“Those who are guilty of the argumentum ad ignorantiam profess belief in something because its opposite cannot be proved … In the realm where “prejudice” is now most an issue, it normally takes a form like this: you cannot prove—by the method of statistics and quantitative measurement—that men are not equal. Therefore all men are equal. … You cannot prove—again by the methods of science—that one culture is higher than another. Therefore the culture of the Digger Indians is just a good as that of Muncie, Indiana, or thirteenth-century France.”
“Life without prejudice,” p. 6.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)
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Richard M. Weaver110
American scholar 1910–1963Related quotes
Bertrand Russell book Religion and Science
Religion and Science (1935), Ch. IX: Science of Ethics.
1930s
Variant: "What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know." (Attributed to Russell in Ted Peters' Cosmos As Creation: Theology and Science in Consonance [1989], p. 14, with a note that it was "told [to] a BBC audience [earlier this century]").
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
Letter to former Illinois Attorney General Usher F. Linder (20 February 1848)
1840s
George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician
Source: 1850s, A treatise on differential equations (1859), p. vi; cited in: Quotations by George Boole http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Quotations/Boole.html, MacTutor History of Mathematics, August 2010.
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
"Proof of God" <br class="br">1940s, Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic? http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell8.htm (1947)