"I tell you the solemn truth that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one o...f the axioms of physics."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifyability. 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--that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as true, or reject it as being false.... To make our position clearer, we may formulate it in another way. Let us call a proposition which records an actual or possible observation an experiential proposition. Then we may say that it is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premises alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why should not the knowledge, the skill, the expertness, the assiduity, and the spirited hazards of trade and commerce, when crown...ed with success, be entitled to give those flattering distinctions by which mankind are so universally captivated? Such are the specious, but false arguments for a proposition which always will find numerous advocates, in a nation where men are every day starting up from obscurity to wealth. To refute them is needless. The general sense of mankind cries out, with irresistible force, "Un gentilhomme est toujours gentilhomme."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a first approximation, I define "belief" not as the object of believing (a dogma, a program, etc.) but as the subject's investm...ent in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted ...to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Communism is a proposition to structure the world more reasonably, a proposition for changing the world. As such, we have to analy...ze it and, if we deem it reasonable, act upon it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The e...ntertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no scepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the universe over, there is but one thing, this old Two- Face, creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any propos...ition may be affirmed or denied.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »