No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
A.J. AYERWhy should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
More A.J. Ayer Quotes
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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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Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
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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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I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.
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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.
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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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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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It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.
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It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.
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Even logical positivists are capable of love.
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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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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.
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There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis – about the meaning of what we say – and there is all of this … all of life.
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The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.
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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.
A.J. AYER