John Stuart Mill Quotes

SYLLOGISM, n. A logical formula consisting of a major and a minor assumption and an inconsequent.

A: Socrates is a man. B: All men are mortal. C: All men are Socrates.

Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.

Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.

You should carefully study the Art of Reasoning, as it is what most people are very deficient in, and I know few things more disagreeable than to argue, or even converse with a man who has no idea of inductive and deductive philosophy.

Even things that are true can be proved.

The example of a syllogism that he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic: Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal, had throughout his whole life seemed to him right only in relation to Caius, but not to him at all.

It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though perhaps a meretricious, effect.

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.

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

A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It's a proof. A proof is a proof. And when you have a good proof, it's because it's proven.

Logic teaches rules for presentation, not thinking.

A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy, yet there are very fine minds incapable of following mathematical demonstrations.

The deductive method is the mode of using knowledge, and the inductive method the mode of acquiring it.

We may either proceed from principles to facts, or recede from facts to principles.

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

Logic has made me hated in the world.

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

Because an appeal makes logical sense is no guarantee that it will work.

Rhetoric and dialectics can't change what I have learned from observation and experience.

A statement is persuasive and credible either because it is directly self-evident or because it appears to be proved from other statements that are so.

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

Logic, having been invented by Greeks in the Northern hemisphere, does not apply south of the equator.

Arguments that prove too much prove nothing.