Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
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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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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It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.
A.J. AYER