Reductio Ad Absurdum Quotes

Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent. ~ Randall Jarrell

In regard to absurdism, Samuel Beckett is sometimes considered to be the epitome of the postmodern artist … In fact, he is the aesthetic reductio ad absurdum of absurdism: no longer whistling in the dark, after waiting for Godot, he is trying to be radically silent, wordless in the dark. ~ William Desmond

Q5. Have not I merely shown that it is possible to outdo just a particular algorithmic procedure, A, by defeating it with the computation Cq(n)? Why does this show that I can do better than any A whatsoever?

The argument certainly does show that we can do better than any algorithm. This is the whole point of a reductio ad absurdum argument of this kind that I have used here. I think that an analogy might be helpful here. Some readers will know of Euclid's argument that there is no largest prime number. This, also, is a reductio ad absurdum. Euclid's argument is as follows. Suppose, on the contrary, that there is a largest prime; call it p. Now consider the product N of all the primes up to p and add 1:

N=2*3*5*...*p+1.

N is certainly larger than p, but it cannot be divisible by any of the prime numbers 2,3,5...,p (since it leaves the remainder 1 on division); so either N is the required prime itself or it is composite-in which case it is divisible by a prime larger than p. Either way, there would have to be a prime larger than p, which contradicts the initial assumption that p is the largest prime. Hence there is no largest prime. The argument, being a reductio ad absurdum, does not merely show that a particular prime p can be defeated by finding a larger one; it shows that there cannot be any largest prime at all. Likewise, the Godel-Turing argument above does not merely show that a particular algorithm A can be defeated, it shows that there ~ Roger Penrose

Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absurdum of my behaviorism. I disagree with this second point, but I agree with the first. I hold further that the behaviorism approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game. ~ G.H. Hardy

The reductio ad absurdum of M.D.'s view, I argued, was that science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity's powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilization drives itself to extinction. M.D. embraced my objection with mordant glee. 'Precisely. Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to saves, to modern man, are the same faculties that'll snuff out Homo Sapiens before this century is out! You'll probably live to see it happen, you fortunate son. What a symphonic crescendo that'll be, eh? ~ David Mitchell

It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of laissez-faire into economic reality by the systematic retreat of states from any regulation or control of the activities of profit-making enterprise. This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx. ~ Eric Hobsbawm

A good sense of humour is the sign of a healthy perspective, which is why people who are uncomfortable around humour are either pompous (inflated) or neurotic (oversensitive). Pompous people mistrust humour because at some level they know their self-importance cannot survive very long in such an atmosphere, so they criticise it as "negative" or "subversive." Neurotics, sensing that humour is always ultimately critical, view it as therefore unkind and destructive, a reductio ad absurdum which leads to political correctness. Not that laughter can't be unkind and destructive. Like most manifestations of human behaviour it ranges from the loving to the hateful. The latter produces nasty racial jokes and savage teasing; the former, warm and affectionate banter, and the kind of inclusive humour that says, "Isn't the human condition absurd, but we're all in the same boat. ~ John Cleese

The second [argument about motion] is the so-called Achilles, and it amounts to this, that in a race the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.
Statement of the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox in the relation of the discrete to the continuous.; perhaps the earliest example of the reductio ad absurdum method of proof. ~ Zeno Of Elea

The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it. ~ Frederick C. Beiser

If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshiped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as worship. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

The obvious reductio ad absurdum is Holocaust deniers: Should their perspective be provided, for "balance," any time someone writes about the Holocaust? ~ Chris Mooney

The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked. ~ Germaine Greer

It seemed a ruse that fear of death should be the sole motivation for living and, yet, to quell this fear made the prospect of living itself seem all the more absurd; to extend this further, the notion of living one's life for the purposes of pondering the absurdity of living was an even greater absurdity in and of itself, which thus, by reductio ad absurdum, rendered the fear of death a necessary function of life and any lack thereof, a trifling matter rooted in self-inflicted incoherence. ~ Ashim Shanker

Nihilism remains partial until it is realized that the reductio ad hominem56 is actually a reductio hominis. "The night brought on by the death of God is a night in which every individual identity perishes. When the heavens are darkened, and God disappears, man does not stand autonomous and alone. He ceases to stand. Or, rather, he ceases to stand out from the world and himself, ceases to be autonomous and apart. No longer can selfhood and self-consciousness stand purely and solely upon itself: no longer can a unique and individual identity stand autonomously upon itself. The death of the transcendence of God embodies the death of all autonomous selfhood, an end of all humanity which is created in the image of the absolutely sovereign and transcendent God. ~ Mark C. Taylor

Yes John and I were together for nearly ten years. It was nice for a long time. I worked for Oldmanston and Pheiff, one of LA's big ad agencies. He and I bought a loft in one of the downtown renovations. Very Pricey. I had a studio. It was all very Queer as Folk. ~ Z.A. Maxfield

Latin motto of Coates Academy: Ad augusta, per angusta. To high places by narrow roads. They're ~ Michael Grant

Very occasionally, a simplified form of communion and of adult baptism for new members of the church would be enacted but no Separatist was ever married in church, because there is no hint of a marriage ceremony in scripture and the primitive church had not considered marriage a sacrament before AD 537. ~ Adam Nicolson

In 1997, I was working with Greg Wilson of Red Ball Tiger, our ad agency at the time, when he came up with an addition to the famous slogan 'I guarantee it' that I was known for saying. ~ George Zimmer

Love is the miracle of life. ~ A.D. Posey

Anything to do with persuasion is rhetoric, right down to the argumentum ad baculum, which means threatening somebody with a stick until they agree with you. ~ Mark Forsyth

Sometimes writing is like playing with fire… like trying to tame an uncontrollable beast. ~ A.D. Posey

Christianity had not started off as the ideology of an empire. Virtually nothing is known about its supposed founder, Jesus of Nazareth. There is not even any definite proof he was a historical rather than a mythical figure. Certainly the proof is not to be found in the Christian New Testament. It claims his birth was in Bethlehem in the Roman province of Judaea, where his family had gone for a census during the time of Augustus. But there was no census at the time stated and Judaea was not a Roman province at the time. When a census was held in AD 7 it did not require anyone to leave their place of residence. Similarly, the New Testament locates Jesus's birth as in the time of King Herod, who died in 4 BC. Roman and Greek writers of the time make no mention of Jesus and a supposed reference by the Jewish-Roman writer Josephus is almost certainly a result of the imagination of medieval monks.100 ~ Chris Harman

And then lo and behold IBM, Apple and Motorola took an ad in all the newspapers, double page ad, and said, announcing the chip that they were now able to manufacture it and that they were going to kill Intel. ~ Arthur Rock

If you'd put it in a Powerpoint deck don't put it in your ad ~ Lee Clow

In that small town of old women and angry men;
They teach girls how to speak in a lower tone
How to nod their heads and not dare to say no.
They teach them not to walk alone in empty streets.
They give them hundreds of rules for how to love, live and even dream.
They color their worlds in black and white; so that they couldn't paint ones in their own.
And those who dare to ask questions, to argue, to refuse and change!
They have been called hoes, bitches and men wanna be
Disobedience; that's what they call it in my society ….. ~ Samiha Totanji

I am convinced that in order for you, as a patient, to be protected, it has to be transparent, evidence-based, objective information. Not self-serving information. Not pharma-driven information. Not ad-driven information. It is transparent, objective, evidence-based information. ~ Patrick Soon-Shiong

Ai taught me a Terran game played on squares with little stones, called go, an excellent difficult game. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

President Bush was in Los Angeles yesterday where he announced his new campaign theme - "Safer, Stronger, and Tested." Isn't that a condom ad? ~ Jay Leno

If I amount to anything it'll be as part of a band. That's it. I'll be playing dive bars and shitty clubs, and I'll get high in the alleys and do lines in the bathrooms, and eventually I'll OD and that'll be that." I glance ad her. "Is that the life you want? ~ Jasinda Wilder

In the far reaches of the world, under a lost and lonely hill, lies the TOMB OF HORRORS. This labyrinthine crypt is filled with terrible traps, strange and ferocious monsters, rich and magical treasures, and somewhere within rests the evil DemiLich. ~ Ernest Cline

Writing is not always a priority. . . .I only write those things that are necessary for me to write. I love to write, and when I'm not writing, I often feel as if I'm betraying my art, my gift, my calling, but that sensation is probably hubris or neurosis as much as anything else. The problem, and one of the joys of writing poetry, is that none of us can really count on entering the canon. The chances are that none of our work will survive long after we're gone. That's just the way it is. To feel otherwise is foolish. we write in competition with the dead for the attention of the unborn. We are writing poems that are trying to take the attention of people away from Sappho, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Baudelaire. Good luck to you! There's a built-in failure to writing poetry that I find comforting.
If you know you're doomed to failure, then you can work freely. People who think their work is going to last, or that it matters, well . . . I always try to disabuse my students of their desire to write for fame. I ask them, "Who here has read Shakespeare?" Everyone raises his or her hand. We agree that his work is immortal, then I remind them: "he's still dead. He's as dead as he'd have been if you hadn't read him; and you'll be dead too someday, no matter how well you write." To sacrifice your life for your art is an appalling notion. On the other hand, I have been called to be a poet, ad it's an unimaginably rich gift. Like every artist, I know that in order to be a moral, eff ~ Tony Leuzzi

An incredible advertising career is not about creating an incredibly amazing ad, it's about making an incredible amazing ad every single day of your career, it's about getting those adds killed, and resurrecting them over and over again. It's about your season average not that occasional home-run. ~ Lee Clow

Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum. ~ Susan Sontag

The air, soil and water cumulatively degrade; the climates and oceans destabilize; species become extinct at a spasm rate across continents; pollution cycles and volumes increase to endanger life-systems at all levels in cascade effects; a rising half of the world is destitute as inequality multiplies; the global food system produces more and more disabling and contaminated junk food without nutritional value; non-contagious diseases multiply to the world's biggest killer with only symptom cures; the vocational future of the next generation collapses across the world while their bank debts rise; the global financial system has ceased to function for productive investment in life-goods; collective-interest agencies of governments and unions are stripped while for-profit state subsidies multiply; police state laws and methods advance while belligerent wars for corporate resources increase; the media are corporate ad vehicles and the academy is increasingly reduced to corporate functions; public sectors and services are non-stop defunded and privatized as tax evasion and transnational corporate funding and service by governments rise at the same time at every level. ~ John McMurtry

Alyque and his team began a public interest ad campaign (for which Lintas had become famous) to raise aid for drought stricken Rajasthan and raised substantial assistance. A death row convict wrote to me from his cell. In the epochal Express style that always encouraged the reporter, the editors ran the story on the front page. ~ Teesta Setalvad

WE DIE. You will never hear those words spoken in a television ad. Yet this central fact of human existence colors our world and how we perceive ourselves within it. ~ Christopher Locke

If you don't think screenwriting is a work of art, good luck in your life without a soul. ~ A.D. Posey

Well, it's possible that the new infusion of ad money against Donald Trump kept his margins in Kentucky and Louisiana down a bit. But we're also seeing something that we've never seen in 100 years, which is we are seeing the crackup of a major American political party. ~ Mara Liasson

Thanksgiving is a time for gratitude. It can also be a time when feeling grateful can be an acrobatic feat that you're just not up for. There's no rules that need to be followed here. Authentic living is your only option, so it's ok to turn off the tv when another ad screams for you to be a certain way just because the calendar says so. Power of suggestion can be great medicine - but don't judge yourself or a loved one who is having trouble learning the words to this song. It's a tough season from some people. Huddle and cuddle with those you trust and love. That's real medicine and it's a good place to be during the holidays. xoxo ~ Deborah Pardes

There's a table with some catalogues and a guest book in the corner; there are artworks. Today, I need so badly to be inspired by them, even though I hate that word: inspiration. It crops up in too many advertisements, politcians' speeches, Disney films, its meaning obliterated. I refuse to be 'inspired' in the same insipid way that ad executives and politicians and Hollywood producers suggest I should be. What I need from these works is to be reminded of why I used to care about art - so much that I'd try and make it for myself. ~ Sara Baume

What are you looking at?"

"I was thinking about becoming a lady of the night."

"What?"

"There's actually an ad looking for one. Can you believe it? It pays a grand a week."

"Shit, for a grand a week, "I'll become a lady of the night. ~ L.A. Fiore

There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes."--a civic leader quoted in a New American Library ad (1951) American Pulp tells the story of the midcentury golden age of pulp paperbacks and how they brought modernism to Main Street, democratized literature and ideas, spurred social mobility, and helped readers fashion new identities. ~ Paula Rabinowitz

This situation is further complicated when the linguist is confronted with speakers of Romany. The largest minority in Europe have no state of their own, and consequently no formal legal institutions or legal lexicon, although there is a formal rhetoric used before Romany ad hoc tribunals. The language professional must therefore draw on the legal terminology of the official language of the Romany speaker's country of origin when facilitating interaction between Romany speakers and institutions in the UK. ~ Jovan Autonomašević

The Steyer brothers deplore the Koch brothers' big-money contributions, as they seek to trump them. That the formers' money in part derives from coal investments matters little given their green intentions. The media are furious over rumor-mongering about Hillary Clinton's health, but that is an ad hoc concern, not one born of principle about leaving the private health issues of public figures alone, given that they not long ago gladly trafficked in sick rumors about Sarah Palin's supposed faked pregnancy. ~ Anonymous

Love your story. ~ A.D. Posey

Perspective and perseverance are carved by time and constructed by wisdom. ~ A.D. Sams

Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

I don't know what the exact answer is, Bax, but I do know you made the choice to be ab ad guy and you can make the choice not to be. ~ Jay Crownover

We were the first people to do advertising on the Web. I actually saw in 1993 that the ad could be the content, the destination. ~ Tim O'Reilly

You can find old Jewish newspapers from Detroit that have my promotional ad in them. It was a totally insane time in my life. Paul Rudd was also a bar mitzvah emcee, you know? It was like being a local rock star in Detroit. ~ James Wolk

What happened was I began to eventually lose everything because cocaine had such a hold on me. I wouldn't show up to do things I had been hired to do - whether it was film for a video or do an ad for a magazine or something. I'd be out partying with cocaine. Eventually, I began to lose everything. So, I left California and went back to Alabama in an attempt to try to get my life together - but geographical location didn't necessarily help me because the real problem was in me. ~ Jay Haizlip

Don't be afraid of us, for now you are not a prisoner. We are extending you an invitation to collaborate with us and maybe to help us put an end to this war that we are engaged in without even looking for it. We are also hoping that, with your special mental abilities, you can help throw some light into this Ancient message," the "Humanoid" said. "You are *The Chosen One*, we think. If it's in your veins to use your powers, as we think it is, we may all win and I am not only talking about the war. Maybe if we make sense of what the Ancient message says, we can all survive in Harmony, and I mean all the worlds and civilizations in the Universe. ~ AD Proca

It's a new world. Stand up. ~ A.D. Posey

Back in the days when American billboard advertising was in flower [said Hemingway], there were two slogans that I always rated above all others: the old Cremo Cigar ad that proclaimed, Spit Is a Horrid Word-but Worse on the end of Your Cigar, and Drink Schlitz in Brown Bottles and Avoid that Skunk Taste. You don't get creative writing like that any more. ~ A. E. Hotchner

The conspiracies that I've researched and encountered, they seem to happen very ad hoc: they become conspiracies when it's necessary to have a conspiracy. ~ Nic Pizzolatto

A home isn't just a roof over our heads. A home is a place where we feel loved and where we love others. It's a place we belong. Love is what makes a home, not the contents inside the house or the number on the door. It's the people waiting for us across the threshold, the people who will take us in their arms after a ad day and kiss us good night and good morning everyday for the rest of our lives. ~ Hermann Hesse

Despite the clear scientific consensus, a veritable brigade of self-proclaimed, underinformed armchair experts lurk on comment threads the world over, eager to pour scorn on climate science. Barrages of ad hominem attacks all too often await both the scientists working in climate research and journalists who communicate the research findings. ~ David Robert Grimes

Several years after she obtained the patent for her game, and finding it difficult to support herself on the $10 a week she was earning as a stenographer, Magie staged an audacious stunt mocking marriage as the only option for women; it made national headlines. Purchasing an advertisement, she offered herself for sale as a "young woman American slave" to the highest bidder. Her ad said that she was "not beautiful, but very attractive," and that she had "features full of character and strength, yet truly feminine. ~ Anonymous

Zero has had a long history. The Babylonians invented the concept of zero; the ancient Greeks debated it in lofty terms (how could something be nothing?); the ancient Indian scholar Pingala paired Zero with the numeral 1 to get double digits; and both the Mayans and the Romans made Zero a part of their numeral systems. But Zero finally found its place around AD 498, when the Indian astronomer Aryabhatta sat up in bed one morning and exclaimed, "Sthanam sthanam dasa gunam" - which translates, roughly as, "place to place in ten times in value". With that, the idea of decimal based place value notion was born. Now Zero was on a roll: It spread to the Arab world, where it flourished; crossed the Iberian Peninsula to Europe (thanks to the Spanish Moors); got some tweaking from the Italians; and eventually sailed the Atlantic to the New World, where zero ultimately found plenty of employment (together with the digit 1) in a place called Silicon Valley. ~ Dan Ariely

One of his friends, a marketing professor at Stanford, said, "Think about this from a marketing perspective. We can change behavior in a short television ad. We don't do it with information. We do it with identity: 'If I buy a BMW, I'm going to be this kind of person. ~ Chip Heath

I despise this ad, and the TV on which it plays with those flashing lights. I mourn the conversations murdered by their juvenile intrusions. ~ Kathleen Rooney