Occams Razor Quotes

“You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.”
― Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles

“And this shows that people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth. And it shows that something called Occam's razor is true. And Occam's razor is not a razor that men shave with but a Law, and it says:

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

Which is Latin and it means:
No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.

Which means that a murder victim is usually killed by someone known to them and fairies are made out of paper and you can't talk to someone who is dead.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“ Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary. ”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Dullards would have you believe that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth... but to a mathematical mind, the impossible is simply a theorem yet to be solved. We must not eliminate the impossible, we must conquer it, suborn it to our purpose.”
― Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

“In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occam's Razor but Occam's Beard: "Multiply entities unnecessarily.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.”
― Victor J. Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist

“You have to disentangle the details. You have to hold up every one independently, and ask, "How do we know *this* detail?" Someone sketches out a picture of humanity's descent into nanotechnological warfare, where China refuses to abide by an international control agreement, followed by an arms race ... Wait a minute—how do you know it will be China? Is that a crystal ball in your pocket or are you just happy to be a futurist? Where are all these details coming from?
Where did *that specific* detail come from?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky

“The complex order we now observe [in the universe] could *not* have been the result of any initial design built into the universe at the so-called creation. The universe preserves no record of what went on before the big bang. The Creator, if he existed, left no imprint. Thus he might as well have been nonexistent.”
― Victor J. Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist

“Two years later the logic of the struggle led (Pope) John XXII to excommunicate William of Ockham, the English Franciscan, known for his forceful reasoning as “the invincible doctor.” In expounding a philosophy called “nominalism,” Ockham opened a dangerous door to direct intuitive knowledge of the physical world. He was in a sense a spokesman for intellectual freedom, and the Pope recognized the implications by his ban. In reply to the excommunication, Ockham promptly charged John XXII with seventy errors and seven heresies.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

“In the twenty-first century, American democracy slit its wrists on Occam’s Razor, and no one answered for the blood.”
― Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent