Richard Ford Quotes

I'm left-brained, so I'm all about a mathematical approach to language. I've always been interested in that.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar.

The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

We think only through the medium of words. Languages are true analytical methods. Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method. The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.

I agree that two times two makes four is an excellent thing; but if we are dispensing praise, then two times two makes five is sometimes a most charming little thing as well.

Philosophy is the opposite of fairy tales

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors.

Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty to oneself

To disparage the dictate of reason is equivalent to contemning the command of God.

The devil has a Ph.D. in perfect logic.

A schoolchild should be taught grammar - for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases.

Not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education.

Reason alone cannot give you a whole steak, but it sure helps with identifying bologna.

Fear is the enemy of logic. There is no more debilitating, crushing, self-defeating, sickening thing in the world--to an individual or to a nation.

If the reason I give is a good one, you will act upon it. If it is a bad one I cannot make it better by piling epithet upon epithet. There is no logic in abuse; there is no argument in an epithet.

To establish what is true is very difficult. Frequently it is easier to establish what is false. And, passing through the false, it's possible to understand something about truth.

Of course I'm inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!

Reasoning is the pastime of my whole household, and all this reasoning has driven out Reason.

My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmatic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking?

When speculation has done its worst, two and two still make four.

History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.