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The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.

A.J. Ayer

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A.J. Ayer
Unfruitful
Unwarranted
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More quotes by A.J. Ayer

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The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge...Unless he can formulate this 'knowledge' in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself.
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I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is ... for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.
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But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.
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The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.
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The only possible basis for a sound morality is mutual tolerance and respect: tolerance of one another’s customs and opinions respect for one another’s rights and feelings awareness of one another’s needs.
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The misfortunes which God is represented in the book of Job as allowing Satan to inflict on Job, merely to test his faith, are indications, if not of positive malevolence, at least of a suspicious and ruthless insecurity, which is characteristic more of a tyrant than of a wholly powerful and benevolent deity.
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While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.
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It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.
A.J. Ayer
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We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.
A.J. Ayer
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Even logical positivists are capable of love.
A.J. Ayer
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No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.
A.J. Ayer
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If one takes full account of the persecution of heretics, the frequency and savagery of the religious wars which Christianity had endangered, the harm caused, especially to children, by the pernicious doctrine of original sin, a case could be made for saying that the world would have been better off without Christianity.
A.J. Ayer
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It is possible to be a meta-physician without believing in a transcendent reality for we shall see that many metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire on the part of their authors to go beyond the limits of experience.
A.J. Ayer
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I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.
A.J. Ayer
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Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
A.J. Ayer
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We shall maintain that no statement which refers to a 'reality'transcending the limits of all possible sense- experience can possibly have any literal significance.
A.J. Ayer
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If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.
A.J. Ayer
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It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.
A.J. Ayer
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No moral system can rest solely on authority.
A.J. Ayer
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Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description but he was a great and good man.
A.J. Ayer