Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man.
A.J. AYERIt seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.
More A.J. Ayer Quotes
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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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Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
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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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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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Even logical positivists are capable of love.
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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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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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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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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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No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
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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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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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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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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 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. AYER