Fallacy quotes:

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  • The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn't work. -- Harold Washington
  • Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. -- Benito Mussolini
  • I think it's a fallacy that the harder you practice the better you get. -- Buddy Rich
  • Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. -- Thomas Huxley
  • A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy, yet there are very fine minds incapable of following mathematical demonstrations. -- Henri Poincare
  • Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy. -- Niklaus Wirth
  • All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy. -- John Ruskin
  • See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome. -- Wole Soyinka
  • I very much believe in the Intentional Fallacy. If Donald Trump lies and dopes and bumbles and staggers his way into peace in the middle east, he gets credit for it. He owns it. -- Gene Weingarten
  • You can't recover memories of a missing event. That's a fallacy. -- Betty Hill
  • Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
  • The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy. -- Marshall McLuhan
  • An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy. -- Steven Weinberg
  • The moment-of-conception fallacy implies that fertilization is a simple process with never a doubt as to whether it has or has not happened. -- George C. Williams
  • A man who marries a woman to educate her falls victim to the same fallacy as the woman who marries a man to reform him. -- Elbert Hubbard
  • Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another. -- Milton Friedman
  • The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better. -- Daniel Kahneman
  • I think the fallacy is to think that Women's Liberation meant that men and women would become interchangeable. That has not happened, and most men and women would not want it to happen. -- Christina Hoff Sommers
  • The fallacy in the progressive critique is the egalitarian dogma that no one should get more than what liberals deem is a 'fair' reward, nor should there be any risk to anyone to fail. -- Robert Agostinelli
  • The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded on fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older. -- William Lyon Phelps
  • The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded on a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older. -- William Lyon Phelps
  • A smattering of everything is worth little. It is a fallacy to suppose that an encyclopaedic knowledge is desirable. The mind is made strong, not through much learning, but by the thorough possession of something. -- Louis Agassiz
  • Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues. -- Daniel Kahneman
  • The idea that a war can be won by standing on the defensive and waiting for the enemy to attack is a dangerous fallacy, which owes its inception to the desire to evade the price of victory. -- Douglas Haig
  • The idea that a war can be won by standing on the defensive and waiting for the enemy to attack is a dangerous fallacy, which owes its inception to the desire to evade the price of victory. -- Douglas Haig
  • I feel that The American Dream is this fallacy that you come to the United States and win lotto. That's a disservice to The American Dream because the American Dream is worth striving for. And it's not easy. -- James Gray
  • That fallacy flies in the face of studies that show, every day, in every way, things are getting a little worse for America's minorities relative to the progress made by those in the top percentiles of assets and income. -- Harold Washington
  • I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called "scientific" mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips. -- Cynthia Ozick
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  • I live by fallacy. 'If I get enough nice Ikea furniture, I'll be a grown-up.' Then I catch myself. Or, 'If I get off by myself, away from the stress of modern life, I'll be OK.' Then I catch myself. -- Chuck Palahniuk
  • The Republican argument that raising the debt ceiling encourages additional future spending is logically irresponsible. The debt ceiling has to be raised to authorize spending already approved by Congress. Despite that fallacy, the GOP has been able to score political points with its argument. -- Eliot Spitzer
  • It's a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done. -- Jodi Picoult
  • The fallacy of monetary policy in the U.S. is to believe this money will go to the man on the street. It won't. It goes to the Mayfair economy of the well-to-do people and boosts asset prices of Warhols... Very happy. Very good for the Fed. Congratulations, Mr. Bernanke. -- Marc Faber
  • I think it's a fallacy to say that a good book sells itself. It doesn't happen. I'm a voracious reader and I can give you a long list of books which should have been best sellers but they aren't. How can you buy a book if you haven't heard of it? -- Amish Tripathi
  • The general nature of the speech act fallacy can be stated as follows, using "good" as our example. Calling something good is characteristically praising or commending or recommending it, etc. But it is a fallacy to infer from this that the meaning of "good" is explained by saying it is used to perform the act of commendation. -- John Searle
  • We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It's very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy - where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system. -- Nicholas A. Christakis
  • The supposed astronomical proofs of the theory [of relativity], as cited and claimed by Einstein, do not exist. He is a confusionist. The Einstein theory is a fallacy. The theory that ether does not exist, and that gravity is not a force but a property of space can only be described as a crazy vagary, a disgrace to our age. -- Charles Lane Poor
  • What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy. -- Tom Robbins
  • The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public . . . Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy. -- William Osler
  • Common sense is science exactly in so far as it fulfills the ideal of common sense; that is, sees facts as they are, or at any rate, without the distortion of prejudice, and reasons from them in accordance with the dictates of sound judgment. And science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. -- Thomas Huxley
  • The weeds of a seemingly learned and brilliant but actually trivial and empty philosophy of Nature which, after having been replaced some 50 years ago by the exact sciences, is now once more dug up by pseudo scientists from the lumber room of human fallacies, and like a trollop, newly attired in elegant dress and make-up, is smuggled into respectable company, to which she does not belong. -- Hermann Kolbe
  • We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It's very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy - where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system. That's clearly not the case when it comes to social systems. -- Nicholas A. Christakis
  • Sophistry is the fallacy of argument. -- Henry Ward Beecher
  • To expect reason is where the fallacy lies. -- Richard Russo
  • Zionism is the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history -- Henry Morgenthau, Sr.
  • It's hard bein' real in a world that's a fallacy. -- Meyhem Lauren
  • I am a person who recognizes the fallacy of humans. -- George W. Bush
  • Until I know this sure uncertainty, I'll entertain the offered fallacy. -- William Shakespeare
  • The greatest fallacy of democracy is that everyone's opinion is worth the same. -- Robert A. Heinlein
  • By committing the scientific method to religious claims you're committing a logical fallacy -- Francis Collins
  • Our life stories are at one and the same time reality, fallacy and fantasy... -- Rasheed Ogunlaru
  • Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence. -- Lewis Mumford
  • A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely. -- Vladimir Nabokov
  • Objectivity is a fallacy...there are different opinions, but you dont give them equal weight. -- Robert Bazell
  • The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside -- George Orwell
  • Pride is a fallacy. None of us are greater than the sum of our parts. -- Eric Hirzel
  • Somehow even a popular fallacy has an aspect of truth when it suits one's own case. -- Margaret Oliphant
  • The assumption that humans could be a reliable back up for the system was a fallacy! -- Astro Teller
  • To pretend you don't feel a certain strangeness after living in England for 40 years is a fallacy. -- Trevor McDonald
  • The question of naturalism is a fallacy, it does not exist... The photographic image replaces naturalistic experience. -- Sid Grossman
  • Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective. -- Craig Venter
  • The Keynesian belief that 'demand' is always at the root of underemployment and slow growth is a fallacy. -- Edmund Phelps
  • Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good. -- Freya Stark
  • A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it. -- George Eliot
  • It's a fallacy to believe that age in itself brings wisdom, but one thing it infallibly brings is experience. -- Gillian Linscott
  • No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful. -- Ernest Hemingway
  • Half the world's troubles come from men not being trained to resent a fallacy as much as an insult. -- Mary Renault
  • I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context. -- John Dewey
  • The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught. -- Sydney J. Harris
  • When a false argument puts on the appearance of a true one, then it is properly called a sophism or fallacy. -- Isaac Watts
  • I've never met anyone who has said, "My goal is to make America mediocre." That's a kind of hard-right conservative fallacy. -- Aaron Sorkin
  • A lot of actors aren't particularly good directors. And they're not particularly good with other actors. That's kind of a fallacy. -- Peter Mullan
  • The biggest public fallacy is that the market is always right. The market is nearly always wrong. I can assure you of that. -- Jim Rogers
  • "Isn't it fun getting older?" is really a terrible fallacy. That's like saying I prefer driving an old car with a flat tire. -- Katharine Hepburn
  • People exaggerate their confidence in their plans - something we call the planning fallacy... The existence of the plan tends to induce overconfidence. -- Daniel Kahneman
  • I'm offended by the is-ought fallacy, which has been used to justify slavery, women not being allowed to vote, children working in factories. -- Moby
  • And there's the fallacy of existence: the idea that one could be happy forever and age with a given situation or series of accomplishments. -- Sylvia Plath
  • Life may be miraculous in its unlikelihood in the universe, but it would be a fallacy to suggest that its rareness makes it inextinguishable. -- John Hodgman
  • Wrong is wrong; no fallacy can hide it, no subterfuge cover it so shrewdly but that the All-Seeing One will discover and punish it. -- Antoine Rivarol
  • Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely. -- Vladimir Nabokov
  • By exposing the fallacy of the UKâ??s extradition arrangements with the US, I leave with my head held high having won the moral victory. -- Babar Ahmad
  • It is a fallacy of the old schools to divide man into parcels, elements, thoughts, emotions, intuitions, etc. All human faculties consist of an interconnected whole. -- Alfred Korzybski
  • It would be a fallacy to deduce that the slow writer necessarily comes up with superior work. There seems to be scant relationshipbetween prolificness and quality. -- Fannie Hurst
  • The cultural problem was 'the fallacy of insignificance', and it was a philosophical form of this fallacy that had somehow landed existentialism in a cul de sac. -- Colin Wilson
  • [No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
  • The fallacy of the neoclassicals is their tenet that total employment, though hit by shocks, can be said always to be heading back to some normal level. -- Edmund Phelps
  • It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron. -- H. L. Mencken
  • I call the notion that we are nothing but killer apes the Beethoven fallacy. Beethoven was disorganized and messy, and yet his music is the epitome of order. -- Frans de Waal
  • I think it's a fallacy that only people in elected office can come up with solutions that solve our problems. I just think maybe there's a different paradigm. -- Benjamin Carson
  • I must begin with a good body of facts and not from a principle (in which I always suspect some fallacy) and then as much deduction as you please. -- Charles Darwin
  • There is a popular fallacy that falling down is the mark of a poor skater. But the truth is that when one stops falling, he has probably stopped improving. -- Dick Button
  • The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy. -- Eric Voegelin
  • The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician. -- Sydney J. Harris
  • People assume that because you have graced the same stage as the star act, in front of thousands, you must be reaping similar financial rewards. This is a complete fallacy. -- John Barrow
  • Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe. -- Clifford Allbutt
  • The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true. -- Richard Flanagan
  • Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe. -- Clifford Allbutt
  • There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically through the ears, as it were, of a skeptic. -- Margaret Oliphant
  • Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality. -- Colin Wilson
  • The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential. -- Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
  • The chief vestige of subjectivity is the fallacy that everybody else also cares about the same things as the observer, and/or lives in his/her exact same state of mind -- Stephan Attia
  • It is the 'zoomorphic' or 'rattomorphic' fallacy - the expressed or implicit contention that there is no essential difference between rat and man - which makes American psychology so profoundly disturbing. -- Ludwig von Bertalanffy
  • Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do, and what they leave behind. -- Terry Pratchett
  • We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals. -- James Russell Lowell
  • I'm always identifying some fallacy in my own life. I'm sort of making fun of myself by exploring and unpacking just why I'm sort of automatically thrown to be a certain way. -- Chuck Palahniuk
  • The assertion fallacy ... is the fallacy of confusing the conditions for the performance of the speech act of assertion with the analysis of the meaning of particular words occurring in certain assertions. -- John Searle
  • We have a cultural notion that if children were not engineered, if we did not manipulate them, they would grow up as beasts in the field. This is the wildest fallacy in the world. -- Joseph Chilton Pearce
  • I hate to force anything. A lot of people say that comedy is twenty percent truth, and eighty percent fallacy. I believe that you have to have lived through something to write about it. -- Tone Bell
  • It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly. -- William Faulkner
  • The key fallacy of so called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available. -- Thomas Sowell
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