Quotes About Sophistry

#1. It seems to me, that the only Objects of the abstract Sciences or of Demonstration is Quantity and Number, and that all Attempts to extend this more perfect Species of Knowledge beyond these Bounds are mere Sophistry and Illusion.

David Hume

#2. Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.

John Adams

#3. The fundamentalist burns with anti-intellectual zeal, and in reaction sophists are often swollen up with intellectualism. The fundamentalist and the sophist justify their excesses by the sin of their opposite. Fundamentalism and sophistry give piety and philosophy bad reputations with society.

John Mark Reynolds

#4. As creeping ivy clings to wood or stone, And hides the ruin that it feeds upon, So sophistry, cleaves close to, and protects Sin's rotten trunk, concealing its defects.

William Cowper

#5. Fire destroys all sophistry, that is deceit; and maintains truth alone, that is gold.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#6. The juggle of sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#7. In the judgment men will not be condemned because they conscientiously believed a lie, but because they did not believe the truth, because they neglected the opportunity of learning what is truth. Notwithstanding the sophistry of Satan to the contrary, it is always disastrous to disobey God.

Ellen G. White

#8. He who is fortunately enlightened [the Sufi]
Knows that sophistry is from the devil and love from Adam.

Idries Shah

#9. Religion is a thing to be lived. It is not merely sophistry.

Mahatma Gandhi

#10. When ideas are manipulated for personal ends, for class or group interests, the name for this is sophistry.

Plato

#11. It is a wicked sophistry to justify the worldliness of the Church by the cross of Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#12. There must be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible.

Harriet Ann Jacobs

#13. Unskilled in sophistry and new to the darker ways of national politics, Grover Cleveland faced his accusers, his slanderers, and his judges, the sovereign people, conscious of the general rectitude of his life, and courageously determined to bear the burdens of his sins in so far as guilt was his.

Grover Cleveland

#14. Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#15. Repeating the commonplaces about atheism and materialism and sophistry, which are the stock-accusations against all philosophers when there is nothing else to be said of them.

Plato

#16. Men of great conversational powers almost universally practise a sort of lively sophistry and exaggeration which deceives for the moment both themselves and their auditors.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#17. No sophistry, no jugglery in figures can explain away the evidence that the skeletons in many villages present to the naked eye.

Mahatma Gandhi

#18. Satan is the master of the ultimate double-talk and sophistry. He calls evil good and continues to confuse men with his cleverly disguised untruths.

Billy Graham

#19. Peg and I are in the trenches of social media, not in a "war room" back at headquarters. We acquired our knowledge though experimentation and diligence, not pontification, sophistry, and conference attendance.

Guy Kawasaki

#20. We have great faith, though yours at present is uncrystallized; we have a terrible honesty that all our sophistry cannot destroy and, above all, a childlike simplicity that keeps us from ever being really malicious.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#21. Sophistry is the fallacy of argument.

Henry Ward Beecher

#22. A man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#23. The cry of revolt against such a god [a god which just affirms the world as it is] is nearer the truth than is the sophistry with which men attempt to justify him ...

Karl Barth

#24. So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people" or, if you like, "a clash of civilisations" and "collateral damage". The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice.

Arundhati Roy

#25. Love supreme defies all sophistry.

George Eliot

#26. Fire destroys falsehood, that is sophistry, and restores truth, driving out darkness.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#27. 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

#28. Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.

Jacques Barzun

#29. Oh, children, growing up to be Adventurers into sophistry, Forbear, forbear to be of those That read the rood to learn the rose.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

#30. Truth is strong enough to overcome all human sophistries.

Aeschines

#31. He likes to use his wit and verbal finesse to confuse others and win arguments. Although he can argue successfully that white is black and straight is crooked, you walk away with the feeling that he's won the argument not because he is correct but because you can't outwit him.

Liezi

#32. When a false argument puts on the appearance of a true one, then it is properly called a sophism or fallacy.

Isaac Watts