"Self-contradiction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... anomaly. A land of freedom, boastfully so-called, with human slavery enthroned at the heart of it, and at last dictating terms of unconditional surrender to every other organ of its life, what was it but a thing of falsehood and horrible self-contradiction? For three-quarters of a century it had nevertheless endured, kept together by policy, compromise, and concession. But at the last that republic was torn in two; and truth was to be possible under the flag. Truth, thank God, truth! even though for the moment it ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... Malthus is at present disposed to deny, or that he has not himself expressly insisted upon in some part or other of his various works.'[436] He only argues that Malthus's concessions are made at the cost of self-contradiction. Why then, it may be asked, should not Hazlitt take the position of an improver and harmoniser of the doctrine rather than of a fierce opponent? The answer has been already implied. He regards Malthus as an apologist for an ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... facts that Miss Miniver never stated an argument clearly, that she was never embarrassed by a sense of self-contradiction, and had little more respect for consistency of statement than a washerwoman has for wisps of vapor, which made Ann Veronica critical and hostile at their first encounter in Morningside Park, became at ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... discussion of our problem. Hume, as I think, laid down the true principle when he said that there could be no a priori proof of a matter of fact. An a priori truth is a truth which cannot be denied without self-contradiction, but there can never be a logical consideration in supposing the non-existence of any fact whatever. The ordinary appeal to the truths of pure mathematics is, therefore, beside the question. All such truths are statements of the precise equivalence of two propositions. To say that there ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... this method, Plato had not only exposed the insufficiency and self-contradiction of all results obtained by a mere a posteriori generalization of the simple facts of experience, but he demonstrated, as a consequence, that we are in possession of some elements of knowledge which have not been derived from sensation; that there ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... no preventive conditions present, but that some of the conditions of production of the possible thing actually are here. Thus a concretely possible chicken means: (1) that the idea of chicken contains no essential self-contradiction; (2) that no boys, skunks, or other enemies are about; and (3) that at least an actual egg exists. Possible chicken means actual egg— plus actual sitting hen, or incubator, or what not. As the actual conditions approach completeness the chicken becomes a better-and- ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... gods; that the relatively late misinterpretation is the original and true meaning of the rite; in a word, that there was no religion in the earliest manifestation of religion. But it is precisely this last contention which is fatal to the Gift-theory. Not only is it a self-contradiction in terms, but it denies the very possibility of religious evolution. Evolution is a process and a continuous process: there is an unbroken continuity between the earliest and the latest of its stages. If there was no religion whatever ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... of being acquainted with the condition of Europe; none could be more competent to gauge the intellectual shallowness and self-contradiction of the Protestant criticism of Catholic doctrine; and to estimate, at its proper value, the fond imagination that the waters let out by the Renascence would come to rest amidst the blind alleys of the new ecclesiasticism. The bastard, whilom poor student and monk, become the familiar of bishops ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... asked, it is hardly superfluous to continue to repeat, that truth of fact and poetical truth are two different things. Milton's attitude towards nature is not that of a "descriptive poet", if indeed the phrase be not a self-contradiction. ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... all the ideals for which our civilization has been striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a so-called cultivated man upon such a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a self-contradiction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a professor drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and explain, ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James |
