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

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I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.
A.J. Ayer
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Theism is so confused and the sentences in which God appears so incoherent and so incapable of verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.
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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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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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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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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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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Even logical positivists are capable of love.
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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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.
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 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.
A.J. Ayer
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No moral system can rest solely on authority.
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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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.
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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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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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