Alfred Jules Ayer Short Quotes

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Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?

Alfred Jules Ayer
I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.

Alfred Jules Ayer
It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

Alfred Jules Ayer
While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

Alfred Jules Ayer
Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man.

Alfred Jules Ayer
It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.

Alfred Jules Ayer
If I had been someone not very clever, I would have done an easier job like publishing. That's the easiest job I can think of.

Alfred Jules Ayer
But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.

Alfred Jules Ayer
In practice, speculations about the past, if they are not to be entirely idle, must relate to the traces which the past has left.

Alfred Jules Ayer
There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis — about the meaning of what we say — and there is all of this … all of life.

Alfred Jules Ayer
I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is … for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.

Alfred Jules Ayer
To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

Alfred Jules Ayer
I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one's existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable.

Alfred Jules Ayer
I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

Alfred Jules Ayer
The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.

Alfred Jules Ayer