I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is … for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.
A.J. AYERNo morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
More A.J. Ayer Quotes
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Even logical positivists are capable of love.
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No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
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But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.
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Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man.
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Theism is so confused and the sentences in which “God” appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.
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While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.
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Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
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If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist’s assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.
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It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.
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We shall maintain that no statement which refers to a ‘reality’transcending the limits of all possible sense- experience can possibly have any literal significance.
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The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.
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I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one’s existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable.
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We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.
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The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.
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I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.
A.J. AYER