Lajos Kossuth Quotes

If it doesn't make sense, it's usually not true.

To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization.

Logic and fact keep interfering with the easy flow of conversation.

...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.

To avoid being drawn into error, keep a firm grip on the truth.

To think truly is noble and to be deceived is base.

I hope you become comfortable with the use of logic without being deceived into concluding that logic will inevitably lead you to the correct conclusion.

The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

Philosophy has to be enquiring; it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.

Convincing yourself doesn't win an argument.

To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion.

Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.

If I'm in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person's side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.

Scholars will argue with each other about everything.

I may not be smart enough to debate you point-for-point on this, but I have the feeling about 60% of what you say is crap.

Modern science's defense against self-delusion relies upon a spirit of open and critical inquiry. This, though hardly infallible, ostensibly uncovers errors and thereby proceeds towards objective truth

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid—in which case all comment is superfluous—or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.

We need a world where the values of science are celebrated: free inquiry, free speech and a healthy skepticism, all coupled with a sense of wonder, a respect for truth and an ability to reason.

Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.

Happily I had very early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and verbal argument. Single sets of truths I knew to be as little conclusive in theology as in physics; and, in one as in the other, no theory to be worth anything, however plausibly backed up with Scripture texts or facts, which was not gathered bona fide from the analysis of all the attainable phenomena, and verified wherever possible by experiment.

I reject the notion of a post-truth area. I don't believe there is such a thing, and we shouldn't accept that.

I would, like any other scientist, willingly change my mind if the evidence led me to do so. So I care about what's true, I care about evidence, I care about evidence as the reason for knowing what is true. It is true that I come across rather passionate sometimes - and that's because I am passionate about the truth... I do get very impatient with humbug, with cant, with fakery, with charlatans.