Fallacious Argument Quotes & Sayings

The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause. — Zadie Smith

Why are you here?"
"'Here' as in your bedroom, or 'here' as in the great, spiritual question of our purpose here on this planet? If you're asking me whether this is all some cosmic coincidence or if there's a greater meta-ethical purpose to life, well, that's a puzzler for the ages. I mean, modern-day reductionism is clearly a fallacious argument, but-,"
-"I'm going back to bed."
-"I'm here because Hodge reminded me it's your birthday. — Cassandra Clare

Your argument is as specious as it is fallacious. I do not give a damn that we have crossed a sea to be here. By your logic, if one was to circumnavigate the globe before being given the option of jumping off a cliff or not jumping off a cliff, you would fling yourself off immediately because - oh, my goodness - you've gone all that way and it would be a shame not to do something memorably stupid at the end. Not memorable to you, of course: you'd be dead. But everyone for miles around will always remember the day the idiot from afar threw himself to his death because, well, it would have been a shame not to. — Jonathan L. Howard

Someone's energy and aura and soul are so much more important - they don't compare to what you have on. — Rachel Roy

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas. — Carl Sagan

Another way to find whether an analogy is fallacious is to see whether you can discover a counter analogy. Surely this is the most effective practice in refuting analogy in argument. — Henry Hazlitt

I'm pretty earthy; I nursed forever because I liked it and my kids liked it, but at the same time I'm very laissez-faire about stuff like bedtimes and food. — Ana Gasteyer

Man is flawed; universe is imperfect; the functioning of the cosmos is defective! Everything seems to be severely punished by the imperfection! May be the real challenge of men is to correct all these flaws! It is possible to think that God is an evolutionary perfectionist! He creates things as unimportant and faulty; then let them all alone and fateless to evolve to perfection! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Fallacious and misleading arguments are most easily detected if set out in correct syllogistic form. — Immanuel Kant

The country is suffering from musical-chairs syndrome. We all dance around for a bit and then when we try to sit down again, somebody doesn't have a chair. We're running scared; we want ours. — Cynthia Heimel

You read too much and you think too much. That's your problem. — Juliann Garey

Young man, consider that the train has left, and all you can do is loudly slam the door in farewell. — Mikhail Tal

Another argument of hope may be drawn from this-that some of the inventions already known are such as before they were discovered it could hardly have entered any man's head to think of; they would have been simply set aside as impossible. For in conjecturing what may be men set before them the example of what has been, and divine of the new with an imagination preoccupied and colored by the old; which way of forming opinions is very fallacious, for streams that are drawn from the springheads of nature do not always run in the old channels. — Francis Bacon

Clary: What are you doing here, anyway?
Jace: 'Here' as in your bedroom or 'here' as in the great spiritual question of our purpose here on this planet? If you're asking whether it's all just a cosmic coincidence or there's a greater metaethical purpose to life, well, that's a puzzler for the ages. I mean, simple ontological reductionism is clearly a fallacious argument, but-
Clary: I'm going to bed. — Cassandra Clare

These were the Sophists, and their interest was in teaching the use of argumentative skills of the sort previous philosophers had exhibited, but as a means of attaining worldly success, for instance in politics. Unfortunately, they gained a reputation for being rather cynical and unscrupulous in their argumentative standards: any old argument would do as long as it persuaded one's listener, even if it was totally fallacious; what mattered was winning the debate, not arriving at the truth, and the line between logic and rhetoric was thus blurred. (The Sophists are still with us. Today we call them "lawyers," "professors of literary criticism," and "Michael Moore.") — Edward Feser

It goes without saying that it is the traditionally minded Hindu we have in view, and not one whose hereditary dispositions have deviated in an anti-traditional direction, to the point of proving that "corruptio optimi pessima." Hinduism, strictly speaking, has no "dogmas" in the sense that every concept may be denied, on condition that the argument used is intrinsically true; which amounts to saying that concepts can be denied from the standpoint of a higher level of truth, metaphysics standing above cosmology and realization above theory as such. However, on their own level, the scriptural symbols of Hinduism are just as immovable as the Semitic dogmas, and this excludes any fallacious comparison of Hindu doctrine with the opinions of philosophers. No orthodox Hindu can maintain that the Veda has been mistaken on any point whatsoever. — Frithjof Schuon

When we feel deeply, we reason profoundly. — Mary Wollstonecraft

The food comes from the ground and cant' be permitted to stay there and rot; something has to be done with it. — Shirley Jackson

If you think you can and think you can...you will! — Timothy Pina