Refuting Quotes & Sayings

To put it schematically, the claim "Everything is subjective" must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can't be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can't be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false. — Thomas Nagel

Refuting a merely contentious argument - a description which applies to the arguments both of Melissus and of Parmenides: their premisses are false and their conclusions do not follow. — Aristotle.

The difference between a debater and a polemicist is that unlike debaters, who try to seek a common ground, a polemicist intends to establish the truth of a controversial point of view while refuting the opposing point of view - there is no room for compromise. — Henrik O. Lunde

The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog's tail wags to communicate. You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments. — Jonathan Haidt

As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact. When they prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow creatures, and that this conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have just to accept it, there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of mathematics. Just try refuting it. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You accepted like a beast of burden the whip of a stranger's curse and the mindless menace it holds along with the scar it leaves as a definition you spend your life refuting although that hateful word is only a slim line drawn on a shore and quickly dissolved in a seaworld any moment when an equally mindless wave fondles it like the accidental touch of a finger on a clarinet stop that the musician converts into silence in order to let the true note ring out loud. — Toni Morrison

Back in August, I wrote a post about the supposed race to the bottom with ebooks, refuting some nonsense written by an establishment bonehead.
This meme won't die. People are still convinced that new ebooks are going to be priced at ten cents, and writers will starve, and this will cause a second Great Depression where banks will close and people will be forced to buy Kindles with food stamps, and then the earth will enter another ice age where all the bunnies will freeze to death. — J.A. Konrath

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

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Scientists tend to build a reputation on refuting the theories of those who have gone before. Yet, whatever we hypothesize, observe, measure or record about the natural world, it leaves more unanswered questions. — Robert Winston

Atheists tend to read only each other's books and not the work of the religious thinkers they are supposedly refuting. — Edward Feser

Refuting anything in this worldly life is tantamount to refuting God. Even refuting stealing is tantamount to refuting God. This Stealing is a kind of laxative. It cleanses us and leaves. — Dada Bhagwan

why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog's tail wags to communicate. You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Hume diagnosed the problem long ago: And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.49 — Jonathan Haidt

The heart must be kept tender and pliable; otherwise agnosticism converts to skepticism. In such a case, the value of apologetics is voided, for apologetics is aimed at persuading doubters, not at refuting the defiant. He who demands a kind of proof that the nature of the case renders impossible, is determined that no possible evidence shall convince him. — Edward John Carnell

I believe that the time given to refutation in philosophy is usually time lost. Of the many attacks directed by many thinkers against each other, what now remains? Nothing, or assuredly very little. That which counts and endures is the modicum of positive truth which each contributes. The true statement is, of itself, able to displace the erroneous idea, and becomes, without our having taken the trouble of refuting anyone, the best of refutations. — Henri Bergson

Thomas rather thought Foley might ask what purpose was served by an economy whose success and protection depended on people living in ugly, sterile, unhealthy environments-he'd met that argument before and admittedly had had some difficulty refuting it-but the ex-pilot merely shrugged and said, There's more to trees than you think. I've run across some trees I'd sooner hug than a woman. — Tom Robbins

Socrates : Then would he not be conceding that his own opinion is false, if he grants that the opinion of those who think he is in error is true?
Theodorus : Necessarily.
Socrates : But the others do not concede that they are in error, do they?
Theodorus : No, they do not.
Socrates : And he, in turn, according to his writings, grants that this opinion also is true.
Theodorus : Evidently.
Socrates : Then all men, beginning with Protagoras, will dispute - or rather, he will grant, after he once concedes that the opinion of the man who holds the opposite view is true - even Protagoras himself, I say, will concede that neither a dog nor any casual man is a measure of anything whatsoever that he has not learned. Is not that the case?
Theodorus : Yes.
Socrates : Then since the "truth" of Protagoras is disputed by all, it would be true to nobody, neither to anyone else nor to him.
[171b-c] — Plato

Do people even look at one another?"
"Not really. Everything that matters is on your screen. There's an agenda that rearranges itself. There's a back-channel chat. And there's fact-checking! If you get up to speak, there are people cross-referencing your claims, supporting and refuting you
"
It sounds like an engineer's Athens. — Robin Sloan

[Great scientists] are men of bold ideas, but highly critical of their own ideas: they try to find whether their ideas are right by trying first to find whether they are not perhaps wrong. They work with bold conjectures and severe attempts at refuting their own conjectures. — Karl Popper

A presumption becomes a self-refuting assertion".

~R. Alan Woods [2012] — R. Alan Woods

While it may be impossible to 'disprove' the existence of some 'Higher Power' or abstract Creator, it is entirely possible - through analysis and research - to find discrepancies within the ancient, organized religious traditions that support the idea of a specific God. — David G. McAfee

Despite the fact that Machen included the story in his collection The Angel of Mons in 1915, with a long preface refuting the truth of the story, the world preferred to believe that in fact St. George had led the bowmen of Agincourt against the Germans at Mons. — Debra N. Mancoff

Keep a vigil on those who push you down always and leave them alone. Stay away from them so that you don't waste your precious time refuting them, trying to impress them or proving your point to them. Let them not occupy any free space in your mind. — Sanchita Pandey

But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? — Charles Darwin

Excuses will become self-refuting. No man who does not believe that Jesus is the perfect, sinless Son of God can, in his desperation and love for sin, reasonably use and misconstrue Jesus' words that unless a Christian is perfect, then that Christian cannot judge sin. Otherwise this non-believer is unconsciously entertaining a belief that Jesus, unlike any other man to ever live, was indeed perfect and sinless in His judgments and therefore that Christian is supposed to be like Him. — Criss Jami

Relativism reduces every element of absoluteness to relativity while making a completely illogical exception in favor of this reduction itself. Fundamentally it consists in propounding the claim that there is no truth as if this were truth or in declaring it to be absolutely true that there is nothing but the relatively true; one might just as well say that there is no language or write that there is no writing. In short, every idea is reduced to a relativity of some sort, whether psychological, historical, or social; but the assertion nullifies itself by the fact that it too presents itself as a psychological, historical, or social relativity. The assertion nullifies itself if it is true and by nullifying itself logically proves thereby that it is false; its initial absurdity lies in the implicit claim to be unique in escaping, as if by enchantment, from a relativity that is declared to be the only possibility. — Frithjof Schuon

tactical refusal of confrontation is itself only a stratagem of warfare. It's easy to understand, for example, why the Oaxaca Commune immediately declared itself peaceful. It wasn't a matter of refuting war, but of refusing to be defeated in a confrontation with the Mexican state and its henchmen. As some Cairo comrades explained it, "One mustn't mistake the tactic we employ when we chant 'nonviolence' for a fetishizing of non-violence — Anonymous

The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile. — C.D. Wright

Mr. Dawkins' assertions are self-refuting- ie. Actual infinity vs. potential infinity easily makes the most reasonable argument for theism and a Deity. Now, the argument for the Creator God of Christianity requires much more time, energy, and logical effort."


~R. Alan Woods [2007] — R. Alan Woods

Refuting the false promises requires philosophic understanding of economic interventionism, central banking, and the deeply flawed foreign policy of meddling in the affairs of other nations. — Ron Paul

Their necks also beautifully demonstrate the jury-rigged nature of evolution while simultaneously refuting the notion that some divine Artificer intelligently designed organic life — Brian Switek

I entered what I can only describe as an alternate universe, and experienced timelessness for myself, first-hand. There was no refuting the immortality of the soul for me ever again after that. — Susan Schneider