Tautology quotes:

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  • All mathematics is tautology. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • How sublime is the audacious tautology of Mohammed, God is God! -- William Rounseville Alger
  • A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • My mother was Irish and she was superstitious, if you'll forgive the tautology. -- Rosalind Russell
  • Being both entrepreneurial and social is no longer an oxymoron, but rather a tautology. -- Jeremy Rifkin
  • To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was tautology. -- Mark Twain
  • Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology. -- Theodor Adorno
  • The two sides of the equation are the same. We have a tautology. The definition is meaningless. -- Norman Macbeth
  • Now this principle of induction cannot be a purely logical truth like a tautology or an analytic statement. . . . -- Karl Popper
  • All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact -- Herbert Simon
  • Pure logic could never lead us to anything but tautologies; it can create nothing new; not from it alone can any science issue. -- Henri Poincare
  • Logic issues in tautologies, mathematics in identities, philosophy in definitions; all trivial, but all part of the vital work of clarifying and organising our thought. -- Frank P. Ramsey
  • Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation.. -- Peter Atkins
  • In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection--quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection tautology. -- Arthur Koestler
  • A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything. -- Heidi Julavits
  • lovers, it is well known, carry the art of tautology to its utmost perfection, and even the most impatient of them can both bear to hear and repeat the same things times without number, till the sound becomes the echo to the sense or the nonsense previously uttered. -- Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
  • It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one. -- Alfred North Whitehead
  • There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy that connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply...the person who wants to read what I have written. -- Will Self
  • The principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else. And the reason for this is that we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves, without sinning against the rules which govern the use of language, and so making our utterances self-stultifying. In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies. -- A.J. Ayer
  • A long memory is the most subversive idea in America. A tautology is a thing which is tautological. A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets people's attention. If your kids look like you, it's hereditory. If they look like the neighbor, it's the environment. Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing. -- Dave Barry
  • The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies. -- Werner Heisenberg
  • Reason is simply a vast tautology. -- J. M. Coetzee
  • A critical discourse that had respect for the mystery of art would look to the sense of life which finds expression in paradox, metaphor, tautology, and syntax. -- Denis Donoghue
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