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More "Sophism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in their original freshness the feelings he then cherished. This noble appeal was received by the house with warm demonstrations of applause. Sir James Graham endeavoured to remove the effect which it produced, setting out with the paltry sophism that Mr. Brotherton had risen by the long-hour system, ergo, he should not oppose it! The fair implication of Mr. Brotherton's speech was that he had risen in spite of the long-hour system, and if Sir James could have regarded the arguments of the honourable member for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... not permitted to assume the contested premises and thence infer the matter in dispute. Insidiously to employ the words contrivance, design and adaptation, before these circumstances are apparent in the universe, thence justly inferring a contriver, is a popular sophism against which it ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... came to the management of public affairs sober and considerately resolved on the ruin of the state; so does this man seem to me with the greatest diligence and eloquence to overturn and demolish custom, as those who magnify the man testify, when they dispute against him concerning the sophism called Pseudomenos (or the Liar). For to say, my best friend, that a conclusion drawn from contrary positions is not manifestly false, and again to say that some arguments having true premises and true inductions may yet moreover have the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... while he violates its mandates. The child of civilization, on the contrary, the man of refinement, will not admit that he commits a fault, and to soothe his conscience he prefers to impose on it by a sophism. No doubt he wishes to obey his appetite, but at the same time without falling in his own esteem. How does he manage this? He begins by overthrowing the superior authority that thwarts his inclination, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... we often believe ourselves awake, was well answered by his plain neighbour, 'Ah, but when awake do we ever believe ourselves asleep?'—Things identical must be convertible. The preceding passage seems to rest on a similar sophism. For the question is not, whether there may not occur in prose an order of words, which would be equally proper in a poem; nor whether there are not beautiful lines and sentences of frequent occurrence in good poems, which would be equally becoming as well ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... knows who is interested in philosophical curiosities, is the first and perpetual sophism of the human mind,—the favorite tool of falsehood, the stumbling-block of science, the advocate of crime. The syllogism has produced all the evils which the fabulist so eloquently condemned, and has done nothing good ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... among the other worlds which revolve about the sun, and its movements harmonized with the laws of the universe. So, when the white race assumes as a hypothesis that it is the main object of creation and that all things else are merely subsidiary to its well-being, sophism, subterfuge, perversion of conscience, arrogance, injustice, oppression, cruelty, sacrifice of human blood, all are required to maintain the position, and its dealings with other races become indeed a problem, a problem which, if based on a hypothesis of common ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... sacred sentiments of obedience, and reverence, and justice, of the supremacy of the calm and grand reason of the law over the fitful will of the individual and the crowd; that it helped to withstand the pernicious sophism that the successive generations, as they come to life, are but as so many successive flights of summer flies, without relations to the past or duties to the future, and taught instead that all—all the dead, the living, the unborn—were one moral ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... went in his coach from Richmond to Kensington. It may seem strange that such fallacies, the dregs of the Jesuitical casuistry, should have had power to seduce men of heroic spirit, both Whigs and Tories, into a crime on which divine and human laws have justly set a peculiar note of infamy. But no sophism is too gross to delude minds distempered ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Nature and Natural could be entirely banished from language about Art there would be some chance of coming to a rational philosophy of the subject; at present the excessive vagueness and shiftiness of these terms cover any amount of sophism. The pots and pans of Teniers and Van Mieris are natural; the passions and humours of Shakspeare and Moliere are natural; the angels of Fra Angelico and Luini are natural; the Sleeping Fawn and Fates of Phidias are natural; the ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... thrown into the shade by the superior glory of having, in his old age, rescued the most Christian nation of the world from the inroads of heresy! To every argument he could only be brought to repeat the trite sophism, "that a change of religion could not be effected without a revolution in the state," and that, though he had no fear of being compelled to restore the gifts he had received from the late monarchs, he would not suffer ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... of the lower civilizations. It disposes once and for all at least of the civilizing mission of Germany. Evidently the Germans are the last people in the world to be trusted with the task. They are as short-sighted morally as physically. What is their sophism of "necessity" but an inability to imagine tomorrow morning? What is their non-reciprocity but an inability to imagine, not a god or devil, but merely another man? Are these to judge mankind? Men of two tribes in Africa not only know that they are all men but can understand ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... publication; this is what happens to the secret acts of governments and the complaints of the lower classes. This silence, which proves nothing, greatly impresses unreflecting historians; it is the origin of the widespread sophism of the "good old times." No document relates any abuse of power by officials or any complaints made by peasants; therefore, everything was regular and nobody was suffering. Before we argue from silence we ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... to regulate the happiness of humanity as it does the march of an army, and with an entirely mathematical precision? This is an evil tendency, a delusion which the Academy cannot oppose too strongly, because it is not only a chimera, but a dangerous sophism. Let us respect good and honest intentions; but let us not fear to say that to publish a book upon the ORGANIZATION OF LABOR is to rewrite for the fiftieth time a treatise upon the quadrature of the circle ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man. No! they were too wise for that. They took good care to refer their claims to custom and prescription, and boldly—sometimes very impudently—asserted them upon traditionary and constitutional grounds. ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... liked it better, had the judiciary been associated for that purpose, or invested separately with a similar power. There are other good things of less moment. I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... I am, and although enjoying good digestive organs, I must have only one meal every day; but I find a set-off to that privation in my delightful sleep, and in the ease which I experience in writing down my thoughts without having recourse to paradox or sophism, which would be calculated to deceive myself even more than my readers, for I never could make up my mind to palm counterfeit coin upon them if I knew it to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... calling forth the lowest animal passions, deprave and brutalize men. Every one knows the weakness of the arguments in favor of war, such as were brought forward by De Maistre, Moltke, and others, for they are all founded on the sophism that in every human calamity it is possible to find an advantageous element, or else upon the utterly arbitrary assertion that wars have always existed and therefore always must exist, as if the bad actions of men could be justified by the advantages or the ...
— "Bethink Yourselves" • Leo Tolstoy
... what I would wish to see accomplished than by such a publication, as it will afford me an opportunity to re-consider the subject, and to say what I please on the general subject, and expose every petty sophism and absurdity of my opponents, and to show what are really the rights of the members of the Church in more senses than one. The strength of the opposite side of the question is silence and Conference authority; the strength of my side is discussion. For one on the ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... denied either the Father or the Son: therefore the church of Rome cannot be the Antichrist intended by St. John." Now, in this argument, which seems to be so clear and conclusive, there is a latent sophism, an assumption contrary to the Scriptures. The false assumption is, that the word denieth is univocal; that is, that it has in the Bible, and on this doctrinal point in particular, only one sense; whereas this is not the case. The Church of Rome does indeed "profess ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... and therefore he must have none. But certainly his school has been of the worst. Would not, perhaps, the reflections applied to the case of the French peasants of a century ago apply also to them?" It is not under oppression that we learn how to use freedom. The ordinary sophism by which misrule is defended is, when truly stilted, this: The people must continue in slavery, because slavery has generated in them all the vices of slaves; because they are ignorant, they must remain under a power which has made and which keeps them ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... sophism in legislation is not a mere abstraction; it must speedily bear fruit in material results of the most disastrous nature, and I implore your honorable committee, in behalf of our common country, not to open a Pandora's box by way of experiment from whence ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the community, we should be accused, and justly, of talking nonsense. Yet such an assertion would not, as far as we can perceive, be more unreasonable than that which Mr Mill has here ventured to make. Without adducing one fact, without taking the trouble to perplex the question by one sophism, he placidly dogmatises away the interest of one half of the human race. If there be a word of truth in history, women have always been, and still are, over the greater part of the globe, humble companions, play things, captives, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... had predicted, Douglas had no resource but to repeat the sophism he had hastily invented in his Springfield speech of ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... the substance of his argument, under eight heads. Six of these only prove future retribution, and only two of them have any direct bearing upon the main question. Yet, through all of them, there runs a quiet assumption, that they are bearing directly on the main question. This is the radical sophism of the whole volume. We may see this more plainly by ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... vicious reasoning, circular reasoning; petitio principii [Lat.], ignoratio elenchi [Lat.]; post hoc ergo propter hoc [Lat.]; non sequitur, ignotum per ignotius [Lat.]. misjudgment &c 481; false teaching &c 538. sophism, solecism, paralogism^; quibble, quirk, elenchus^, elench^, fallacy, quodlibet, subterfuge, subtlety, quillet^; inconsistency, antilogy^; a delusion, a mockery, and a snare [Denman]; claptrap, cant, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Channing, in his first argument, "that if any one may be held as property, then any other man may be so held." This sophism has been already sufficiently refuted. It proceeds on the supposition that if one man, however incapable of self-government, may be placed under the control of another, then all men may be placed ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... a speech, of great beauty and animation, in reply. But his whole argument consisted in the sophism, that the French had been rendered savage by the long sense of oppression, and that the blame of their atrocities, (which he fully admitted,) should be visited on the monarchy, not on ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... away the crime from the cause of the people, as a weapon which has pierced their hands and changed liberty into despotism. Let us not seek to justify the scaffold with the cause of our country, and proscriptions by the cause of liberty. Let us not pardon the spirit of our age by the sophism of revolutionary energy, let humanity preserve its heart; it is the safest and most infallible of its principles, and let us resign ourselves to the condition of human things. The history of the Revolution is glorious ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... demonstrate it. We merely add a single observation which appears to us of some importance. The writer who said: "Everything is true, and everything is false," announced a fact which the human intellect, naturally prone to sophism, interprets as it chooses, but it really seems as though human affairs have as many facets as there are minds that contemplate them. This fact ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... This astute little sophism confounded poor George for a minute, during which Sally began to giggle violently, and flirt in her rustic fashion with the three rebels in a row. At length George, recovering his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... him that they were not come to condemn him, their province was to condemn no one, but only to cut off the heretic from the church, for the temporal judge to deal with as he should think fit." The cowardly sophism had been heard too often. Ridley thanked the court "for their gentleness," "being the same which Christ had of the high priest:" "the high priest said it was not lawful for him to put any man to death, but committed Christ to Pilate; neither would suffer him to ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... Library,' which covered a period of 1138 years. We have only a small part remaining of this vast compilation. These rescued portions we owe to Eusebius, to John Malala and other writers of the lower empire, who have cited them in the course of their works. He is the reputed author of the famous sophism against motion. 'If any body be moved, it is moved in the place where it is, or in a place where it is not, for nothing can act or suffer where it is not, and therefore there is no ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... and possess no validity or truth, except as regulative principles of the systematic employment of reason in experience. But when such delusive proof are presented to us, it is our duty to meet them with the non liquet of a matured judgement; and, although we are unable to expose the particular sophism upon which the proof is based, we have a right to demand a deduction of the principles employed in it; and, if these principles have their origin in pure reason alone, such a deduction is absolutely impossible. And thus it is ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... seem strange that such fallacies, the dregs of the Jesuitical casuistry, should have had power to seduce men of heroic spirit, both Whigs and Tories, into a crime on which divine and human laws have justly set a peculiar note of infamy. But no sophism is too gross to delude minds ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... their own principles were more distinctly defined; and, as they soon found that they were quite an overmatch for any individual sect, their tone gradually became more decided and dictatorial. But the theological position from which they started was a sophism; and, like the movements of a traveller who has mistaken his way, every step of their progress was an advance in a wrong direction. Some of the more prominent errors to which their theory led may ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... discovery of Ralegh's knavery long since. That royal hypothesis of stark imposture, and no enthusiasm, was the clue which the Lords Commissioners, with Bacon at their head, had obsequiously borrowed to hale Ralegh to the scaffold. It was the strange sophism out of which Bacon again was set to compose a sedative for ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... same question of the lower civilizations. It disposes once and for all at least of the civilizing mission of Germany. Evidently the Germans are the last people in the world to be trusted with the task. They are as short-sighted morally as physically. What is their sophism of "necessity" but an inability to imagine tomorrow morning? What is their non-reciprocity but an inability to imagine, not a god or devil, but merely another man? Are these to judge mankind? Men ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... the Bible. Every Other Book Inspired? Connection of Bible History and Morality. Hume's Sophism. Miracles Being Violations of Laws of Nature, Contrary to an Unalterable Experience. No Testimony can Reach to the Supernatural. Records of Facts Not Judged by Your Notions. Rationalistic Explanation of the Miracles. Bible Account of Creation Unscientific. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the matter in dispute. Insidiously to employ the words contrivance, design and adaptation, before these circumstances are apparent in the universe, thence justly inferring a contriver, is a popular sophism against which it behoves us to ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... Themistocles—"My son commands his mother; his mother commands me; I command the Athenians; the Athenians command Greece; Greece commands Europe; Europe commands the whole earth; therefore my son commands the whole earth"—the sophism depends upon the inaccurate use of the commands, which is employed in different senses in the different propositions. This errour was without difficulty detected by S—— at ten years old; and we make no doubt that any unprejudiced boy of the same age, ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
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