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.
A.J. AYER
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.
More A.J. Ayer Quotes
-
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.
A.J. AYER -
I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.
A.J. AYER -
No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
A.J. AYER -
Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
A.J. AYER -
The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.
A.J. AYER -
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 -
There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis – about the meaning of what we say – and there is all of this … all of life.
A.J. AYER -
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.
A.J. AYER -
While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.
A.J. AYER -
Even logical positivists are capable of love.
A.J. AYER -
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 -
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.
A.J. AYER -
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 -
It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.
A.J. AYER -
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.
A.J. AYER -
Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man.
A.J. AYER