A Quote by Thomas Jefferson

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.

Thomas Jefferson

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Quote Author

Thomas Jefferson
American - President
April 13, 1743 - July 4, 1826

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.

Thomas Jefferson

I have always declared God to be a distinct personage, Jesus Christ a separate and distinct personage from God the Father, and the Holy Ghost was a distinct personage and a Spirit: and these three constitute three distinct personages and three Gods.

Joseph Smith, Jr.

Possible ideas and thoughts are vast in number. A distinct word for every distinct idea and thought would require a vast vocabulary. The problem in language is to express many ideas and thoughts with comparatively few words.

John Wesley Powell

I do not deny God, because that word conveys to me no idea, and I cannot deny that which presents to me no distinct affirmation, and of which the would-be affirmer has no conception. I cannot war with a nonentity. If, however, God is affirmed to represent an existence which is distinct from the existence of which I am a mode, and which it is alleged is not the noumenon of which the word I represents only a speciality of phenomena, then I deny God, and affirm that it is impossible God can be.

Charles Bradlaugh

...a distinction must be made between true and false ideas, and that too much rein must not be given to a man's imagination under pretext of its being a clear and distinct intellection.

Gottfried Leibniz

On the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in so far as I am a thinking, non-extended thing; and on the other hand I have a distinct idea of body, in so far a this is simply an extended, non-thinking thing. And, accordingly, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and exist without it.

Rene Descartes

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation, but, we venture to say, they will find themselves very much enlightened during the process, and will even be doubtful whether the ideas as expressed in symbols had ever quite found their way out of the equations into their minds.

James Clerk Maxwell

I think you can make fun of anything except things people can't help. They can't help their race or their sex or their age, so you ridicule their pretension or their ego instead. You can ridicule ideas - ideas don't have feelings. You can ridicule an idea that someone holds without hurting them.

Ricky Gervais

Wisdom and understanding are synonymous words; they consist of two propositions, which are not distinct in sense, but one and the same thing variously expressed.

John Tillotson

You have two choices in life - you can dissolve into the main stream or you can be distinct. To be distinct, you must be different. To be different you must strive to be what no one else but you can be. Don’t be so concerned with the opinions of others; those who follow the quiet, creative voice from within are both fortunate and correct.

Bob Proctor

I have the idea that anyone who has ever heard my name has the distinct impression that I was put under the sod years ago just before they buried Lillian Russell.

Olivia De Havilland

The everyday world, as Kant proved, is mere appearance. But it is also the only world in which we can make sense of the idea of a plurality of distinct individuals. We can only distinguish things as different if they occupy different regions of space-time. It follows (a point Kant missed but which the mystics have always understood) that reality 'in itself' is 'beyond plurality' and is, in that sense, 'One'.

Julian Young

Arbitrariness and true liberty are as distinct from each other that the empirical nature is distinct from the higher nature of man.

African Spir

This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, or myself. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived.

George Berkeley

I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.

Thomas Jefferson

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.