quotations about facts
Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them.
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
"Evolution as Fact and Theory", Discover Magazine, May 1981
It is wiser and better always to face facts, never to ignore them. Interrogate them; ask them what they mean, and what they have to teach.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
Unfortunately, the facts don't always speak for themselves. As we noted earlier, ground rules and, especially, interests influence what the parties to a situation see as facts. In order to assess the actual facts, you have to account for the influence of interests and ground rules.
MARK PASTIN
Make an Ethical Difference: Tools for Better Action
It is not the number of facts he knows, but how much of a fact he is himself, that proves the man.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Sometimes facts are like clay pigeons, put up so others can shoot 'em down.
LEE THAYER
How Executives Fail
Sometimes we use facts. Sometimes we avoid or ignore them. Sometimes we even reshape them or dispose of them because of new knowledge. In other words, facts are partly solid and partly malleable, and they don't always reveal a clean, coherent truth.
KEITH VARGO
"Way of the Warrior", Black Belt Magazine, December 2003
I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
letter to Michele Besso, October 8, 1952
Sometimes, fact mixed with fiction so thoroughly that, though no lies were told, it was hard to remember what was strictly true.
STEPHENIE MEYER
The Host
As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Tallulah", Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection
I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
The Story of the Malakand Field Force
There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.
MAYA ANGELOU
attributed, Sheroes
Facts are how we organize and interpret our surroundings. No one learns something new and then holds it entirely independent of what they already know. We incorporate it into the little edifice of personal knowledge that we have been creating in our minds our entire lives. In fact, we even have a phrase for the state of affairs that occurs when we fail to do this: cognitive dissonance.
SAMUEL ARBESMAN
The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
Facts may be colored by the personalities of the people who present them.
REGINALD ROSE
Twelve Angry Men
I often wish ... that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.
BLISS CARMAN
"On Having Known a Poet", Atlantic Monthly, May 1906
There are numerous layers to truth, and the simple and superficial statement of facts cannot satisfy the writer.
GAO XINGJIAN
"Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth", Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium
To no circumstance is the wide diffusion of error in the world more owing than to our habit of adopting conclusions from insufficiently established data. An indispensable preliminary, then, in every investigation, is to get at facts. Until these are arrived at, every opinion, theory, or system, however ingeniously framed, must necessarily rest upon an uncertain basis.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those "easy speeches that comfort cruel men."
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
preface, Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name
Facts don't change when theories change; facts sometimes contradict theories. Facts are independent existences, sometimes known and sometimes described by language-users, but there are many facts of which we are ignorant.
FIONA J. HIBBERD
Unfolding Social Constructionism
Most facts that we don't use in some way will be lost to us.
ROBERT MADIGAN
How Memory Works