FACT QUOTES II

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


Facts are stupid things -- stubborn things, I should say.

RONALD REAGAN

address to Republican National Convention, Aug. 15, 1988

Tags: Ronald Reagan


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


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

Tags: Gao Xingjian


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

Tags: Reuen Thomas


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


You know the facts don't always add up to the truth.

CAROLEE DEAN

Take Me There


You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.

CHUCK PALAHNIUK

attributed, How Writers Write

Tags: Chuck Palahniuk


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


What are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history"--what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future, facts are your single clue.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

Tags: Robert A. Heinlein


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

Tags: Stephenie Meyer


Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.

WALTER LIPPMANN

Public Opinion

Tags: Walter Lippmann


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


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

Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee


Facts may be colored by the personalities of the people who present them.

REGINALD ROSE

Twelve Angry Men


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

Tags: Timothy Garton Ash


I might show facts as plain as day:
But, since your eyes are blind, you'd say,
"Where? What?" and turn away.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

"A Sketch"


Strong understanding ever keeps very close of facts, and leaves not the lead of one except under pilotage of another and to seek for more, that it may put many facts together till their relation one to another makes a circumference of knowledge.

JAMES VILA BLAKE

Essays


Sometimes facts are like clay pigeons, put up so others can shoot 'em down.

LEE THAYER

How Executives Fail


The more power a person has, the more his or her opinions can be pawned off as facts.

LEE THAYER

How Executives Fail