“Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good! For His mercy endures forever.” – 1 Chron. 16:34
“Be happy with what you have, and there will be plenty to be happy about.” – Irish proverb
“Baskets of fruit are heavy.” – Doug Wilson
“Wine is bottled poetry.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
“Never eat more than you can lift.” – Miss Piggy
“I’m in shape. Round is a shape.” – Hans Leidenfrost
“It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.” – Mark Twain
“Before I go on babbling, let me say some more” – Marty Becktell
“A paradox is truth standing on its head to get attention.” – G. K. Chesterton
“The worse your logic, the more interesting the results you obtain from it.” – Lord Russell
“Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.” – Laurence J. Peter
“You can’t be very good at philosophy if you’re very bad at logic” – Peter Kreeft
“Given the state of our culture, we should want our sons and daughters to be dangerous in the right cause, to possess effective weapons against the enemies of God and His people and know how to use them, because sometimes, fitting words are fighting words.”
– Fitting Words: Classical Rhetoric for the Christian Student
“Genius without education is like silver in the mine.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Study yourselves to death, then pray yourselves to life.” – Chris Schlect
“One learns by teaching.” – Seneca
“A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.” – Samuel Johnson
“The three secrets of success in public speaking are: Be sincere, be brief, be seated.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Learn to hold thy tongue; five words cost Zacharias forty weeks of silence.” – Thomas Fuller
“Sacred cows make the best hamburger.” – Mark Twain
“Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.” – Winston Churchill
“In theory there ain’t no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” – Yogi Berra
“Control your emotions, or they will control you.”
“Pride is to the character as the attic is to the house: the highest point, and generally the most empty.” – Michael K. Williams
“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.” – Ambrose Bierce
“Wit is a sword. It is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it” – G. K. Chesterton
“Wisdom is his guide, eloquence his attendant” – Augustine
“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something” – Plato
While studying informal fallacies to prepare the next lesson in my upcoming rhetoric text Fitting Words, I observed something surprising about the ad populum fallacy. I have generally understood this fallacy to be simply an appeal to the masses, indeed to the mere mass of the masses” (Introductory Logic, Nance and Wilson) as in “Mom, all my friends are doing it!” (for which all mothers have learned the counterexample “If all your friends were jumping off of a cliff, should you?”)
But in all the standard college logic texts that I own (not a small sample), argumentum ad populum is taken to mean, quite broadly, an improper appeal to emotion. As a sample: Continue reading Ad Populum Mitosis?