A. J. Ayer Quotes

No morality can be founded on authority, even if the authority were divine.

But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.

We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.

Even logical positivists are capable of love.

Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?

I saw a Divine Being. I'm afraid I'm going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.

The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.

It seems that I have spent my entire life trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

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

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.

Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man.

I'm not a film-school guy. I was a high-school dropout. I was on a nuclear submarine. I was an electrician. I was a house painter. So if you get in my face, I'm going to fight you.

[If] you want to learn something about somebody, get into a fistfight. You'll learn more in five minutes than you will in five weeks of conversations. It's basic.

Resisted temptations become lost opportunities.

Riches make cowards of us.

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

Well, as far as film, either you're making a film or you're making videos. Digital capture is always trying to emulate the range and look of film. I believe personally that film has more.

We shall maintain that no statement which refers to a 'reality'transcending the limits of all possible sense- experience can possibly have any literal significance.

Character is the best security.

I feel like, as a filmmaker, I'm at my strongest when I write the script and when it comes from me, out of whole cloth. My best work has always been self-generated.

All wars are crusades, or we're made to feel they are. That's just what's so wicked about them. We're made to feel - not think - and people can't think when they feel.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

To operate а tank as a crew, it's not about five individuals. It has to be one organism, composed of five people.

I like to do stuff real and practical and in camera, as much as possible. I like old school filmmaking.

I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one's existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable.

I will have clients rather than people who just give me orders

Every movie is different. Every movie requires its own sort of photographic voice.

The worst part of directing is always seeing the first assembly. It's devastating. It really is. It's like going into the delivery room and you can't wait to see your baby, and it's a crocodile.

It's important for me to take very famous, well-known people and not have them play themselves and not have them be seen as themselves.

Stories of friendship are very interesting to me. Artificial families are something I like to explore. Whether it's a bunch of guys or a bunch of ladies, there's something interesting about that.

I think great acting is about inhabiting a skin and transforming yourself.

Actors are insanely competitive and they hold back on each other. They are like magicians and none of them want to show their tricks.

I'm not the biggest fan of music videos. I don't think they're done well a lot of the time. I think it's hard to find something that grabs you and keeps you engaged for the whole time.

There's nothing in all the world as much fun as talk. When you're talking, that is, with the right person.

Curious, isn't it that "talking with the right people" means something so different from "talking with the right person"?

The trouble with education is that we always read everything when we're too young to know what it means. And the trouble with life is that we're always too busy to re-read it later.

I've almost come to feel that it doesn't make much difference what you believe in - the thing that's important is a state of belief. It's much better to believe in nonsense than in nothing.

Sentiment, crystallized, grows into sentimentality. It lost all spontaneity, which was the essence of feeling. It was dated--old-fashioned.

Character comes before scholarship.

All banks should be under government control. Deposits guaranteed, dividends reduced, officials turned into state servants taking their orders from Washington.

Even the scrutiny is good because it lets you know the world cares about your movie, and there is interest in it.

I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is ... for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.

You never know what you have until you put it in front of an audience. That's the truth. That's the truth of filmmaking and that's why you make movies, for an audience to, hopefully, enjoy it.

I think a good director can embrace any genre and it's the kind of thing where you always want to do something different. You always want to challenge yourself.

I'm one of those big believers that the movie comes together in the way it's supposed to be and that movies are fated to become what they become.

My mantra is "Better is better".

The most terrifying thing in my life is a blank sheet of paper.

The worst pressure is the pressure I put on myself.