What Everyone Should Know?

In all communication there has to be a shared body of knowledge that is taken for granted. We have to agree on what you don't have to define.

Few maxims are true in every respect.

*	It doesn't pay to tell someone they are wrong.

Dale Carnegie

Losing an argument is a noble art.

Every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions. But no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.	Bernard Baruch

Equality is essential to conversation.

G. K. Chesterton

What is reasonable for people to do in the face of new evidence depends on what they previously [thought they] had good reason to believe.

Anthony Flew

Everyone weighs the evidence differently depending on what they want or don't want to believe.

*	The irrational is not necessarily unreasonable.

G. K. Chesterton

In the human psyche things rarely achieve the simplicity of rational categories.
Ignace Lepp

Not every word can be defined.

As nothing can be proved but by supposing something intuitively known, and evident without proof, so nothing can be defined but by the use of words too plain to admit a definition.	Samuel Johnson

Just because we can't define something as a truth doesn't mean we can't feel it as a fact.	G. K. Chesterton

It's important not to get hung up on definitions.

*	Explanation has to stop somewhere.

It is not every question that deserves an answer.

In all pointed sentences some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to concise ness.	Oscar Wilde

There is an accuracy that defeats itself by the overemphasis of details. I often say that one must permit oneself, and quite advisedly and deliberately, a certain margin of misstatement.	Benjamin N. Cardozo

Very few sentences can withstand analytical criticism because language is not a logical system.

Rival philosophers can undermine one another's arguments indefinitely.

We often irritate others when we think we could not possibly do so.

La Rochefoucauld

The degree to which we are loved and accepted emotionally is in exact propor
tion to our ability to give enjoyment to others—family excepted.

*	The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.

William Hazlitt

The most important trait in determining a person's attractiveness is the degree of their negativity: the more negative, the less attractive.

A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world: everyone you meet is your mirror.	Ken Keyes

People who haven't received much emotionally usually can't give much emo
tionally.

It is irrational to assume what it is one's business to prove.

Common sense is a form of insight.

One person's blinding common sense is another person's raving nonsense.

We seldom attribute common sense except to those who agree with us.

La Rochefoucauld

*	Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.	Bertrand Russell

Paraphrase: Everything is complicated and subtle to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it simple and straightforward.

Paraphrase: Language is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to justify a common sense belief to a person who doesn't accept it.

*	You can always use logic to get round common sense.

Increasing the speed limit on our highways is not necessarily going to make our roads unsafe.	Al Palladini (Minister of Transport under

Ontario Premier Mike Harris and former car salesman)

We demand strict proof for opinions we dislike, but are satisfied with mere hints for what we're inclined to accept.	John Henry Newman

It's not a controversial proposition that people tend to believe what they want, and that the strength of their conviction is usually proportional to their self- interest.

If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true, he reasons, therefore it is true.	William James

A belief is not necessarily false because it happens to be consoling.

The closest we can get to impartiality is admitting we are partial.

G. K. Chesterton

Arguments that don't satisfy us emotionally usually don't satisfy us intellect
ually.

It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing.

John Henry Newman

It is impossible to make any intellectual headway against the steady resistance of a strong negative conviction.

Desire is the very essence of man.

Spinoza

The search for an outside meaning that can compel an inner response must always be disappointed: all 'meaning' must be at bottom related to our primary desires, and when they are extinct no miracle can restore to the world the value which they reflected upon it.	Bertrand Russell

When you object to someone's attitude or opinion on moral grounds, it invar iably causes bad feeling.

*	You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

G. K. Chesterton

Everything that logic can give us is ultimately founded on something other than logic, call it faith, or common sense, or intuition, or insight, or primary intellectual conviction.

If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. There are some premises that can't be reached as conclusions.	C. S. Lewis

No argument can establish the truth of its premises, since if it tried to do so it would be circular; and therefore no argument can establish the truth of its conclusions.	Bryan Magee

It is not certain that everything is uncertain.

Pascal

It is brilliantly silly to ask whether anything can be known for certain—for the simple reason that any conceivable answer to the question implies that at least one thing is known for certain. And if one thing is known for certain, why not many?

*	You can be certain without being logically certain. As well as logical certainty there is the certainty of experience.

You can be certain that you exist, that you're alive, that you're awake, that you're sane, even though you can't demonstrate your certainty. After all, it would be insincere to pretend that we're not absolutely certain that some people try to avoid income tax, or that politicians don't always keep their promises.

Philosophies (and philosophical arguments) are a lot like houses. Each of them has its good and bad points.

No individual argument should be taken too seriously, irrespective of whether it supports some favourite belief or undermines it.

*	All knowledge must be built up upon our instinctive [i.e. intuitive] beliefs, and if these are rejected, nothing is left.	Bertrand Russell

Every philosophical argument is rooted in an intuitive belief which is explicit or implied.

Most of what we take for granted is exceedingly difficult to validate, and much of it impossible.	Bryan Magee

It is impossible to accept or reject a world view on purely rational grounds.

*	The attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of any particular philosophy is absolutely hopeless. (Paraphrased from William James', 'In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless.')

We must abandon the search for an argument so powerful and so incontrovert
ible that it will destroy the philosophical opposition once and for all.

The case for any world view cannot be based on a mathematical certainty—as in the proposition, 'Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one other.'

Every philosophical position has its own difficulties. The question one must decide is not whether the answers to the difficulties of some particular philos ophy are completely satisfying, but whether or not the difficulties inherent in competing philosophies are even greater.

All of us must hold metaphysical beliefs about the world, whether we like it or not. An example of a metaphysical belief would be the belief that the laws of nature really are laws, and not just weird repetitions.

The accusation of metaphysics has become in philosophy something like the accusation of being a security risk in the public service. I do not for my part know what is meant by the word "metaphysics." The only definition I have found that fits all cases is: 'a philosophical opinion not held by the present author.'	Bertrand Russell

There's no such thing as unbounded intellectual freedom.

All intelligent ideas are narrow in the sense that they cannot be broader than themselves.	G. K. Chesterton