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The significance of a fact is relative to [the general body of scientific] knowledge. To say that a fact is significant in science, is to say that it helps to establish or refute some general law; for science, though it starts from observation of the particular, is not concerned essentially with the particular, but with the general. A fact, in science, is not a mere fact, but an instance. In this the scientist differs from the artist, who, if he deigns to notice facts at all, is likely to notice them in all their particularity.
Bertrand RussellThere is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level.
Ayn RandAn inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the past that is no longer discernible, a fact that has left no footprints at all in the world today.
Daniel DennettSilences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).
Michel-Rolph TrouillotHollywood's martyr-mythology leaves out the fact that the famed Hollywood Ten, for example, were in fact members of the Communist Party, which advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government in violation of the Smith Act and which took orders directly from Moscow.
Jonah GoldbergYou can't just say there is a God because well, the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children. You have to account for the fact that almost all animals in the wild live under stress with not enough to eat and will die violent and bloody deaths. There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is.
Stephen FryIt is a remarkable fact, a scientific fact, that the healthiest children come from the happiest mothers.
L. Ron HubbardWe get caught. How? Not by what we give but by what we expect. We get misery in return for our love: not from the fact that we love but from the fact that we want love in return. There is no misery where there is no want. Desire, want, is the father of all misery. Desires are bound by the laws of success and failure. Desires must bring misery.
Swami VivekanandaOne will meet, for example, the virtual assumption that what is relative to thought cannot be real. But why not, exactly? Red is relative to sight, but the fact that this or that is in that relation to vision that we call being red is not itself relative to sight; it is a real fact.
Charles Sanders PeirceOne-hundred facts about Vietnam and we studied the fact sheet and got in to these arguments and it was fantastic, and I remember one moment when we heard two students saying don't talk to those guys, meaning my brother and me. They've just memorized that stupid fact sheet. And we thought, gosh do we sound that good? It didn't seem possible. But that was my introduction to politics.
Bill AyersInstead of saying that globalization is a fact, that it's inevitable, we've also got to demonstrate that while the growing interdependence of the world economy is indeed a fact, it's not uncontrollable.
Peter MandelsonIt is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of evasions: history as sociology, leaders as teachers, bland benevolence as a motive force, when, finally, power is an end to itself, and the instinctive urge to prevail the most important single human trait, the necessary force without which no city was built, no city destroyed.
Gore VidalThe general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln' is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we've actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln's presidency that's somewhat original.
Tony KushnerA surreal and ultimately disgusting facet of the Iraq fiasco is the lag between when a fact becomes obvious and when the fiasco's architects acknowledge that fact.
George WillPart of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
C. S. LewisI worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information โ and especially of stressful information โ is in fact affecting cognition. It is in fact affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.โจ And I worry that weโre losing that.
Eric SchmidtI want to emphasize the fact that we all have the same experience and the same concern, but the artist must know exactly what the experience is. He must pursue the truth relentlessly. Once he sees this fact his feet are on the path. If you want to know the truth you will know it. The manipulation of materials in an artwork is a result of this state of mind. The artist works by awareness of his own state of mind.
Agnes MartinEveryone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest. The writer of the snippet merely refers to a frivolous and fugitive fact in a frivolous and fugitive way. The writer of the leading article has to write about a fact he has known for 20 minutes as though he has studied it for 20 years.
Gilbert K. ChestertonThe Master said, The case is like that of someone raising a mound. If he stops working, the fact that it perhaps needed only one more basketful makes no difference; I stay where I am. Whereas even if he has not got beyond leveling the ground, but is still at work, the fact that he has only tilted one basketful of earth makes no difference. I go to help him.
ConfuciusAdolescents have the right to be themselves. The fact that you were the belle of the ball, the captain of the lacrosse team, the president of your senior class, Phi Beta Kappa, or a political activist doesn't mean that your teenager will be or should be the same....Likewise, the fact that you were a wallflower, uncoordinated, and a C student shouldn't mean that you push your child to be everything you were not.
Laurence SteinbergThe fact that the mind rules the body is, in spite of its neglect by biology and medicine, the most fundamental fact which we know about the process of life.
Franz AlexanderSuppose that I see a hungry child in the street, and I am able to offer the child some food. Am I morally culpable if I refuse to do so? Am I morally culpable if I choose not to do what I easily can about the fact that 1000 children die every hour from easily preventable disease, according to UNICEF? Or the fact that the government of my own "free and open society" is engaged in monstrous crimes that can easily be mitigated or terminated? Is it even possible to debate these questions?
Noam ChomskyAn important fact to remember is that all natural diets, including purely vegetarian diets without a hint of dairy products, contain amounts of calcium that are above the treshold for meeting your nutritional needs....In fact,calcium deficiency caused by an insufficient amount if calcium in the diet is not known to occur in humans.
John A. McDougallI really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it is because in addition to the fact that the sea changes and the light changes, and ships change, it is because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it we are going back from whence we came.
John F. KennedyI played a medium on Ghost Whisperer for six years, and the mediums never complained at the fact that I had cleavage while I was crossing people over into the light. In fact, they were super-excited that a hot person was out there representing the medium.
Jennifer Love HewittWhat helped me a lot is the fact that I have a very short neck. If I had a neck like a stack of dimes, you can bet I couldn't take a good shot. But the fact that I had a short neck and worked on it a lot (as opposed to most fighters who don't work on their neck muscles) definitely helped. I would stand on my head against a wall and move my head back and forth, side to side, for half an hour or so while talking on the phone.
George ChuvaloI am one who believes that we are, in fact, engaged in a worldwide war against terrorism. We must have the serenity to accept the fact that war is not going to go away if we ignore it.
Robert Foster BennettI find the fact that billionaires are quoted as if the fact that they are billionaires gives them some kind of wisdom is outrageous.
Ben Elton[Freud's] great strength, though sometimes also his weakness, was the quite extraordinary respect he had for the singular fact... When he got hold of a simple but significant fact he would feel, and know, that it was an example of something general or universal, and the idea of collecting statistics on the matter was quite alien to him.
Ernest JonesIntegrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.
Ayn RandThe lens, that allegedly impartial eye, permits all possible distortions of reality... The importance of photography lies not only in the fact that it is a creation, but above all in the fact that it is one of the most effective means of shaping our ideas and influencing our behavior.
Gisele FreundWhat is the essence of theosophy? It is the fact that man, being himself divine, can know the divinity whose life he shares. As an inevitable corollary to this supreme truth comes the fact of the brotherhood of man.
Annie BesantAnd this thesis is somewhat connected with general social and political observations, because it establishes the fact that the number of consumers is considerably larger than the number of producers, a fact which exercises a not inconsiderable social and political pressure.
Hjalmar SchachtEveryone seems to have internalized the fact that you can say anything you want at a televised debate, and only a tiny fraction of the audience will ever see a fact-check. So why not claim the moon is square?
Ted CruzThe Christ within who is our hope of glory is not a matter of theological debate or philosophical speculation. He is not a hobby, a part-time project, a good theme for a book, or a last resort when all human effort fails. He is our life, the most real fact about us. He is the power and wisdom of God dwelling within us.
Brennan ManningYou will not be stuck forever. The trick is to know there are no tricks. There is, in fact, no easy way. There is only the work.
Blaine Hoganno study has brought out any solid evidence that the death penalty deters crime. In fact, Amnesty reports that 'the murder rate in states which use the death penalty is twice that of states which do not, according to FBI statistics.
Antoinette BoscoIt is horrible! It is not the suffering and the death of the animals that is horrible, but the fact that the man without any need for so doing crushes his lofty feeling of sympathy and mercy for living creatures and does violence to himself that he may be cruel. The first element of moral life is abstinence.
Leo TolstoySo the fact that there's someone who's planning what happens to the characters, writing it down, means that the characters always have a fate. And when we think about fate, we tend think of it as the thing we would have if we were literary characters, that is, if there were somebody out there, writing us.
Daniel KehlmannThe fact that people have hijacked it is certainly not something that fills me with great joy. We have to find new ways of addressing people, new ways of getting into contact with people.
Angela MerkelNature is a mirror in which I am reflected, because by rescuing this land from sad devastation [through recreating it in photographs], I am in fact trying to save myself from my own inner sadness.
Mario GiacomelliScience, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
H. L. MenckenThe skeptic may deny your doctrine or attack your church but he cannot honestly ignore the fact that your life has been changed.
Charles R. SwindollIf you take a look at places like Harvard, it's striking. In the early ,50s, I think there were a handful of Jewish professors, three or four. But by the 1960s, there were Jewish deans and administrators. In fact, one of the reasons why MIT became a great university was because they admitted Jews whereas Harvard did not.
Noam Chomsky