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Tautology Quotes

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“In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology: ‘Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write.’ And could afford to write, they might have added. In contrast they speak of George Garrett, whom Orwell met in Liverpool, a gifted writer, seaman, dockworker, Communist militant, ‘the plain facts of [whose] situation—on the dole, married and with kids, the family crowded into two rooms—made it impossible for him to attempt any extended piece of writing.’ Orwell’s writing life then was from the start an affirmation of unexamined bourgeois values. This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary: I urged him to write his autobiography, but as usual, living in about two rooms on the dole with a wife (who I gather objects to his writing) and a number of kids, he finds it impossible to settle to any long work and can only do short stories. Apart from the enormous unemployment in Liverpool, it is almost impossible for him to get work because he is blacklisted everywhere as a Communist. Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place.)”

WritingPoliticsPovertyEconomicsBourgeoisieGeorge OrwellTautologyEdward Said
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“Reason is indeed all about identity, or, rather, tautology. Mathematics is the eternal, necessary system of rational, analytic tautology. Tautology is not “empty”, as it is so often characterized by philosophers. It is in fact the fullest thing there, the analytic ground of existence, and the basis of everything. Mathematical tautology has infinite masks to wear, hence delivers infinite variety. Mathematical tautology provides Leibniz’s world that is “simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.” No hypothesis cold be simpler than the one revolving around tautologies concerning “nothing.” There is something – existence – because nothing is tautologous, and “something” is how that tautology is expressed. If we write x = 0, where x is any expression that has zero as its net result, then we have a world of infinite possibilities where something (“x”) equals nothing (0).”

ReasonZeroNothingSomethingRationalismCompleteFullOntological MathematicsTautologyHolism
Book:God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics
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“The idea that there is something necessarily wrong with circular logic is itself a logical fallacy. If there is nothing wrong with the starting premises then the conclusions are necessarily correct too. In fact, only circular logic can be correct. Only such logic can offer total holistic coherence and analytic closure, i.e. perfect tautology – provided it is the correct circular logic, which means it must have the correct starting premise: the PSR itself.”

PhilosophyWholeCompletenessTautologyHolismPsrLogical FallaciesPrinciple Of Sufficient ReasonCircular LogicLinear Logic
Book:Tractatus Logico-Mathematicus: How Mathematics Explains Reality
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“A good critic is trying to tell you what she has learned about herself from the reading of a particular piece of literature. A bad reviewer is often trying to tell you how smart he is by declaring whether or not he liked a particular book. If he liked the book, then this is the kind of book a superior person likes, and vice versa. He might try to explain why he didn’t like it, but the review is really just a tautology. “I didn’t like this book because it is bad,” is equivalent to “This book is bad because I didn’t like it.”

ReviewersSolipsismTautologyGet Over YourselfReviewingWhy Trolls Troll
Author:Kevin Guilfoile
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“Under capital’s growth imperative, there is no horizon – no future point at which economists and politicians say we will have enough money or enough stuff. There is no end, in the double sense of the term: no maturity and no purpose. The unquestioned assumption is that growth can and should carry on for ever, for its own sake. It is astonishing, when you think about it, that the dominant belief in economics holds that no matter how rich a country has become, their GDP should keep rising, year after year, with no identifiable end point.”

PoliticsCapitalismEconomicsGreenGdpTautologyDegrowth
Book:Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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“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 exactly the person who wants to read what I have written...”

WantPersonsIdeasAgeRaceClassWrittenIdentityReaderPagesGenderNakedIntimacyAgencyConnectingThrillingNationalityWritten WordTautology
Author:Will Self
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“Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology - we are quite unable to imagine the contrary...”

IfsWorldMindSeemsConsciousnessImagineHappeningsEvidenceContraryBluntTautologyCircumstantial Evidence
Author:Erwin Schrodinger
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“The man who has learned that three plus one are four doesn't have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that's that. He cannot conceive a different sum. There are mathematicians who say that three plus one is a tautology for four, a different way of saying "four" ... If three plus one can be two, or fourteen, then reason is madness.”

IfsKnowsMenWayTwoDifferentReasonThreeNumbersPiecesFourHe ManMadnessMathematicsProofChessDifferent WaysPlusMathematicianCoinsPencilsAssertionFourteenDiceTautologyChess Pieces
Book:The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory
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“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.”

WellsArtSoundNumbersKnownBearsLoversPerfectionRepeatsNonsenseEchoesWell KnownImpatientTautology
Book:The inheritance, by the author of Marriage. By the author of 'Marriage'. Revised by the author
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“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.”

PeopleIfsLooksLongIdeasKidsTodayAmericaMemoriesAttentionEnvironmentLike YouProveGolfWittyNeighborWealthyClothingsPointlessHideousProtestantsSubversiveOverweightTautologyWitty Sayings
Author:Dave Barry
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“Phrases like Worship Service or Service of Worship are tautologies. To worship God means to serve him. Basically there are two ways to do it. One way is to do things for Him that He needs to have done - run errands for Him, carry messages for Him, fight on His side, feed His lambs, and so on. The other way is to do things for Him that you need to do - sing songs for Him, tell Him what's on your mind and in your heart, in general rejoice in Him.”

WayNeedsMindHeartMeanTwoDoneRunningSongFightingSidesWorshipMessagesOne WayPhrasesRejoiceTwo WaysLambsWorship GodErrandsTautologyWorship Service
Author:Frederick Buechner
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“Science sometimes improves hypotheses and sometimes disproves them. But proof would be another matter and perhaps never occurs except in the realms of totally abstract tautology. We can sometimes say that if such and such abstract suppositions or postulates are given, then such and such abstract suppositions or postulates are given, then such and such must follow absolutely. But the truth about what can be perceived or arrived at by induction from perception is something else again.”

IfsSometimesMatterWould BeGivenPerceptionProofRealmsAbstractHypothesisSuppositionTautology
Author:Gregory Bateson
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“The principles of logic and mathematics are true 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.”

SelfReasonUseLanguagePrinciplesLogicMathematicsAbandonPropositionsUtteranceAnalyticsSinningContradictingUse Of LanguageTautology
Author:A.J. Ayer
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“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.”

IfsWorldPhilosophyNextLeftSimpleSilenceSeeingAmountSolutionsDividedPointlessUnclearTautologySimple Solutions
Author:Werner Heisenberg
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“A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices.”

IfsGrowsCommonNumbersGloryOrdinaryPerceiveAdsVersesTowersOne WordVerbsImmaturePrecipiceBanalityNew WordsPronounsOdesTautology
Author:Alasdair Gray
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“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.”

ImportantCoursesEnergyInterestInterestingExperienceImportanceMathematicsMathStatementsBeing TrueOccasionsMathematicalOperationsPropositionsTautology
Author:Alfred North Whitehead
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