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… — A.J. Ayer Copy Share Image
No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine. — A.J. Ayer Copy Share Image
In other words, the propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions. Accordingly we may say that philosophy is a department of logic. For we will see that the characteristic mark of a purely… — A.J. Ayer Copy Share
The principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else. And the reason for this is that we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves, without sinning against the rules which govern the use of language, and so making our utterances self-stultifying. In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are… — A.J. Ayer Copy Share
I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is ... for 26 years I had never… — A.J. Ayer Copy Share Image
The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that… — A.J. Ayer Copy Share Image
If 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that 'God exists' is to… — A.J. Ayer Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“What is not so generally recognized is that there can be no way of proving that the existence of a god, such as the God of Christianity, is even probable. Yet this also is easily shown. For if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical hypothesis. And in that… — A.J. Ayer Copy Share
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ...… — A.J. Ayer Copy Share Image
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… — A.J. Ayer Copy Share Image
