Quotes About Facts

That's the kind of ad I like, facts, facts, facts.

Facts, and facts alone, are the foundation of science... When one devotes oneself to experimental research it is in order to augment the sum of known facts, or to discover their mutual relations.

No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain, yet it is not always the theory that is to blame. Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress. It is also a first step in our attempt to find the principles implicit in familiar observational notions.

It's very rare to find a place where news itself has a political bent. Normally, let's say in the U.K. for instance, newspapers might explicitly support one party or the other, but television is just straight-up facts that are not influenced by any party from either side. In South Africa we try to maintain the same thing. Unfortunately, the government sometimes intervenes, but for the most part, the facts are the facts.

I have great hope and faith, but it's a humanistic faith based in facts; you have to believe that facts exist. We can all arrive at the same facts if we engage in the process of experimentation, observation, and verification, which can solve more of the world's major problems than a debate over whether God does or doesn't exist.

Our alleged facts might be true in all kinds of ways without contradicting any truth already known. I will dwell now on only one possible line of explanation, - not that I see any way of elucidating all the new phenomena I regard as genuine, but because it seems probable I may shed a light on some of those phenomena. All the phenomena of the universe are presumably in some way continuous; and certain facts, plucked as it were from the very heart of nature, are likely to be of use in our gradual discovery of facts which lie deeper still.

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.

There are times I almost think I am not sure of what I absolutely know. Very often find confusion in conclusion I concluded long ago. In my head are many facts that, as a student, I have studied to procure. In my head are many facts of which I wish I was more certain I was sure.

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

If you’re purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn’t illuminate.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.

In a very real sense, therefore, advocacy of the doctrine of continuity [i.e evolutionism] has always necessitated on retreat from pure empiricism [i.e., logic an observation], and contrary to what is widely assumed by evolutionary biologists today, it has always been the anti-evolutionists [i.e creationist], not the evolutionists, in the scientific community who have struck rigidly to the facts and adhered to a more strictly empirical approach... It was Darwin the evolutionist who was retreating from the facts.

Where these reduced (operational - E.W.) concepts govern the analysis of the human reality, individual or social, mental or material, they arrive at a false concreteness - a concreteness isolated from the conditions which constitute its reality. In this context, the operational treatment of the concept assumes a political function. The individual and his behavior are analyzed in a therapeutic sense - adjustment to his society. Thought and expression, theory and practice are to be brought in line with the facts of his existence without leaving room for the conceptual critique of these facts.

Mainstream economics scholarship produces theory without facts ("pure theory") and facts without theory ("applied economics").

The root of honesty is an honest intention, the distinct and deliberate purpose to be true, to handle facts as they are, and not as we wish them to be. Facts lend themselves to manipulation. Many a butcher's hand is worth more than its weight in gold. What we want things to be, we come to see them to be; and the tailor pulls the coat and the truth into a perfect fit from his point of view.

I am an idealist. I often feel I would like to be an artist in an ivory tower. Yet it is imperative that I speak to people, so I must desert that ivory tower. To do this, I am a journalist - a photojournalist. But I am always torn between the attitude of the journalist, who is a recorder of facts, and the artist, who is often necessarily at odds with the facts. My principle concern is for honesty, above all honesty with myself.

Debating, doubting, or rejecting the basic scientific facts about climate change in the face of the overwhelming evidence and overwhelming scientific opinion will not change those facts.

It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren't facts at all. You could build a whole life's story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which.

It is characteristic of ideology to impose self-evident facts as self-evident facts.

Lies are attempts to hide the truth by willfully denying facts. Fiction, on the other hand, is an attempt to reveal the truth by ignoring facts.

Trump has learned how to function in a world in which people now live in very separate realities, where they get their news from Facebook recommendations and believe in a particular set of facts. Others, who live in a different reality, know quite a different set of facts.

It's not facts that hurt people, it's their attitude towards facts.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

All I'm going to tell you is investigations, whether it be this and others, where you have partial facts, analysts, agents are always trying to interpret what those facts mean, extrapolate from them what they mean.

There is no supernatural, there is only nature. Nature alone exists and contains all. All is. There is the part of nature that we perceive, and the part of nature that we do not perceive. ... If you abandon these facts, beware; charlatans will light upon them, also the imbecile. There is no mean: science, or ignorance. If science does not want these facts, ignorance will take them up. You have refused to enlarge human intelligence, you augment human stupidity. When Laplace withdraws Cagliostro appears.

We are anxious when there is a dissonance between our "knowledge" and the perceivable facts. Since our "knowledge" is not to be doubted or questioned, it is the facts that have to be altered.

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life.

Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it's always interesting how many people toss the facts.

Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.

The classification of facts, the recognition of their sequence and relative significance is the function of science, and the habit of forming a judgment upon these facts unbiassed by personal feeling is characteristic of what may be termed the scientific frame of mind.

Truthiness is what you want the facts to be as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support.

Not all Trump supporters are bigots. They believe he had something to offer. I may disagree. You may disagree but we need to be civil to each other. Use the facts to make your point. I had read that the clothes made by some of the brands use sweatshops. Facts folks not feelings. We all have to live with each other and our choices.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

What I use from my own life is not the facts, it's the emotion. It's how I felt about something. It has nothing to do with facts at all. You can get those anywhere. It's the feelings of childhood that you need to know.

Facts are of not much use, considered as facts. They bewilder by their number and their apparent incoherency. Let them be digested into theory, however, and brought into mutual harmony, and it is another matter.

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

The Christian religion is so manifestly contrary to the facts, belief in it can only be held with the most delusional gerrymandering imaginable.

We can invent as many theories we like, and any one of them can be made to fit the facts. But that theory is always preferred which makes the fewest number of assumptions.

It is possible to express the laws of thermodynamics in the form of independent principles , deduced by induction from the facts of observation and experiment, without reference to any hypothesis as to the occult molecular operations with which the sensible phenomena may be conceived to be connected; and that course will be followed in the body of the present treatise. But, in giving a brief historical sketch of the progress of thermodynamics, the progress of the hypothesis of thermic molecular motions cannot be wholly separated from that of the purely inductive theory.

Where I would like to discover facts, I find fancy. Where I would like to learn what I did, I learn only what I was thinking. Theyare loaded with opinion, moral thoughts, quick evaluations, youthful hopes and cares and sorrows. Occasionally, they manage to report something in exquisite honesty and accuracy. That is why I have refrained from burning them.

Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -­- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition.

I would argue that the truth of Easter does not depend on whether there was an empty tomb, or whether anything happened to the body of Jesus. ... I do not see the Christian tradition as exclusively true, or the Bible as the unique and infallible revelation of God. ... It makes no historical sense to say, 'Jesus was killed for the sins of the world.' ... I am one of those Christians who does not believe in the virgin birth, nor in the star of Bethlehem, nor in the journeys of the wisemen, nor in the shepherds coming to the manger, as facts of history.

In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts.

You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.

You don't need the right facts if you have the right inflection.

The idea of perfection always gives one a chance to talk without knowing facts.

To do science is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts.