Positivist Quotes

#1. if you take a positivist position, as I do, questions about reality don't have any meaning. All one can ask is whether imaginary time is useful in formulating mathematical models that describe what we observe.

Stephen Hawking

#2. There was an ape in the days that were earlier, Centuries passed and his hair became curlier; Centuries more gave a thumb to his wrist - Then he was a Man and a Positivist.

Mortimer Collins

#3. The church and the scientific community are fighting at times a common enemy: the truth religion cannot deny and the positivist materialist scientist is unable to explain.

Paul Greene

#4. To get at the meaning of a statement the logical positivist asks, What would the world be like if it were true? The operationist asks, What would we have to do to come to believe it? For the pragmatist the question is, What would we do if did believe it?

Abraham Kaplan

#5. There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that :;:;:;:;:;:; We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so.

Jacob Bronowski

#6. If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

Flannery O'Connor

#7. It is as futile and dangerous to aim at making of society one large family, as sentimental socialism seeks to do, as to aim at making of it one large team, as positivist socialism seeks to do.

Bertrand De Jouvenel

#8. From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

#9. The virtual suppression of ethical discussion after 1845 produces the semblance of purely descriptive analysis, dressed in the mantle of positivist objectivity, analysis which is, in fact, strung to a framework of crude, because unexplicated, moral assumptions.

John Carroll

#10. Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.

Alan Greenspan

#11. If moral values amount to nothing but subjective phenomena of the human mind without independent meaning and existence - a position held by a variety of naturalist, positivist, and pragmatist philosophers - one never can be found lacking in light of an objective standard of moral values.

Reinhard Hutter

#12. The residue of religion in my work appears as a modified transcendentalism, and the positivist scientific side of my thought appears as concreteness and realism. The effort to reconcile the two is at the core of all my poetry.

Louis Dudek

#13. In the world according to the positivist, the inspiring thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them they're sunny side up. In the world according to the existentialist, the hopeless thing about scrambled eggs is that any way you turn them they're scrambled.

Tom Robbins

#14. The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.

Alan Watts

#15. Enlightenment, if left unclouded by pathetic fancy, leads to a very special and bracing sort of nihilism - positivist, rationalist ... merciless.

David Bentley Hart

#16. He was never quite at home in what we may call our post-positivist era

Jocelyn Gibb

#17. Sitting and looking at obstacles gives you nothing but dark circles. Stride for solutions.

Vikrmn

#18. There is a big gap between what we read in Scripture about the Holy Spirit and how most believers and churches operate today.

Francis Chan

#19. I once got sacked for laughing ... mind you, I was driving a hearse at the time.

Bernard Manning

#20. At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Raymond Chandler

#21. There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading may be given without first getting the author's permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.

Robert Benchley

#22. It is infinitely better that the profane and loose be unmasked than to be muffled up under the veil and hood of traditional hypocrisy, which turns and dulls the very edge of all conscience either toward God or man.

Roger Williams

#23. Through me, the way is to the suffering city; Through me, the way is to eternal pain; Through me, the way among the people lost.

Dante Alighieri

#24. What are you looking at, foreigner?" the guard demanded roughly. The smile was a little unsettling. A prisoner shouldn't smile at his captors like that.
"I'm just making sure I can remember you," Gilan told him. "Never know when that might be useful.

John Flanagan

#25. I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed.

Umberto Eco

#26. Everybody is always tugging at you. They'd all like a sort of chunk out of you. I don' think they realize it, but it's like 'grrr do this, grr do that' But you do want to stay intact-intact and on two feet.

Marilyn Monroe

#27. As an actress, you know there are limitations on what you can do creatively.

Michelle Yeoh

#28. And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star they won't tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they're old enough to bear it and when they learn they'll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#29. I wish to deal only with the masterpieces which the consensus of opinion for a long time has accepted as supreme. We are all supposed to have read them; it is a pity that so few of us have.

W. Somerset Maugham

#30. No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.

Virginia Woolf