A.J. Ayer Quotes

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

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.

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.

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.

It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?

I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.

Even logical positivists are capable of love.

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.

But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.