Top 100 Fallacy Fallacy Quotes
#1. Fallacy, Fallacy. - He cannot rule himself; therefore that woman concludes that it will be easy to rule him, and throws out her lines to catch him;-the poor creature, who in a short time will be his slave.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#2. In learning and argumentation, the quality brain is similar to a facility of maximum security. What passes the logic test, free of fallacy and pretense, then must pass the test of biblical accuracy in order to proceed as an adopted, reliable truth.
Criss Jami
#3. Most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc.
Richard Dawkins
#4. In war, God is always on your side, no matter which side you're on. God is invincible, but one side always loses. Nobody seems to see the fallacy in this.
Elliot MacDonald
#5. One of the most useful pieces of advice we've learned in our journalism careers is summed up in the phrase "beware the fallacy of evil men.
Bill Kovach
#6. The greatest fallacy of democracy is that everyone's opinion is worth the same.
Robert A. Heinlein
#7. I think it's a fallacy that only people in elected office can come up with solutions that solve our problems. I just think maybe there's a different paradigm.
Benjamin Carson
#8. People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe
Hippocrates
#9. And there is the fallacy of existence: the idea that one would be happy forever and aye with a given situation or series of accomplishments.
Sylvia Plath
#10. The assertion fallacy ... is the fallacy of confusing the conditions for the performance of the speech act of assertion with the analysis of the meaning of particular words occurring in certain assertions.
John Searle
#11. Somehow even a popular fallacy has an aspect of truth when it suits one's own case.
Margaret Oliphant
#12. I feel that The American Dream is this fallacy that you come to the United States and win lotto. That's a disservice to The American Dream because the American Dream is worth striving for. And it's not easy.
James Gray
#13. "Isn't it fun getting older?" is really a terrible fallacy. That's like saying I prefer driving an old car with a flat tire.
Katharine Hepburn
#14. It is a fundamental fallacy to think that our human bodies work like the structures that humans have built.
Leslie Kaminoff
#15. 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.
Thomas Clifford Allbutt
#16. The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.
George Eliot
#17. The question of naturalism is a fallacy, it does not exist ... The photographic image replaces naturalistic experience.
Sid Grossman
#18. They don't think up questions like that on the basis of what might be true; they concoct the questions on the basis of what might be sensational if it just happened to be true.
Walter M. Miller Jr.
#19. De Bono argues that the West's tradition of settling disagreement by debate or argument is an example of overreliance on logic.
Steve Volk
#20. It would be a fallacy to deduce that the slow writer necessarily comes up with superior work. There seems to be scant relationshipbetween prolificness and quality.
Fannie Hurst
#21. A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy, yet there are very fine minds incapable of following mathematical demonstrations.
Henri Poincare
#22. 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.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
#23. The assumption that humans could be a reliable back up for the system was a fallacy!
Astro Teller
#24. It's a fallacy to believe that age in itself brings wisdom, but one thing it infallibly brings is experience.
Gillian Linscott
#25. It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.
William Faulkner
#26. The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential.
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
#27. What we consider too good to be true, is truth; all else is fallacy
Oshetha Shakoor
#28. Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.
Freya Stark
#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.
Meg Rosoff
#31. Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, 'If science can't do something therefore religion can.'
Richard Dawkins
#32. We have a cultural notion that if children were not engineered, if we did not manipulate them, they would grow up as beasts in the field. This is the wildest fallacy in the world.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
#33. If proof were the standard of truth, fallacies would constitute the ultimate reality.
Raheel Farooq
#34. You're never in control. That - that is the greatest fallacy of the - you know, there's over 200 people that it requires to make a film. And there's people who are in control of how you look, what your performance is, what takes are used, what - you're only in control of how you say no.
Sandra Bullock
#35. House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#36. We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals.
James Russell Lowell
#37. Social Science ... led us to the fallacy that, since all men have their being in culture and as a result of culture, they owe a debt to that culture which even a lifetime of altruism could not repay.
David Riesman
#38. The fallacy here? The subtle movement from seeing forsaking sin as the fruit of grace that is rooted in election, to making the forsaking of sin the necessary precursor for experiencing that grace. Repentance, which is the fruit of grace, thus becomes a qualification for grace. This
Sinclair B. Ferguson
#39. [No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#40. I call the notion that we are nothing but killer apes the Beethoven fallacy. Beethoven was disorganized and messy, and yet his music is the epitome of order.
Frans De Waal
#41. If indeed good were a feeling....then it would exist in time. But that is why to call it so is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. It will always remain pertinent to ask, whether the feeling itself is good; and if do, then good cannot itself be identical with any feeling.
G.E. Moore
#42. It's a fallacy that people think that today's teenagers are shallow or somehow less intelligent than in the past.
Margaret Stohl
#43. I live by fallacy. 'If I get enough nice Ikea furniture, I'll be a grown-up.' Then I catch myself. Or, 'If I get off by myself, away from the stress of modern life, I'll be OK.' Then I catch myself.
Chuck Palahniuk
#44. The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.
Adam Gopnik
#45. Pride is a fallacy. None of us are greater than the sum of our parts.
Eric Hirzel
#46. The God excuse, the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument.
George Carlin
#47. It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Overnight success is a fallacy. It is preceded by a great deal of preparation. Ask any successful person how they came to this point in their lives, and they will have a story to tell.
Mark Twain
#48. Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#49. People assume that because you have graced the same stage as the star act, in front of thousands, you must be reaping similar financial rewards. This is a complete fallacy.
John Barrow
#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.
Wole Soyinka
#51. But to subsist in bones, and be but Pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration.
Thomas Browne
#52. It is only a mere fallacy to say you are quitting when your heartbeat is in tune with the beat. A real change is a real change!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#53. But the idea that God might want to change his mind is an example of the fallacy, pointed out by St. Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time: time is a property only of the universe that God created.
Stephen Hawking
#54. 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.
Eliot Spitzer
#55. The cultural problem was 'the fallacy of insignificance', and it was a philosophical form of this fallacy that had somehow landed existentialism in a cul de sac.
Colin Wilson
#56. To base the unexplainabilty and the immense wonder of nature onto an other miracle (God) is unnecessary and not acceptable for any serious thinker.
[Diary entry, 1971]
Fritz Zwicky
#57. What is there left for me after my purgatory of solitude? ... I welcome death as a version of life in which I will not be myself. There is a fallacy here which I ought to see but will not. For when I wake on the ocean floor it will be the same old voice that drones out of me ...
J.M. Coetzee
#58. There is a popular fallacy that falling down is the mark of a poor skater. But the truth is that when one stops falling, he has probably stopped improving.
Dick Button
#59. I must begin with a good body of facts and not from a principle (in which I always suspect some fallacy) and then as much deduction as you please.
Charles Darwin
#61. The more time, toil, and sacrifice spent by a population in producing medicine as a commodity, the larger will be the by-product, namely, the fallacy that society has a supply of health locked away which can be mined and marketed.
Ivan Illich
#62. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.
John Ruskin
#63. 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.
Margaret Atwood
#64. The power of collective memory does not lie in its accurate, systematic, or sophisticated mapping of the past, but in establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance.
Yael Zerubavel
#65. This is the typical fallacy on which all of CONSUMER AMERICA is based. Some piece of useless crap will make people like you.
Blake Nelson
#66. Discrepancy between theory and practice, which in sound physical and mechanical science is a delusion, has a real existence in the minds of men; and that fallacy, through rejected by their judgments, continues to exert and influence over their acts.
William John Macquorn Rankine
#67. 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.
Robert Agostinelli
#69. An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.
Steven Weinberg
#70. Upon the dark road you are travelling, do not seek out the light, the illusion, the fallacy and incessant need for all things external. Have no fear, take the darkness as your comfort because you are the light shining in the dark.
You just need to find the spark.
L.J. Vanier
#71. 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!
Bill Maher
#73. A man who marries a woman to educate her falls victim to the same fallacy as the woman who marries a man to reform him.
Elbert Hubbard
#74. The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
Marshall McLuhan
#75. Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.
Daniel Kahneman
#77. The contrast between genetic and environmental, between nature and nurture, is not a contrast between fixed and changeable. It is a fallacy of biological determinism to say that if differences are in the genes, no change can occur.
Richard C. Lewontin
#78. Wrong is wrong; no fallacy can hide it, no subterfuge cover it so shrewdly but that the All-Seeing One will discover and punish it.
Antoine Rivarol
#79. When I pointed out this fallacy in her thought process, however, all she said was, "Just do it," only not the way they say it in Nike ads. She said it the way the Wicked Witch of the West said it to the winged monkeys when she sent them out to kill Dorothy and her little dog, too.
Jenny Carroll
#80. You are not seeking to attain some future state. That is the fallacy of many spiritual seekers. They have an image of some state - enlightenment, or whatever they call it - they want to achieve.
Eckhart Tolle
#81. The fallacy of monetary policy in the U.S. is to believe this money will go to the man on the street. It won't. It goes to the Mayfair economy of the well-to-do people and boosts asset prices of Warhols ... Very happy. Very good for the Fed. Congratulations, Mr. Bernanke.
Marc Faber
#82. 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.
Niklaus Wirth
#83. The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy.
Eric Voegelin
#84. He'd built his career on the fallacy of clear boundaries between the material and the imagined, and the idea that the difference mattered.
Katherine Lampe
#85. It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.
H.L. Mencken
#86. A science only advances with certainty, when the plan of inquiry and the object of our researches have been clearly defined; otherwise a small number of truths are loosely laid hold of, without their connexion being perceived, and numerous errors, without being enabled to detect their fallacy.
Jean-Baptiste Say
#87. 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.
G.K. Chesterton
#88. We're all prostitutes if you think about it. The whole capitalist system is built on meretriciousness. You sell your body or you sell your mind, and the Cartesian mind/body thing is a fallacy anyway, your mind is just your brain, so it amounts to the same thing really.
M. Thomas Gammarino
#89. We could call the second problem with the current Sabbath vogue the fallacy of the direct object. Whom is the contemporary Sabbath designed to honor? Whom does it benefit? In observing the Sabbath, one is both giving a gift to God and imitating Him.
Lauren F. Winner
#90. No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
Ernest Hemingway,
#91. Privacy with medical information is a fallacy. If everyone's information is out there, it's part of the collective.
Craig Venter
#92. What a paradox it is, the sane causes more problems than the insane! It is! The real problems of the world do not come from the insane but, the sane!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#93. Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do, and what they leave behind.
Terry Pratchett
#94. The Keynesian belief that 'demand' is always at the root of underemployment and slow growth is a fallacy.
Edmund Phelps
#95. Some people take what they need from the orchard, and other people pick the orchard clean."
From - "The Mind Game Company - The Players
Andrew Neff
#96. The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside
George Orwell
#97. The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother - which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.
Sydney J. Harris
#98. I think it's a fallacy that the harder you practice the better you get.
Buddy Rich
#99. Sophistry, like poison, is at once detected and nauseated, when presented to us in a concentrated form; but a fallacy which, when stated barely in a few sentences, would not deceive a child, may deceive half the world, if diluted in a quarto volume.
Richard Whately
#100. A lot of actors aren't particularly good directors. And they're not particularly good with other actors. That's kind of a fallacy.
Peter Mullan
