Valid Arguments Quotes

Logic, it is often said, is the study of valid arguments. It is a systematic attempt to distinguish valid arguments from invalid arguments. ~ W.H. Newton-Smith

Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself. ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

If any one asks: 'Why should I accept the results of valid arguments based on true premisses?' we can only answer by appealing to our principle. In fact, the truth of the principle is impossible to doubt, and its obviousness is so great that at first sight it seems almost trivial. Such principles, however, are not trivial to the philosopher, for they show that we may have indubitable knowledge which is in no way derived from objects of sense. The ~ Bertrand Russell

Tips for Facebook These tips are equally valid for Twitter, Tumblr, G+, and any other time-hungry Social Networking. Keep business and recreational separate. Run two profiles so you can demarcate the different activities. Business Social Networking fits in 'Time-Out'. Personal Social Networking belongs in 'Down-Time' Keep your beliefs and prejudices away from your Profile. Be a good Digital Citizen. ~ Stacy Hudson

I believe in what I believe, and I think after all these years I've heard a lot of arguments, and I'm convinced by the superiority of the arguments that are made on the conservative side. I think that's a better way to run a society. ~ Charles Krauthammer

I'm an American for marriage equality. I believe that love comes in all different shapes, sizes, and colors. So whether you're LGBT or straight, your love is valid, beautiful, and an incredible gift. ~ Demi Lovato

Whether the criticism of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments expressed by the leaders of the women's rights movement was justifiable or not is still being debated. But one thing seems clear: their defense of their own interests as white middle-class women - in a frequently egotistical and elitist fashion - exposed the tenuous and superficial nature of their relationship to the postwar campaign for Black equality. Granted, the two Amendments excluded women from the new process of enfranchisement and were thus interpreted by them as detrimental to their political aims. Granted, they felt they had as powerful a case for suffrage as Black men. Yet in articulating their opposition with arguments invoking the privileges of white supremacy, they revealed how defenseless they remained - even after years of involvement in progressive causes - to the pernicious ideological influence of racism. ~ Angela Y. Davis

Actually, the "leap of faith" - to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it - is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a "leap" that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias. Religion understands perfectly well that the "leap" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, which is why it often doesn't in fact rely on "faith" at all but instead corrupts faith and insults reason by offering evidence and pointing to confected "proofs." This evidence and these proofs include arguments from design, revelations, punishments, and miracles. Now that religion's monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see these evidences and proofs as the feeble-minded inventions that they are. ~ Christopher Hitchens

When John accuses "evildoers" of leading gullible people into sin, what troubles him is what troubled the Essenes: whether - or how much - to accommodate pagan culture. And when we see Jesus' earliest followers, including Peter, James, and Paul, not as we usually see them, as early Christians, but as they saw themselves - as Jews who had found God's messiah - we can see that they struggled with the same question. For when John charges that certain prophets and teachers are encouraging God's people to eat "unclean" food and engage in "unclean" sex, he is taking up arguments that had broken out between Paul and followers of James and Peter about forty years earlier - an argument that John of Patmos continues with a second generation of Paul's followers. For when we ask, who are the "evildoers" against whom John warns? we may be surprised by the answer. Those whom John says Jesus "hates" look very much like the Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul's teaching. Many commentators have pointed out that when we step back from John's angry rhetoric, we can see that the very practices John denounces are those that Paul had recommended. ~ Elaine Pagels

... the war about the genocide was truly a postmodern war: a battle between those who believed that because the realities we inhabit are constructs of our imaginations, they are all equally true or false, valid or invalid, just or unjust, and those who believed that constructs of reality can - in fact, must - be judged as right or wrong, good or bad.
While academic debates about the possibility of objective truth and falsehood are often rarified to the point of absurdity, Rwanda demonstrated that the question is a matter of life and death. ~ Philip Gourevitch

We, as women, have this slight flaw. Yes, admitting it, we are flawed with a faultless memory in regards to the good and bad in men...Stored within our memory banks is every loving gesture and sugar coated word, thoughtful moments, places, arguments, indiscretions, lies all catalogued, timed and dated...The list, for us, is endless...
It is not our fault...You give us so much to remember... ~ Virginia Alison

FAQ regarding my book were not about my use of commas or how the images went berserk, but about the political situation in Bosnia, about guilt and shame, about victims and perpetrators, about reasons, arguments and beliefs that led to the conflict in the first place, etc. All of this needed and still needs answering and ongoing discussions, but I mostly felt overwhelmed and unqualified to articulate anything worth more than personal experiences of the siege, of fear and refuge - all the things which I wrote about anyway. ~ Sasa Stanisic

To most people in the U.K., indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as 'what NASA does'. This perception is - in many respects - a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up U.S. and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match. ~ Martin Rees

Marriage is a series of desperate arguments people feel passionately about. ~ Katharine Hepburn

One can today easily demonstrate that there can be no valid derivation of a law of nature from any finite number of facts; but we still keep reading about scientific theories being proved from facts. Why this stubborn resistance to elementary logic? ~ Imre Lakatos

There is only one valid species of voyage, which is walk towards the men. ~ Ella Maillart

Some artists want to confront. Some want to invoke thought. They're all necessary and they're all valid. ~ Maya Lin

In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense; and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and repossession, and suffer his reason and feelings to determine for themselves; and that he will put on, or rather that he will not put off, the true character of man, and generously enlarge his view beyond the present day. ~ Thomas Paine

The slightest contact with logic makes all false arguments disintegrate. ~ Victor Hugo

He wrote arguments for and against life; he began to think the slowest and most painful form of suicide was living, running the whole decathlon of suffering, no breather or bottled water. Fear of dying was irrational. Death was utilitarian. Decrease in net resource consumption and planetary suffering. Increase in net comedy. There was no afterlife but there was a right-before-death, and medical research said it was loopy and nice, all white lights and gentle voices. With booze it wasn't even scary. Some people with terrible lives didn't kill themselves, but that didn't mean they shouldn't. Most people weren't alive and didn't mind. You couldn't regret it. ~ Tony Tulathimutte

Jews refuse to apply Kant's categorical imperative and be limited by universal rules. We might attempt a definition of a Jew as someone unable to make an objective moral judgement. His arguments will forever vary according to whether the subject is good for Jews or bad for Jews. WMD are bad in gentile hands but good in Jewish ones. Gentile nationalism is bad, devotion to the Jewish cause is good. Equal rights for Jews and non-Jews is good in Europe but bad in Palestine. ~ Israel Shamir

Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious. ~ William James

The Bible Christian Church in Philadelphia struggled along for about a hundred years. Early in the twentieth century it quietly expired. The group initiated the U.S. vegetarian movement and shaped its thesis. Metcalfe gave the cause moral and religious arguments, tended his pastorate, founded the first vegetarian society, edited its magazine, The American Vegetarian, and died in 1862 with full confidence that asparagus seed had a bright future as a coffee substitute; 'already in many places,' he said, 'becoming such a favorite, as to threaten wholly to supplant coffee at the breakfast table. ~ Gerald Carson

I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age - and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please.

"The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere.

"I'm working on it. ~ Andrew Sullivan

In comedy laughter settles all arguments. ~ Robert McKee

every fictional world was a work of fantasy, and whenever writers introduce a threat or a conflict into their story, they create the possibility of horror. He had been drawn to horror fiction, he said, because it took the most basic elements of literature and pushed them to their extremes. All fiction was make-believe, which made fantasy more valid (and honest) than realism. He ~ Joe Hill

Renowned for stating his convictions in the form of a paradox, as above, Chesterton, along with anyone who has something positive or equivocal to say about the human race, comes out on top in the crusade for truth. (There is nothing paradoxical about that.) Therefore, should your truth run counter to that of individuals who devise or applaud paradoxes that stiff up the status quo, you would be well advised to take your arguments, tear them up, and throw them in someone else's garbage. ~ Thomas Ligotti

There's a technique we use in our local rationalist cluster called "Is That
Your True Rejection?", and it works like this: Before you stake your
argument on a point, ask yourself in advance what you would say if that
point were decisively refuted. Would you relinquish your previous
conclusion? Would you actually change your mind? If not, maybe that point
isn't really the key issue. You should search instead for a sufficiently
important point, or collection of points, such that you would change your
mind about the conclusion if you changed your mind about the arguments.
It is, in our patois, "logically rude," to ask someone else to painstakingly
refute points you don't really care about yourself. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

... But sometimes a person begins with opinions and judgments and valid criticisms, but then things creep in that have nothing to do with forming opinions, and then it's all over with strict logic, and what you end up with is an absurd world republic and beautiful style. ~ Thomas Mann

I think the biggest lesson is the common one that gets in the way of most of us as artists - there are these messages in society that if you aren't hitting certain metrics, then you're not successful and you're not valid. ~ Lela Loren

A religious commitment coupled with theological awareness gives Jews a much better way to answer the claims made upon us by missionaries representing other religions than do the rather weak political and cultural arguments of the secularists. ~ David Novak

Unless thought is valid we have no reason to believe in the real universe. ~ C.S. Lewis

I would contend that it is more accurate to say there's no good person or evil person among those who die...Many [Shin commentaries] say the good person relies on self-power in an effort to achieve birth in the Pure Land, while the evil person does not operate in that way. Various explanations are brought forth, but the peaceful composure of the faces of the dead are completely oblivious to these weary arguments. ~ Shinmon Aoki

I want to know what's coming in the afterlife
before I sign off on arguments
in the kitchen & the sight of him
fleeing to the car
once he sees how far & wide,
how dark & deep
this frigid female mind can go. ~ Analicia Sotelo

you see it." Gurdjieff, a great spiritual teacher who taught in Europe and America in the early decades of the twentieth century, noted that if you think you're free and you don't know you are in prison, you can't escape. Gurdjieff saw us as being in a prison of our own habits of mind. Unless we understand how we are conditioned by our desires, we remain stuck in the reality they create, like a television program with an ad that keeps repeating over and over, implanting a subliminal message while we watch the show. BEYOND THOUGHT In the West we get rewarded for rational knowledge and learning. But only when you see that the assumptions you've been working under are not valid, ~ Ram Dass

The only valid rule for a work of art is that it be true to itself. ~ Marty Rubin

I don't think listening to Mr. Howard's arguments is likely to do me much harm. Mind you, I believe what I was brought up to believe. It saves a vast of bother - and back of it all, God is good. The trouble with Mr. Howard is that he's a leetle TOO clever. He thinks that he's bound to live up to his cleverness, and that it's smarter to thrash out some new way of getting to heaven than to go by the old track the common, ignorant folks is travelling. ~ L.M. Montgomery