Quotes About Facts

Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.

If it is indeed the business of imagination to make politics distrust itself - reminding it that its principles are not literal facts but constructs of imagination - it is also its business to encourage politics to remake itself by remaking its images of the good life.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

Truth is based upon knowledge. So, of course, it can be compromised by incomplete knowledge. As a doctor I sought truth through facts. As a pathologist I was now learning that truth could be directly affected by choices I made, by how many facts I chose to study.

But truth doesn't count / in law, only proof.

He tilted his head to the side, still watching me in that same, disconcerting way. "Some things are true, drunk or sober. You should know that. You deal in facts all the time." "Yeah, but this isn't—" I couldn't argue with him looking at me like that. "I have to go. Wait… you didn't take the cross." I held it out to him. He shook his head. "Keep it. I think I've got something else to help center my life.

In my defense: while I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is.

I had never been much interested in Pluto, too few facts and too much isolation.

too many facts hamper a diplomat, especially an honest one." "I'm not especially honest." "But you have no talent for dishonesty, so your refuge must be ignorance and stubbornness. You have the latter; try to preserve the former.

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy. Two: Record many facts. Try to see a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that's science. Three: Awareness that you live in a malevolent universe controlled by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset

TIME Magazine probably publishes many facts, but since its founding in the early 1920's I have been on the spot eight or nine times when something that wound up as a news story in TIME happened. Not once—not once—did the TIME Magazine story match what I saw and heard.

Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying there are only facts," I should say; no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations. Nietzsche, The Will to Power

And that ended the broadcast. The next time I saw him was less than a week later and he obviously hadn't had his shot for the day. He came over to me in a coffee shop and the transformation was shocking. The Buddha-like eyes were frantic, the voice had a whine, and "facts" now had a very emotional meaning for him.

When the accumulated facts, gimmicks, tools, techniques and gadgets of neuro-science — the science of brain change and brain liberation — reaches a certain critical mass, we will all be able to free ourselves from these robot cycles.

Theory is no substitute for information," Susan said.

What if all's appearance? Is not outside seeming real as substance inside? Both are facts, so leave me dreaming.

I reset the alarm, let myself out, and went to my car. I dumped the yearbooks and files onto the passenger seat, but didn't drive away. I thought about the gun. Amy might have had second thoughts. She might have decided it was too loud or too smelly or just wasn't fun. Maybe having a gun around the house made her feel less safe, so she got rid of it. There were plenty of innocent reasons her gun was missing, but guesses weren't facts. I

Storyteller's Creed: I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Authority: One who is good at combating the enemy fools it with inscrutable moves, confuses it with false intelligence, makes it relax by concealing one's strength, . . . deafens its ears by jumbling one's orders and signals, blinds its eyes by converting one's banners and insignias, . . . confounds its battle plan by providing distorted facts. —Tou Bi Fu Tan, A Scholar's Dilettante Remarks on War (16th century A.D.)

Arguments, speculation-- conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated any more. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory--not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.

We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc.

Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory—not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade.

Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation. In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts.