Quotes About Facts

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.

We Americans have many grave problems to solve, many threatening evils to fight, and many deeds to do, if, as we hope and believe, we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage and the virtue to do them. But we must face facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to a foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism Ã¢â'¬Â¦ 

I always thought it was a myth about electric eels having enough of a charge to kill someone." "It's no myth. I've studied up on it for this assignment. The electrophorus electricus grows to a length of eight or ten feet, and weighs perhaps as much as ninety pounds.

History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.

What is history? ... it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.

Like the alchemists, they were content to advocate highly imaginative solutions whose relation to existing facts was one of flat negation.

The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate.

Science can only determine what is, but not what shall be, and beyond its realm, value judgements remain indispensable. Religion, on the other hand, is concerned only with evaluating human thought and actions; it is not qualified to speak of real facts and the relationships between them.

Be boring. Be consistent. Plan ahead. Let the facts rather than your emotions determine your response. Learn to keep your mind open and your mouth shut.

Arguing from facts never wins a definitive victory against skillfully presented opinion.

I think our refusal to read {some} novels exactly corresponds with..our refusal to confront inconvenient facts of a changing world and our moral culpability in what our government has done in our name . . . While more novels are read than ever before--those are escapist novels--so as to forget what we need to remember.

Semyon was a natural scientist; he liked to say he trafficked in facts, not niceties. Manners were for intellectual weaklings in the humanities.

He was a child, but his mind was already laden like a museum, where old and new specimens, facts and figures, lived together as evidence of his own personal history.

All the charges you enumerate have been made with one purpose in mind-to place our office on the defensive and make us waste valuable time answering allegations that have no basis in fact.

If something is crucial to the plot, then I'd better be sure I've got my facts straight. Readers of crime novels are smart and savvy, and they'll waste no time letting me know if there's a hole in my plot.

Optimism doesn't wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time.

I am sorry to upset my colleagues by saying we wasted four years in opposition, but if you do get so badly defeated as a party you do have to face up to some painful facts and you do have to change.

The lonely wanderer, who watches by the seashore the waves that roll between him and his home, talks of cruel facts, material barriers that, just because they are material, and not ideal, shall be the irresistible foes of his longing heart.

There are two ways of lying. One, not telling the truth and the other, making up statistics.

We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information.

On a normal novel, I would like to get 2,000 to 2,500 words done in a day; I average 10,000 words a week, and then there's a day for planning. With the historical ones, it's a lot harder because you have to stop and double-check facts.

Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.

People know the facts of a story just as well as the people on TV do, and they have more platforms to hold the media accountable when they don't get it right. We are a world full of media experts. That's a great thing.

Fact doesn't have to be plausible; it just has to be fact.