Willard van Orman Quine

"Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Platos beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occams razor."

"Wymans overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes."

"Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism."

"The word definition has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings."

"Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?"

"Our argument is not flatly circular, but something like it. It has the form, figuratively speaking, of a closed curve in space."

"No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole."

"A fancifully fancyless medium of unvarnished news."

"Tactically, conceptualism is no doubt the strongest position of the three; for the tired nominalist can lapse into conceptualism and still allay his puritanic conscience with the reflection that he has not quite taken to eating lotus with the Platonists."

"Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind."

"Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar."

"Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about."