most part, belonged to a primitive language, refleting in its structure the assumed structure of the world of remote antiquity. Besides, they did not realize that these 'eternal verities' last only so long as the human nervous system is not altered. Under the influence of these 'philosophers', two-valued 'logic', and the confusion of orders of abstractions, nearly all of us contracted a firmly rooted predilection for 'general' statements - 'universals', as they were called - which in most cases inherently involved the semantic one-valued conviction of validity for all 'time' to come. ~ Alfred Korzybski

Fear is a disease that eats away at logic and makes man inhuman. ~ Marina Anderson

By your logic I should also be in charge of Solinade dances, needlework, and horse thieving. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

There is no learned man but will confess be hath much profited by reading controversies,
his senses awakened, his judgment sharpened, and the truth which he holds firmly established. If then it be profitable for him to read, why should it not at least be tolerable and free for his adversary to write? In logic they teach that contraries laid together, more evidently appear; it follows then, that all controversy being permitted, falsehood will appear more false, and truth the more true; which must needs conduce much to the general confirmation of an implicit truth. ~ John Milton

All our nourishment becomes ourselves; we eat ourselves into being ... For every bite we take contains in itself all our organs, all that is included in the whole man, all of which he is constituted ... We do not eat bone, blood vessels, ligaments, and seldom brain, heart, and entrails, nor fat, therefore bone does not make bone, nor brain make brain, but every bite contains all these. Bread is blood, but who sees it? It is fat, who sees it? ... for the master craftsman in the stomach is good. He can make iron out of brimstone: he is there daily and shapes the man according to his form. ~ Paracelsus

I like cats ... When I meet a cat, I say, "Poor Pussy!" and stoop down and tickle the side of its head; and the cat sticks up its tail in a rigid, cast-iron manner, arches its back, and wipes its nose up against my trousers; and all is gentleness and peace. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

I had thought that growing up's consolation was that you could escape from the arbitrariness of things, that somehow one acquired more control. Now you had two numbers until you were ninety-nine. And it wasn't true. Growing up was just more of the same but taller. What happened was all luck. There was no logic. ~ Janice Galloway

The problem isn't who is in charge. It's what is in charge. The problem is that people are encouraged to function as machines. Or, actually, as mechanisms. Human emotion and sympathy are unprofessional. They are inappropriate to the exercise of reason. Everything which makes people good - makes them human - is ruled out. The system doesn't care about people, but we treat it as if it were one of us, as if it were the sum of our goods and not the product of our least admirable compromises. ~ Nick Harkaway

Rachel, who before her marriage had been a promising pianist, and now sat with the baby on her knee, picking out nursery tunes with one finger. Nev said it wouldn't be like that, and she believed him - or at least she believed he meant it - but it would, because marriage changed everything. It had its own logic, its own laws, and they were independent of the desires and intentions of those who entered into it. She felt a moment's pleasure in the cynicism of this perception, though God knows it was depressing enough. ~ Pat Barker

When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line. ~ Samuel Beckett

Anderson's papers and slide shows have become more alarming. Under titles such as "Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous . . . Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope," he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast. With his colleague Alice Bows-Larkin, an atmospheric physicist and climate change mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson argues that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies - all while emissions ballooned - that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the core expansionist logic at the heart of our economic system. ~ Naomi Klein

There is no great religion without a great schism. All of them have it. And that's because you're dealing with something called faith. And faith is not something you can prove; faith is personal opinion. Uh, when you're dealing with something with certainty, like, y'know, science or logic, you don't have the
there's no wiggle room; that's why history is not filled with warring math cults, y'know, because you can settle the issue; you can prove something to be right or wrong, and that's the end of the argument: next case. Whereas, when you're dealing with faith, you can forever argue your point, or another point, because you're dealing with intangibles. Personally, I think, faith is what you ask of somebody when you don't have the goods to prove your point. ~ Tom Quinn

[A]ny being with the supposed capacity to create the logically impossible must himself be logically impossible. ~ George H. Smith

Cows eat grass and silage. This is melting the ice caps and killing us all. So they need a new foodstuff: something that is rich in iron, calcium and natural goodness. Plainly they cannot eat meat so here is an idea to chew on. Why not feed them vegetarians? ~ Jeremy Clarkson

It is very hard to understand the logic and intelligence of the argument that, in order to protect us from a group that might overpower us, we should support a group that already has overpowered us. It ~ Stefan Molyneux

I used to think things were the way they are for a reason, that there was some hidden meaning. I used to think that this meaning governed the way the world was. But it's an illusion to think that there are good and bad reasons. Grammar is a lie to make us think that what we say is connected by a logic that you'll find if you study it, a lie that gone on for centuries. Because I now know that life just lurches between stability and instability and doesn't obey any law. ~ Delphine De Vigan

There I was to attempt,
Jupiter-only-knew what extravagant acts of foolhardiness, what some
people call bravery, to rescue a barbarian I barely knew.
Do not get me wrong. I did like him.
But you don't go ahead and slit your throat
because you like someone. ~ Angelo Tsanatelis

This was 1990 the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed. ~ Bill Bryson

It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there's no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

Right or Wrong, most times, merely depends on perspective. It takes humility (not necessarily logic) to let go of our egos to see through the other person's eyes. But I guess even I, myself, can't let go to see why you'd object. ~ Ufuoma Apoki

Perfect! You guys are the same age. I bet you have a lot in common."
Classic adult logic. Reid and I are vaguely the same age, so of course we're basically soul mates. It's like horoscopes. Somehow I'm supposed to believe that I'm similar in some meaningful way to every single person born on my birthday. Or every single Sagittarius. I mean, I barely have anything in common with Cassie, and we were born six minutes apart. ~ Becky Albertalli

But then jJax said, "Yet don't we always go looking for danger?"
"And we have a Metal to save," Robb added.
Talle shook her head. "Who is now a brainwashed murdering robot who wants to KILL us."
"But he didn't," Ana argued, painfully aware of the wound in her stomach. If he had wanted to kill her, he could have. He knew how. She didn't tell them what Di had whispered before he plunged the blade into her, wishing to have let her burn. That was not Di. So, she kept it to herself, a secret between her and her new scars. And that means the HIVE didn't take everything. The HIVE WON'T take everything. The Iron Kingdom isn't mine--it's ours. We're the outcasts, the rebels, the refugees--"
"And the royalty," said Jax.
"And the royalty," she agreed. "We're part of the Iron Kingdom. We're the parts no one remembers, so they'll never see us coming. Who's with me?"
Jax and Robb raised their hands without hesitation, and then Lenda, and Talle. The captain pursed her lips, blinking the stray tears out of her eyes, and then she nodded because Ana knew she just wanted to keep her safe--but now it was Ana's turn to save people.
"To the ends of the universe, darling," Siege finally replied.
Ana's heart swelled. She held tightly to Di's memory core, a lifeline glowing with hope in the dark. Once, she had not known who she could be without Di, and once she couldn't have fathomed the thought. But now she knew she carried Di with her, and Barger, and Wick, a ~ Ashley Poston

Religion without sense is like a car with no wheels. You can be in it, but it won't take you anywhere. We must be logical and good-natured if we want it to take us places for the greater good. ~ Torron-Lee Dewar

And Thou, vast Ocean! on whole awful face Time's iron feet can print no ruin trace. ~ Robert Montgomery

You can access that on many levels and the human spirit and the human mind responds to those themes because they recognise the veracity of them. That they are real things. Sometimes it even goes beyond logic, it's just a sense of something. ~ Mel Gibson

If you look at a multi-player game, it's the people who are playing the game who are often more valuable than all of the animations and models and game logic that's associated with it. ~ Gabe Newell

O poor, unthinking human heart! Error will not go away, logic and reason are slow to penetrate.We cling with both arms to false hope, refusing to believe in the weightiest proofs against it, embracing it with all our strength. In the end it escapes, ripping our veins and draining our heart's blood; until, regaining consciousness, we rush to fall into snares of delusion all over again ~ Rabindranath Tagore

When dead men come hunting in the night, do you think it matters who sits on the Iron Throne? ~ George R R Martin

I've loved men that wear un-ironed clothes, it doesn't make me fall out of love. When you love someone, you should see beyond their image. It just makes me want to iron their shirt. But once you love a person, they could wear a garbage bag! ~ Olga Kurylenko

Sometimes absurd logic can be amusing and heart-touching. ~ Debasish Mridha

I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains,
And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about; ~ Christopher Marlowe

I wish I could tell you that the thought of deserting Vera never entered my mind, that my friend was in danger and I went to her rescue without hesitation. Truly, though, at that moment I hated her. I hated her for being clumsy at the worst possible time, for staring up at me with her panicked brown eyes, electing me to be her savior even though Grisha was the only one she had ever kissed. I knew that I could not live with the memory of those eyes pleading for me, and she knew it, too, and I hated her even as I jumped down from the gate, lifted her to her feet, and hauled her to the iron bars. ~ David Benioff

Not all vampires are created equal, you know. ~ Melika Dannese Lux

If you accept that pets can love us as much as we do them, then the logic is clear and cannot be denied. If you believe that there is a heaven for people, then they must be there, waiting for us, when we cross over. Heaven is love, and pets always share that with us. ~ Wallace Sife

In my experience a boy will change his goal from unobtainable to obtainable once he realizes which is which.
"By that logic you should settle for me."
"Doesn't work for girls. We want what we can't have. ~ Rick Remender

You need to be naive enough to do things differently. No big publishing house would have allowed us to co-create a fully designed, four color business book in landscape format - because it was contrary to the publishing industry logic. However, we thought of Business Model Generation as a product, not just a book - similar to Apple products. ~ Alexander Osterwalder

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom. ~ George Bernard Shaw

We're all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it's dinnertime. ~ Cheryl Strayed

It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general. ~ Charles Horton Cooley