"Sophism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would lead to crying abuses. Society has neither the right nor the duty to facilitate the dangerous or injurious acts of certain individuals at the expense of others, by rendering them less dangerous, so that certain third parties may be less liable to suffer. This is an absurd sophism. The duty of society is to make responsible the one who has committed the dangerous or injurious act, and to punish him if he has done harm. Here, on the contrary, one only of the culprits (the prostitute) is compelled to keep to her vile trade, while the ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... distinction between governor and governed is an error in politics analogous to that in philosophy or theology of denying all real distinction between creator and creature, God and the universe, which all the world knows is either pantheism or pure atheism—the supreme sophism. If we make governor and governed one and the same, we efface both terms; for there is no governor nor governed, if the will that governs is identically the will that is governed. To make the controller and the controlled the same is precisely to deny all control. There must, then, if ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... the point of the Ithuriel-spear, whose touch can but reveal more clearly the grace and grandeur of her angelic proportions. The advocates of Slavery have taken refuge in the last covert of desperate sophism, and affirm that their institution is of Divine ordination, that its bases are laid in the nature of man. Is anything, then, of God's contriving endangered by inquiry? Was it the system of the universe, or the monks, that trembled at the telescope of Galileo? Did the circulation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... the vessel for a moment with my name, I was no more amenable to rebuke, than the respectable merchants of Sierra Leone and elsewhere who passed hardly a day without selling, to notorious slavers, such merchandise as could be used alone in slave-wars or slave-trade. It is probable that the sophism soothed my conscience at the moment, though I could never escape the promise that sealed my ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... self-evident that we will not attempt to demonstrate it. We merely add a single observation which appears to us of some importance. The writer who said: "Everything is true, and everything is false," announced a fact which the human intellect, naturally prone to sophism, interprets as it chooses, but it really seems as though human affairs have as many facets as there are minds that contemplate them. This fact may be detailed ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
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