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Fallacy Quotes

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Fallacy Quotes

“Im Kapitalismus wie im Kommunismus läuft alles (...) auf eine falsche Vorstellung hinaus, die wir vor vierzig Jahren beinahe überwunden hätten: auf den Trugschluss, ein Leben ohne Armut sei kein Recht, auf das alle Menschen Anspruch hätten, sondern ein Privileg, für das man arbeiten müsse.”

PovertyCapitalismPrivilegeCommunismRightFallacyKapitalismusRechtArmutKommunismus
Book:Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World
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“I cannot give up on my values and beliefs for the sake of respecting someone else’s values and morals. Because those values explain who am I. I prefer struggling and even dying for what I believe and what I don’t believe. Silence is not respect; it is not condemning brutality and cruelty, and neglecting your own existence as human being. I will be killed and so many others because of standing against the fallacy and misleading notion of religions. They will torture us and cut us in pieces alive and even won’t stop disrespecting our death bodies; that is how these monsters have been governing for hundreds thousands of years.”

ValuesSilenceRespectKillingTortureMoralsBeliefsFallacyHuman BeingStrugglingRespectingMisleading Notion
Author:M.F. Moonzajer
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“For Paley, a watch is purposeful and thus must have been created by a being with a purpose. A watch needs a watchmaker, just as a world needs a world-maker—God. Yet both Wallace and Paley might have heeded the lesson from Voltaire's Candide (1759), in which Dr. Pangloss, a professor of "metaphysico-theology-cosmolonigology," through reason, logic, and analogy "proved" that this is the best of all possible worlds: '"Tis demonstrated that things cannot be otherwise; for, since everything is made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end. Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches" (1985, p. 238). The absurdity of this argument was intended on the part of the author, for Voltaire firmly rejected the Panglossian paradigm that all is best in the best of all possible worlds. Nature is not perfectly designed, nor is this the best of all possible worlds. It is simply the world we have, quirky, contingent, and flawed as it may be.”

LogicFallacyPangloss
Book:Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
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“it seems that once again people engage in a search for evidence that is biased toward confirmation. Asked to assess the similarity of two entities, people pay more attention to the ways in which they are similar than to the ways in which they differ. Asked to assess dissimilarity, they become more concerned with differences than with similarities. In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked”

MindBrainPsychologyLogicHuman BehaviorFallacy
Book:How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life
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“A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation - or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown.”

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Author:Ayn Rand
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“Overview of the Fallacy of Division by Austin Cline In critical thinking, we often come across statements that fall victim to the fallacy of division. This common logical fallacy refers to an attribution placed onto an entire class, assuming that each part has the same property as the whole. These can be physical objects, concepts, or groups of people. By grouping elements of a whole together and assuming that every piece automatically has a certain attribute, we are often stating a false argument. This falls into the category of a fallacy of grammatical analogy. It can apply to many arguments and statements we make, including the debate over religious beliefs. The fallacy of division is similar to the fallacy of composition but in reverse. This fallacy involves someone taking an attribute of a whole or a class and assuming that it must also necessarily be true of each part or member. The fallacy of division takes the form of: X has property P. Therefore, all parts (or members) of X have this property P. Here are some obvious examples of the Fallacy of Division: The United States is the richest country in the world. Therefore, everyone in the United States must be rich and live well. [So pointing out one poor American does not refute the proposition that the United States is a rich country.]”

LogicCritical ThinkingFallacyFallacy Of Division
Author:Austine Cline
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“Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an action, by causing us to feel them; and we cannot fail to finish by knowing that fire burns, if we have burned ourselves. For this rough teacher, I should like, if possible, to substitute a more gentle one. I mean Foresight. For this purpose I shall examine the consequences of certain economical phenomena, by placing in opposition to each other those which are seen, and those which are not seen.”

ReasonGovernmentPoliticsFreedomLibertyEconomicsLogicLibertarianAnarchySelf KnowledgeUnseenTaxationTheftFallacyCollectivismStatismVoluntaryismAncapAustrian School Of EconomicsKeynesian
Author:Frédéric Bastiat
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“[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis.”

ArtModelsTraditionMeaningModernismFallacyAssumptionsAvant GardeArt HistoryTrope
Book:The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context
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“The greatest moral appeal of the doctrine of the Blank Slate comes from a simple mathematical fact: zero equals zero. This allows the Blank Slate to serve as a guarantor of political equality...[I]f we are all blank slates, the reasoning goes, we must all be equal. But if the slate of a newborn is not blank, different babies could have different things inscribed on their slates. Individuals, sexes, classes, and races might differ innately in their talents, abilities, interests, and inclinations. And that, it is thought, could lead to three evils. The first is prejudice: if groups of people are biologically different, it could be rational to discriminate against the members of some of the groups. The second is Social Darwinism: if differences among groups in their station in life...come from their innate constitutions, the differences cannot be blamed on discrimination, and that makes it easy to blame the victim and tolerate inequality. The third is eugenics: if people differ biologically in ways that other people value or dislike, it would invite them to try to improve society by intervening biologically -by encouraging or discouraging people's decisions to have children...or by killing them outright. The Nazis carried out the final solution because they thought Jews and other ethnic groups were biologically inferior. The fear of the terrible consequences that might arise from a discovery of innate differences has thus led many intellectuals to insist that such differences do not exist...”

PeopleHuman NatureDiscriminationFallacy
Author:Stephen Pinker
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“Death would not surprise us as often as it does, if we let go of the misbelief that newborns are less mortal than the elderly.”

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Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“You pay full price for each error. You pay full price for each fault You pay full price for each inaccuracy You pay full price for each omission You pay full price for each slip You pay full price for each blunder You pay full price for each miscalculation You pay full price for each misunderstanding You pay full price for each flaw You pay full price for each oversight You pay full price for each misinterpretation You pay full price for each fallacy.”

PayYouMisunderstandingFallacyPriceErrorOversight
Author:-human bot
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“There is an universal tendency amongst mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us. Hence the frequency and beauty of the prosopopoeia in poetry, where trees, mountains and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion. (Section 3, paragraph 2).”

MaliceFallacyPersonificationAnthropocentrismTransferenceAnthropomorphismPersonify
Book:The Natural History of Religion
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“People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon. Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but the sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.”

FollyFallacyHeliocentrismAppeal To AuthorityGeocentrismAppeal To Ancient WisdomArgument From Authority
Book:The Table Talk of Martin Luther
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“The Escalation Game is not an exotic brainteaser. Real life presents us with quandaries in which we are, as the saying goes, in for a penny, in for a pound. They include long-running labor strikes, dueling lawsuits, and literal wars of attrition, in which each nation feeds men and matériel into the maw of the war machine hoping the other side will exhaust itself first. The common rationale is “We fight so that our boys will not have died in vain,” a textbook example of the sunk-cost fallacy but also a tactic in the pathetic quest for a Pyrrhic victory. Many of the bloodiest wars in history were wars of attrition, showing once again how the infuriating logic of game theory may explain some of the tragedies of the human condition. Though persisting with a certain probability may be the least bad option once one is trapped in an Escalation Game, the truly rational strategy is not to play in the first place.”

WarFallacyEscalationGame Theory
Book:Rationality
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“A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension. I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow. In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze. I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge;' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead. But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning. There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. 'If I have seen further than other men,' said Isaac Newton, 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”

ScienceHorrorResearchDiscoveryNewtonFallacyHistory Of ScienceCondescensionIsaac NewtonHistorian Of Science
Book:Adding a Dimension: Seventeen Essays on the History of Science
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“學生在做科學實驗時，也經常發生這種情況。通常學生都知道實驗會出現怎樣的結果，所以他們會動一些手腳，努力讓結果更漂亮。在讀取計量器的刻度時，會將數值讀得高一點，或是低一點，當得出接近理想的結果時，就會感到滿足，完全沒有發現自己犯了根本性的錯誤。在判斷實驗是否正確時，最好事先不知道會得出怎樣的結果，同樣地，我認為不告訴你們那片拼圖是誰會比較好，這就是我剛才說的，希望答案具有客觀性。”

ScienceFallacyLogical ThinkingExperiment
Book:Silent Parade
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“There is an old song which asserts 'the best things in life are free.' Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted...and get it without toil, without sweat, without tears. Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.”

PeopleBelieveWantedPainLife IsValuesSongEffortDemocracyCenturyTearsBirthVoteBreathsNobleExperimentsBest ThingsTragicSweatCollapseThings In LifeToilTwentieth CenturyFallacyDecadenceBest Things In LifeOld SongBest Things In Life Are Free
Book:Starship Troopers
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