Peter Singer Quotes

My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.

We've taught you that the earth is round, That red and white make pink, And something else that matters more - We've taught you how to think.

The capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because it can lead us to places that we did not expect to go.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.

Intelligence is an extremely subtle concept. It's a kind of understanding that flourishes if it's combined with a good memory, but exists anyway even in the absence of good memory. It's the ability to draw consequences from causes, to make correct inferences, to foresee what might be the result, to work out logical problems, to be reasonable, rational, to have the ability to understand the solution from perhaps insufficient information. You know when a person is intelligent, but you can be easily fooled if you are not yourself intelligent.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.

The greatest progress that the human race has made lies in learning how to make correct inferences.

The math helps you have better understanding and helps you have more creative ideas, but you can't replace the creative ideas

If logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning.

There is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than [mathematics], ... or, like this, seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation, to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being.

Geometry is beautifully logical, and it teaches you how to think and prove that things are so, step by step by step. Proofs are excellent lessons in reasoning. Without logic and reasoning, you are dependent on jumping to conclusions or - worse - having empty opinions.

To develop thinking as a skill, it should be deliberate, focused, confident, and enjoyable.

The process of elimination, combined with a modicum of common sense, will always assist us to arrive at the correct conclusion with the maximum of possible accuracy and the minimum of hard labor. Which being translated means: I guessed it.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning. The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.

Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.

I think like a detective.

Adults sometimes think children don't think. That's what propels them to order children around. But children do integrate thoughts and make sense of them. When I was a child, I thought about everything in the universe.

I'm raised to actually think, to use my brain.

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.

Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.

The world presents enough problems if you believe it to be a world of law and order; do not add to them by believing it to be a world of miracles.

The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think.