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No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A.J. Ayer

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A.J. Ayer
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More quotes by A.J. Ayer

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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 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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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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If 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that 'God exists' is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance.
A.J. Ayer
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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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But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.
A.J. Ayer
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There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.
A.J. Ayer
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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.
A.J. Ayer
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While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.
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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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 do not believe in God. It seems to me that theists of all kinds have very largely failed to make their concept of a deity intelligible and to the extent that they have made it intelligible, they have given us no reason to think that anything answers to it.
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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Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
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
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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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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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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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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.
A.J. Ayer