The Ethics of Belief (1877), The Limits Of Inference
Context: p>We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know. We may believe the statement of another person, when there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.</p
“In highly charged political matters, one person's ambiguity may be another person's truth.”
February 1985, as a prosecution witness in the case against Clive Ponting Norton-Taylor, Richard. 'Sir Richard Mottram http://politics.guardian.co.uk/byers/story/0,11320,656525,00.html, The Guardian (25 February 2002).
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Richard Mottram 4
British civil ervant 1946Related quotes
“Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.”
“One person's craziness is another person's reality.”
Variant: One person's crazyness is another person's reality
“One person's weed is another person's wildflower.”
Source: An Unthymely Death and Other Garden Mysteries
Source: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Ch. 1 : Why State of Nature Theory?; Political Philosophy, p. 6
Context: Some anarchists have claimed not merely that we would be better off without a state, but that any state necessarily violates people's moral rights and hence is intrinsically immoral. Our starting point then, though nonpolitical, is by intention far from nonmoral. Moral philosophy sets the background for, and boundaries of, political philosophy. What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or do to establish such an apparatus.
“To the world you may be one person; but to one person you may be the world.”
Coth, in Book Four : Coth at Porutsa, Ch. XXVI : The Realist in Defeat
The Silver Stallion (1926)