Tautology Quotes

“Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe---in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Being who you are for ever is the price you pay for im­mor­tal­ity.”
― Hannu Rajaniemi, The Fractal Prince

“At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“A good critic is trying to tell you what she has learned about herself from the reading of a particular piece of literature. A bad reviewer is often trying to tell you how smart he is by declaring whether or not he liked a particular book. If he liked the book, then this is the kind of book a superior person likes, and vice versa. He might try to explain why he didn’t like it, but the review is really just a tautology. “I didn’t like this book because it is bad,” is equivalent to “This book is bad because I didn’t like it.”
― Kevin Guilfoile

“Under capital’s growth imperative, there is no horizon – no future point at which economists and politicians say we will have enough money or enough stuff. There is no end, in the double sense of the term: no maturity and no purpose. The unquestioned assumption is that growth can and should carry on for ever, for its own sake. It is astonishing, when you think about it, that the dominant belief in economics holds that no matter how rich a country has become, their GDP should keep rising, year after year, with no identifiable end point.”
― Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

“In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology:

‘Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write.’ And could afford to write, they might have added. In contrast they speak of George Garrett, whom Orwell met in Liverpool, a gifted writer, seaman, dockworker, Communist militant, ‘the plain facts of [whose] situation—on the dole, married and with kids, the family crowded into two rooms—made it impossible for him to attempt any extended piece of writing.’ Orwell’s writing life then was from the start an affirmation of unexamined bourgeois values.

This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary:

I urged him to write his autobiography, but as usual, living in about two rooms on the dole with a wife (who I gather objects to his writing) and a number of kids, he finds it impossible to settle to any long work and can only do short stories. Apart from the enormous unemployment in Liverpool, it is almost impossible for him to get work because he is blacklisted everywhere as a Communist.

Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place.)”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The television was on. It had been on for hours. Years. It was there. TV on demand, a great freedom. Hadn’t Burroughs said there was more freedom today than ever before. Wasn’t that like saying things were more like today than they’ve ever been.”
― Lynne Tillman, The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories

“The idea that there is something necessarily wrong with circular logic is itself a logical fallacy. If there is nothing wrong with the starting premises then the conclusions are necessarily correct too. In fact, only circular logic can be correct. Only such logic can offer total holistic coherence and analytic closure, i.e. perfect tautology – provided it is the correct circular logic, which means it must have the correct starting premise: the PSR itself.”
― Thomas Stark, Tractatus Logico-Mathematicus: How Mathematics Explains Reality

“Wittgenstein was brilliant enough to see that math is, and must be, pure tautology, but not brilliant enough to see that mathematical tautology is descriptive and
real, not empty and abstract.”
― Mike Hockney, Gödel Versus Wittgenstein

“The only way up is up.”
― Greg Egan

“Reason is indeed all about identity, or, rather, tautology. Mathematics is the eternal, necessary system of rational, analytic tautology. Tautology is not “empty”, as it is so often characterized by philosophers. It is in fact the fullest thing there, the analytic ground of existence, and the basis of everything. Mathematical tautology has infinite masks to wear, hence delivers infinite variety. Mathematical tautology provides Leibniz’s world that is “simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.” No hypothesis cold be simpler than the one revolving around tautologies concerning “nothing.” There is something – existence – because nothing is tautologous, and “something” is how that tautology is expressed. If we write x = 0, where x is any expression that has zero as its net result, then we have a world of infinite possibilities where something (“x”) equals nothing (0).”
― Thomas Stark, God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics

“The mind must be enlarged to see the simple things — or even to see the self-evident things.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic & The Everlasting Man

“Tautology, being the most vulgar logical expression, is always the strongest argument.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments