Quotes About Facts

Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

They're called 'facts', and my role is to amplify those, not cheerlead. And I don't care at all what you think of my motives.

Politics is largely the process of taking credit and putting the blame on others - regardless of what the facts may be.

Positive secularism is not tolerance of all religions, but it is the total denial of religious beliefs: it is the emergence of homogeneous human outlook which is based upon verifiable facts of life.

Faith does not ignore the facts, it ignores the power of the facts.

Well, all I know is what I read in the papers.

Trust is all about instinct. If you had all the facts, you wouldn't need trust. Trust is what is required in the absence of proof. But I believe you can strengthen your instincts by testing them; every time you prove yourself right or wrong, they grow stronger.

We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts.

Novelists and historians have known for centuries that people do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world, but rather to rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions.

If you want to convince someone, target their System 1 with narrative, not their System 2 with facts and data.

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.

No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, "categories," supposed necessities; and of looking toward last things, fruits, consequences, facts.

Morris tried to keep the books in some sort of order, but they always mixed themselves up. The tragedies needed cheering up and would visit with the comedies. The encyclopedias, weary of facts, would relax with the comic books and fictions. All in all it was an agreeable jumble.

she was used to dealing with worry by sinking herself completely into the facts of a situation. Her strength lay in her ability to scrutinize circumstances from every angle and to anticipate the moves of an opponent. But she didn't have facts and she didn't know her opponent, and all she was left with was the worry.

What prevents theoretical insights from going beyond existing limitations and changing to meet new facts is just the belief that theories give true knowledge of reality (which implies, of course, that they need never change).

Another historian, Molly Greene, wearily describes the decline thesis as a meat-grinder, which converts all the facts into the homogenised elements of a single story rather than the distinct indicators of many different stories.

In fact this ultimate degree of Darwinian faith, which blinds the faithful to even the most obvious facts of human life, is far commoner at present than it ever was before. But

But in any case, understanding is one of the higher functions of the human mind and brain, and a unique one. Many other physical systems, such as animals' brains, computers and other machines, can assimilate facts and act upon them. But at present we know of nothing that is capable of understanding an explanation – or of wanting one in the first place – other than a human mind.

once the existence of facts was denied then everything was a lie.

But it's crucial that we set the process in motion. One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent 'big picture' of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts. But to begin making sense of the new information that's now before our eyes, it is not enough to compile and sift vast quantities of data. A conceptual shift is also required.

The facts of the Great Depression made a dominant economic theory that denied the possibility of generalized crisis untenable.

There is a great difference between historical facts and speculative opinions ; nor is the knowledge of the one propagated in the same manner with that of the other

It's the very essence of science that its conclusions can change, that is, that its truths are not absolute. The intrinsic good sense of this is contained within the remark reportedly made by the eminent economist John Maynard Keynes, responding to the criticism that he had changed his position on monetary policy during the 1930s Depression: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?