A Quote by A.J. Ayer

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

A.J. Ayer

Quote Topics

Appears Branch Department Ethics Knowledge More Nothing Sociology Than Then

Quote Author

A.J. Ayer
English - Philosopher
October 29, 1910 - June 27, 1989

All pantheism must ultimately be shipwrecked on the inescapable demands of ethics, and then on the evil and suffering of the world. If the world is a theophany , then everything done by man, and even by animal, is equally divine and excellent; nothing can be more censurable and nothing more praiseworthy than anything else; hence there is no ethics.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Opportunism towards knowledge is a utilitarian demand that knowledge must be immediately practical. Just like with sociology where we hope its purpose is to serve society, however, the true purpose of sociology lies in its impracticality. It cannot become practical or else it loses its meaning. Perhaps we should learn a different kind of knowledge: the knowledge to question knowledge.

Wang Jianwei

People assume that the executive branch has more power than it actually has. Only the legislative branch can create the laws; the executive branch cannot create the laws. So, if the executive branch tries to create a branch one side or the other... you go back to the founders of the nation. They set up a system that ensures that it doesn't happen.

Michael Dell

One of the principal objects of theoretical research in my department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in its greatest simplicity.

J. Willard Gibbs

Actual knowledge is identical with its object: in the individual, potential knowledge is in time prior to actual knowledge, but in the universe as a whole it is not prior even in time. Mind is not at one time knowing and at another not. When mind is set free from its present conditions it appears as just what it is and nothing more: this alone is immortal and eternal (we do not, however, remember its former activity because, while mind in this sense is impassible, mind as passive is destructible), and without it nothing thinks.

Aristotle

Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. ... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. Rome no more than beheld (that is, taken in through the eyes only) could still be a masterpiece in cardboard - the eye I suppose being of all the organs the most easily infatuated and then jaded and so tricked. Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge.

Elizabeth Bowen

There is nothing more negligent than attempting to address a problem one finds on a branch than by censoring the leaves.

Saul Williams

At times, it appears easy to sermonise on morality and ethics. But morality and ethics appear good only when applied to others, never on oneself.

Jaggi Vasudev

Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge ... but, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

It is the worst of all superstitions to assume that the epistemological characteristics of one branch of knowledge must necessarily be applicable to any other branch.

Ludwig von Mises

In just about every area of society, there's nothing more important than ethics.

Henry Paulson

Manners are made up of trivialities of deportment which can be easily learned if one does not happen to know them; manner is personality - the outward manifestation of one's innate character and attitude toward life.... Etiquette must, if it is to be of more than trifling use, include ethics as well as manners. Certainly what one is, is of far greater importance than what one appears to be.

Emily Post

What do you mean less than nothing? I don't think there is any such thing as less than nothing. Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness. It's the lowest you can go. It's the end of the line. How can something be less than nothing? If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something - even though it's just a very little bit of something. But if nothing is nothing, then nothing has nothing that is less than it is.

E. B. White

To-day it appears as though it may well be altogether abolished in the future as it has to some extent been mitigated in the past by the unceasing, and as it now appears, unlimited ascent of man to knowledge, and through knowledge to physical power and dominion over Nature.