“The answer is logic. Or, to put it another way, the ability to reason analytically. Applied properly, it can overcome any lack of wisdom, which one only gains through age and experience.”
“Pure logic can lead you to conclusions that are ethically wrong, whereas if you are moral and righteous, that will ensure that you don’t act shamefully.”
“On its own, being a decent person is no guarantee that you will act well, which brings us back to the one protection we have against demagogues, tricksters, and the madness of crowds . . . : clear and reasoned thinking.”
“I would also contend that if you had to choose between giving a man a noble disposition or teaching him to think clearly, you’d do better to teach him to think clearly. Too many problems in this world are caused by men with noble dispositions and clouded minds.”
“Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’
‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’
‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
‘Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God.
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
“Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it. But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, these things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.”
“I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself.”
“Everything at Devon slowly changed and slowly harmonized with what had gone before. So it was logical to hope that since the buildings and the Deans and the curriculum could achieve this, I could achieve, perhaps unknowingly already had achieved, this growth and harmony myself.”
“I’d prefer a world with no identity politics. I’d prefer we judged people according to reason, logic and evidence instead of barmy left-wing theories about ‘oppression.’ ”
“Human beings are not reasonable creatures. Instead of being ruled by logic, we are ruled by emotions. The world would be a happier place if the opposite were true.”
“– Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?
– I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?”
“Ideas come according to their own logic. That logic is not rational. It’s not linear. We may get the middle before we get the end. We may get the end before we get the beginning. Be ready for this. Don’t resist it.”
“The mechanistic world is imagined only as sight and touch imagine a world (as “moved”) --so as to be calculable-- thus causal unities are invented, “things” (atoms) whose effect remains constant (--transference of the false concept of subject to the concept of the atom).”
“Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space . . . I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.”
“The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.”
″‘There you see!’ said Pippi, removing the tin. ‘If I hadn’t had this one me, I would have fallen face first and knocked myself silly.’
‘Yes, but,’ said Annika, ‘if you hadn’t had the tin on you, why, you’d never have tripped over the fence...‘”
“Violence and cruelty were just a stupid person’s way of making himself felt because it was easier to use your hands to strike a blow than to use your brain to find a logical and just solution to a problem.”
″‘It isn’t a person,’ Antonius insisted. ‘It’s a ghost. A ghost can’t suffocate.’
‘Shut up!’ Mucius snapped. ‘Ghosts don’t sit in wardrobes in the morning.‘”
″...I saw that what he had previously said, and which had appeared to me void of meaning, was so thoroughly logical that I could not understand how it was I had not understood him sooner.”