Top 43 Refuted Quotes
#1. There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.
John Stuart Mill
#2. The myth that men are the economic providers and women, mainly, are mothers and care givers in the family has now been thoroughly refuted. This family pattern has never been the norm, except in a narrow middle-class segment.
Gro Harlem Brundtland
#3. The accusation that President Clinton cares deeply about nothing is refuted by his tenacious and guileful battle to prevent any meaningful limits on the form of infanticide known as partial-birth abortion.
George Will
#4. A sane accusation can be refuted. An insane accusation, one that makes no sense on any level, cannot be refuted, cannot even be addressed, because it is insolent nonsense. There is no sober way to defend oneself from the accusation of being a one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater.
John C. Wright
#5. I usually never stay at the board after a game. Especially against Spassky. I made a dumb suggestion and he refuted it instantly! I know I'm going to have to play him some day and it was really stupid to look like such a jerk in front of him.
Bobby Fischer
#6. What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)
Stephen Batchelor
#7. Newspaper accounts must not only be studied, but, occasionally refuted.
Harold Holzer
#8. America's political landscape is infested with many zombie ideas - beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die. The most prominent zombie is the insistence that low taxes on rich people are the key to prosperity.
Paul Krugman
#9. Laughter and tears may not persuade, but they cannot be refuted.
Mason Cooley
#10. Many times what cannot be refuted by arguments can be parried by laughter.
Desiderius Erasmus
#11. Many witnesses to the shooting of Michael Brown made statements inconsistent with other statements they made and also conflicted with the physical evidence. Some were completely refuted by the physical evidence.
Robert P. McCulloch
#12. If not consciously acknowledged and mourned, uncertainty about one's descent can cause great anxiety and unrest, all the more so if, as in Alois's case, it is linked with an ominous rumor that can neither be proven nor completely refuted
Alice Miller
#13. As a world view, Darwinism cannot of course be refuted, since Faith is, always has been, and always will be, stronger than facts.
Francis Parker Yockey
#14. Susan B. Anthony formed the Equal Rights Association, refuted ideas that women were inferior to men, and fought for a woman's right to vote.
Louise Slaughter
#15. The General Theory was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.
Murray N. Rothbard
#16. Never underestimate the power of bad ideas. They must be refuted again and again.
Llewellyn Rockwell
#17. Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record.
Niles Eldredge
#18. Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments. They must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe ...
Ludwig Von Mises
#19. It must be possible for an empirical system to be refuted by experience.
Karl Popper
#20. A false argument should be refuted, not named. That's the basic idea behind freedom of speech. Arguments by name-calling, rather than truth and light, can generally be presumed fraudulent.
Ann Coulter
#21. The myth that John Locke was the philosopher behind the American Republic, is easily refuted by examining how Locke's philosophy steered Thomas Jefferson, for example.
Robert Trout
#22. The advances of agricultural and contraceptive technology in the nineteenth century apparently refuted Malthus: in England, the United States, Germany, and France the food supply kept pace with births, and the rising standard of living deferred the age of marriage and lowered the size of the family.
Will Durant
#23. Millar Burrows of Yale observes: 'Archeology has in many cases refuted the views of modern critics. It has shown in a number of instances that these views rest on false assumptions and unreal, artificial schemes of historical development. This is a real contribution and not to be minimized.'
Millar Burrows
#24. Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history
Michel Foucault
#25. I prefer to be refuted than to refute, for it is a greater good for oneself to be freed from the greatest evil than to free another.
Socrates
#26. The assertion that men are objectively equal is so absurd that it does not even merit being refuted.
Vilfredo Pareto
#27. Freedom of speech is not only the right to say as you please, it is also the right to have what you say contested, and where it does not accord with reason - refuted, or with sense - ridiculed.
David Joseph Cribbin
#28. The idea of a superior or inferior race is a myth that has been completely refuted by anthropological evidence.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#29. Why, then, do I continue to claim that creationism isn't science? Simply because these relatively few statements have been tested and conclusively refuted.
Stephen Jay Gould
#32. The idea of a character dichotomy between women and men has been overwhelmingly, decisively, refuted. The broad psychological similarity of men and women as groups can be regarded, on the volume of evidence supporting it, as one of the best-established generalizations in all the human sciences.
Raewyn W. Connell
#33. The ideas of theologians are refuted by their adversaries, the ideas of scientists are refuted by their followers.
Peter Gay
#34. There can be no ultimate statements science: there can be no statements in science which can not be tested, and therefore none which cannot in principle be refuted, by falsifying some of the conclusions which can be deduced from them.
Karl Popper
#35. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times a thought can be refuted, yes, but not retracted. (p. 179)
Milan Kundera
#36. Some books against Deism fell into my hands ... it happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quote to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist.
Benjamin Franklin
#37. As every one is pleased with imagining that he knows something not yet commonly divulged, secret history easily gains credit; but it is for the most part believed only while it circulates in whispers, and when once it is openly told, is openly refuted.
Samuel Johnson
#38. Having refuted, then, as well as we could, every notion which might suggest that we were to think of God as in any degree corporeal, we go on to say that, according to strict truth, God is incomprehensible, and incapable of being measured.
Origen
#39. The idea that water has a memory can be refuted by any one of several easily understood, invalid, arguments.
Brian Josephson
#40. The first-cause and prime-mover argument, brilliantly proffered by St. Thomas Aquinas in the fourteenth century (and brilliantly refuted by David Hume in the eighteenth century), is easily turned aside with just one more question: Who or what caused and moved God?
Michael Shermer
#41. The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#42. The supremacy of expediency is being refuted by time and truth. Time is an essential dimension of existence defiant of man's power, and truth reigns in supreme majesty, unrivaled, inimitable, and can never be defeated.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#43. Dom Paulo had not expected to convince him. But it was with a heavy heart that the abbot noticed the plodding patience with which the thon heard him through; it was the patience of a man listening to an argument which he had long ago refuted to his own satisfaction.
Walter M. Miller Jr.
