Refutation Quotes

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  • The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

    Peace   Truth   Lying  
    Mark Twain (2017). “The Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated Edition): Novels, Short Stories, Memoir, Travel Books, Letters, Biography, Articles & Speeches: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, Yankee in King Arthur's Court…”, p.2818, e-artnow
  • Put bluntly, the American church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice. We say we believe that the fundamental structure of reality is grace, not works - but our lives refute our faith.

    Brennan Manning (2008). “The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out”, p.11, Multnomah
  • ...the Muslims of recent times had fallen very short indeed of the ideals of their faith, ...nothing could be more erroneous than to measure the potentialities of Muhammad's message by the yardstick of present-day Muslim life and thought - just as he [Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi] said, 'it would be erroneous to see in the Christians' unloving behavior toward one another a refutation of Christ's message of love...'

    Faith   Christian   Islam  
  • After I set out to refute Christianity intellectually and couldn't, I came to the conclusion the Bible was true and Jesus Christ was God's Son.

  • When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of "popular" writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as "conjecture and refutation.

    Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, p.437, W. W. Norton & Company
  • Astrologers were greatly impressed, and misled, by what they believed to be confirming evidence-so much so that they were quite unimpressed by any unfavorable evidence. Moreover, by making their interpretations and prophecies sufficiently vague they were able to explain away anything that might have been a refutation of the theory had the theory and the prophecies been more precise. In order to escape falsification they destroyed the testability of their theory. It is a typical soothsayer's trick to predict things so vaguely that the predictions can hardly fail: that they become irrefutable.

    Order   Typical   Might  
  • To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one have already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis -beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of their possessor's body at the time.

    William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.14, Courier Corporation
  • Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.

    Josh Billings (1972). “Uncle Sam's Uncle Josh: Or, Josh Billings on Practically Everything, Distilled from Josh's Rum and Tansy New England Wit by Donald Day”
  • Some volumes against Deism fell into my hands ... they produced an effect precisely the reverse to what was intended by the writers; for the arguments of the Deists, which were cited in order to be refuted, appeared to me much more forcibly than the refutation itself; in a word, I soon became a thorough Deist.

    Hands   Order   Religion  
    Benjamin Franklin (1815). “The works of the late Dr. Benjamin Franklin: consisting of his Life, written by himself. Together with humorous, moral and literary essays, chiefly in the manner of the Spectator. Among which are several not in any American edition”, p.74
  • Contend not in wisdom with a fool, for thy sense maketh much of his conceit; And some errors never would have thriven, had it not been for learned refutation.

    Wisdom   Errors   Fool  
    Martin Farquhar Tupper (1871). “Proverbial philosophy: in 4 ser., now first complete”, p.18
  • The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind,' puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.

    Thinking   Mind   Kind  
    "American 'Civilization'". Essay by Julius Evola (1945), published in his posthumous anthology "Civiltà americana. Scritti sugli Stati Uniti (1930–1968)", 2010.
  • But, if we explore the literature of Heroism, we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the Epaminodas, the Scipio of old, and I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation to the despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A wild courage, a Stoicism not of the schools, but of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and had given that book immense fame.

    Religious   Book   School  
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (2000). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.281, Modern Library
  • Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict on them the most constant refutations without weakening them, and an avalanche of afflictions or ailments succeeding one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor.

    Doctors   Doubt   World  
    Marcel Proust, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, John Sturrock, Carol E. Clark (2002). “In Search of Lost Time: Way by Swann's”
  • THERE is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of dangerous consequence. Such topics, therefore, ought entirely to be forborne; as serving nothing to the discovery of truth, but only to make the person of an antagonist odious.

    David Hume (1875). “Essays Moral, Political, and Literary”, p.79
  • If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.

    Pet   Looks   Favors  
    Karl Popper (2013). “The Poverty of Historicism”, p.124, Routledge
  • The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

    Emile M. Cioran (1999). “All Gall is Divided: Gnomes and Apothegms”, p.86, Arcade Publishing
  • I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

    Writing   Play   Way  
    Tom Stoppard, Paul Delaney (1994). “Tom Stoppard in Conversation”, p.31, University of Michigan Press
  • The risk for a woman who considers her helpless children her "job" is that the children's growth toward self-sufficiency may be experienced as a refutation of the mother's indispensability, and she may unconsciously sabotage their growth as a result.

    Mother   Jobs   Children  
    Letty Cottin Pogrebin (1983). “Family politics: love and power on an intimate frontier”, McGraw-Hill Companies
  • Philosophy itself cannot but benefit from our disputes, for if our conceptions prove true, new achievements will be made; if false, their refutation will further confirm the original doctrines.

  • [Dr. Constain James] refuted so well the aberrations of Darwinism.... [A system] which is repugnant at once to history, to the tradition of all people, to exact science, to observed facts, and even to reason itself, would seem to need no refutation. But the corruption of this age, the machinations of the perverse, the danger of the simple, demand that such fancies, altogether absurd though they are, should - since they borrow the mask of science - be refuted by true science.

    Simple   People   Scary  
  • Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

    Reality   Mad   Mind  
  • An alternate explanation is not a refutation.

  • I'm not quite pompous enough to think of myself as an educator or a man capable of definitive refutation of falsehoods.

    Men   Thinking   Enough  
  • After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, "I refute it thus."

    James Boswell (1998). “Life of Johnson”, p.333, Oxford University Press, USA
  • It was one thing to have guessed it, another to have had that guess confirmed beyond possibility of refutation.

    Arthur C. Clarke (2012). “The City and the Stars”, p.22, RosettaBooks
  • I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.

    Issues   Moral   Kind  
    Tom Stoppard, Paul Delaney (1994). “Tom Stoppard in Conversation”, p.31, University of Michigan Press
  • The economic and social theories used by those who take part in the social struggle ought to be judged not by their objective value but primarily for their effectiveness in arousing emotions. The scientific refutation of them which can be made is useless, however correct it may be objectively.

    Vilfredo Pareto (1971). “Manual of political economy”, Augustus m Kelley Pubs
  • The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be believed only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called faith.

    Robert Green Ingersoll (1990). “On The Gods and Other Essays”
  • Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on philosophers, but they have not been very kind to me... I have been variously called nominalist, an instrumentalist, a positivist, a realist, and several other ists. The technique seems refutation by denigration: If you can attach a label to my approach, you don't have to say what is wrong with it... I am sure that Einstein, Heisenberg and Dirac didn't worry about whether they were realists or instrumentalists.

  • I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, 'And the sun stood still... and hasted not to go down about a whole day' (Joshua x. 13) and 'He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time' (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.

    Moving   Past   Support  
    Alan Mathison Turing, B. J. Copeland (2004). “The Essential Turing”, p.450, Oxford University Press
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