Fallacy Quotes

1. "Kenya DOES NOT belong to 2 tribes only. Kenya has 42 tribes. to say that the decision of 2 tribes is the decision of the whole country is fallacy and outright dictatorship and tribalismAkuku Mach Pep, Democracy on Trial"
Author: Akuku Mach Pep

2. "The fallacy that Morley in his life of Gladstone asserts to be the greatest affliction of politicians; it is indeed a common plague of humanity. It is:The fallacy of attributing to one cause what is due to many causes."
Author: Alfred Korzybski

3. "The basic trouble with the modern world … is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one. Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is forced upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom."
Author: Ayn Rand

4. "Since the topic is science, the non scientists don't get a vote. We shouldn't decide everything by polling the masses. This is the fallacy called Argumentum Ad Numerum, the idea that something is true because great number believe it, as in EAT SHIT, twenty trillions flies can't be wrong!"
Author: Bill Maher

5. "I think the fallacy is to think that Women's Liberation meant that men and women would become interchangeable. That has not happened, and most men and women would not want it to happen."
Author: Christina Hoff Sommers

6. "In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

7. "Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality."
Author: Colin Wilson

8. "Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective."
Author: Craig Venter

9. "A common fallacy in much of the adverse criticism to which science is subjected today is that it claims certainty, infallibility and complete emotional objectivity. It would be more nearly true to say that it is based upon wonder, adventure and hope."
Author: Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

10. "One of the deep prejudices that the age of mechanism instilled in our culture, and that infects our religious and materialist fundamentalisms alike, is a version of the so-called genetic fallacy: to wit, the mistake of thinking that to have described a thing's material history or physical origins is to have explained that thing exhaustively."
Author: David Bentley Hart

11. "For some days, now, the termperature had wavered between freezing and thawing and it was difficult to tell whether the sediment thickening the atmostphere was rain or sleet or smog. Through the murk the dull red eye of a sun that had scarcely been able to drag itself above roof level all day was sinking blearily beneath the horizon, spreading a rusty stain across the snow-covered surfaces. Read pathetic fallacy weather."
Author: David Lodge

12. "The Republican argument that raising the debt ceiling encourages additional future spending is logically irresponsible. The debt ceiling has to be raised to authorize spending already approved by Congress. Despite that fallacy, the GOP has been able to score political points with its argument."
Author: Eliot Spitzer

13. "No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful."
Author: Ernest Hemingway

14. "Perhaps that is the real surprise of love; it exists, but one may not attribute causes and effects to it. The existence may appear to be a mere fallacy to the minds of some, and by the time they realise what hit them, they would already be down and dead."
Author: Faraaz Kazi

15. "...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

16. "It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

17. "The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

18. "That fallacy flies in the face of studies that show, every day, in every way, things are getting a little worse for America's minorities relative to the progress made by those in the top percentiles of assets and income."
Author: Harold Washington

19. "The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn't work."
Author: Harold Washington

20. "So long as the processes of healing were not understood and man thought that the power to heal resided in substances and things outside of him, he logically sought for extrinsic means of healing, and a healing art was a logical development. The system of medicine, as we know it today, was a logical development out of the fallacy that healing power resides in extrinsic sources."
Author: Herbert M. Shelton

21. "In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was a great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality - history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies. - The French Lieutenant's Woman"
Author: John Fowles

22. "Life may be miraculous in its unlikelihood in the universe, but it would be a fallacy to suggest that its rareness makes it inextinguishable."
Author: John Hodgman

23. "It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the revolution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsvetaeva. They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted. Basically, talent doesn't need history."
Author: Joseph Brodsky

24. "He'd built his career on the fallacy of clear boundaries between the material and the imagined, and the idea that the difference mattered."
Author: Katherine Lampe

25. "Another mistaken notion connected with the law of large numbers is the idea that an event is more or less likely to occur because it has or has not happened recently. The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences of the event is called the gambler's fallacy. For example, if Kerrich landed, say, 44 heads in the first 100 tosses, the coin would not develop a bias towards the tails in order to catch up! That's what is at the root of such ideas as "her luck has run out" and "He is due." That does not happen. For what it's worth, a good streak doesn't jinx you, and a bad one, unfortunately , does not mean better luck is in store."
Author: Leonard Mlodinow

26. "The fallacy in Peter's mind was this: he believed his relationship was dependent on his consistency in producing the qualities he thought had earned him the Lord's approval."
Author: Lloyd John Ogilvie

27. "To be acknowledged that we do not believe in their misleading notion and fallacy, today, tomorrow and forever even if it costs us our life. They have suffocated people for hundreds of years and if we don't stop them today no one else would do it tomorrow."
Author: M.F. Moonzajer

28. "...the argument for the perfectibility of humankind rests on a logical fallacy. Thus: man is by definition imperfect, say those who would perfect him. But those who would perfect him are themselves, by their own definition, imperfect."
Author: Margaret Atwood

29. "Trying to think inside Finn's head was like committing what our English master called Pathetic Fallacy, the attribution of human emotions to boulders or trees."
Author: Meg Rosoff

30. "The Nazis, he had written in his latest, "are wedded to a sort of aesthetico-moral fallacy, which is that if a man has blond hair, blue eyes and strong features, then he will also be brave, loyal, intelligent and so on. They truly believe that goodness has some causal relationship with beauty. Which is idiotic, yes, but no more idiotic than you are, Egon. When you see a girl like Adele Hitler with an innocent, pretty face, can you honestly tell me you don't assume she must be an angelic person? Even though it makes about as much sense as astrology."
Author: Ned Beauman

31. "We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It's very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy - where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system."
Author: Nicholas A. Christakis

32. "Author discussed what he calls the "narrative fallacy." This refers to our "limited ability" to look at a sequence of facts "without weaving an explanation into them."
Author: Nicholas Nassim Taleb

33. "Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy."
Author: Niklaus Wirth

34. "...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time."
Author: Orson Scott Card

35. "What we consider too good to be true, is truth; all else is fallacy"
Author: Oshetha Shakoor

36. "A lot of actors aren't particularly good directors. And they're not particularly good with other actors. That's kind of a fallacy."
Author: Peter Mullan

37. "Our life stories are at one and the same time reality, fallacy and fantasy..."
Author: Rasheed Ogunlaru

38. "To expect reason is where the fallacy lies."
Author: Richard Russo

39. "The fallacy in the progressive critique is the egalitarian dogma that no one should get more than what liberals deem is a 'fair' reward, nor should there be any risk to anyone to fail."
Author: Robert Agostinelli

40. "The chief vestige of subjectivity is the fallacy that everybody else also cares about the same things as the observer, and/or lives in his/her exact same state of mind"
Author: Stephan Attia

41. "An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy."
Author: Steven Weinberg

42. "Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe."
Author: Thomas Clifford Allbutt

43. "Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic."
Author: Thomas Huxley

44. "Without good purpose and good intent you are but a fallacy -- a premise without a conclusion, brilliance without light, a journey without a destination -- a complete impossibility."
Author: Val Edward Simone

45. "Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

46. "Truly, there are no justified ways to how a mule tramples the earth, but who would be burdened to hear such an obscurity? We do not gaze upon stars to appertain affection towards them, rather to sooth our contempt fallacy of an ill-placed apprehension of them. Who concern themselves with anything if not genuine in their convictions? Delusions? I am flattered no less."
Author: Volatalistic Phil

47. "Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the "chance-of-the-gaps fallacy." Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance."
Author: William A. Dembski

48. "The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded on a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older."
Author: William Lyon Phelps

49. "Until I know this sure uncertainty,I'll entertain the offered fallacy."
Author: William Shakespeare

50. "See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome."
Author: Wole Soyinka

Fallacy Quotes Pictures