quotations about facts
Most facts that we don't use in some way will be lost to us.
ROBERT MADIGAN
How Memory Works
You know the facts don't always add up to the truth.
CAROLEE DEAN
Take Me There
This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.
SUSAN JACOBY
The Age of American Unreason
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
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
The more power a person has, the more his or her opinions can be pawned off as facts.
LEE THAYER
How Executives Fail
But no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
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
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
letter to Charles Kingsley, September 23, 1860
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"
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
A Scandal in Bohemia
Facts, therefore, have merely a potential and, as it were, subsequent value, and the only advantage of possessing them is the possibility of drawing conclusions from them; in other words, of rising to the idea, the principle, the law which governs them. Our knowledge is composed not of facts, but of the relations which facts and ideas bear to themselves and to each other; and real knowledge consists not in an acquaintance with facts, which only makes a pedant, but in the use of facts, which makes a philosopher.
HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE
Essays
Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
HENRI POINCARE
Science and Hypothesis
You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
attributed, How Writers Write
Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.
EDITH WHARTON
Xingu and Other Stories
Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
THOMAS SOWELL
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears opposed to a long train of deductions it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
A Study in Scarlet
Sometimes fact-checking can feel unnatural because it goes against the way the brain is hardwired. Our brains are wired to scan for the threats in our environment and all the problems we need to fix. In psychology this is called the negativity bias. But in most cases this disposition doesn't serve us well. Instead, training the brain to look for facts that fuel a hopeful and optimistic picture of reality can help motivate us. Again, I am not talking about ignoring reality. I'm talking about moving our focus from paralyzing facts to activating ones to create an optimistic, empowered mindset.
MICHELLE GIELAN
Broadcasting Happiness: The Science of Igniting and Sustaining Positive Change
The facts that you actually see with your own eyes don't always tell the truth, because sometimes there is something going on under it all that you don't see.
LINDA MARIE IRISH
It's a God Thing
Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words