Quotes About Facts

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.… —John Adams1

Visions are the foundations on which theories are built. The final structure depends not only on the foundation, but also on how carefully and consistently the framework of theory is constructed and how well buttressed it is with hard facts.

lifelong benefits [to students who learn to think for themselves] include a healthy skepticism towards political slogans and a healthy desire to check out the facts before repeating rhetoric on other issues.

Never underestimate the difficulty of changing false beliefs by facts. Henry Rosovsky

The historic consequences of treating particular beliefs as sacred dogmas, beyond the reach of evidence or logic, should be enough to dissuade us from going down that road again—despite how exciting or emotionally satisfying political dogmas and the crusades resulting from those dogmas can be, or how convenient in sparing us the drudgery and discomfort of having to think through our own beliefs or test them against facts.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: "You're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.

Drawing up policy blueprints is a task for which there has never been a shortage of eager candidates. We can only hope that those policies will be based on hard facts about the real world, rather than on rhetoric or preconceptions.

people share a very similar vision of the world and treat its conclusions as axioms rather than as hypotheses that need to be checked against facts.

Filtering out discordant facts in the media and refusing to release raw data on which some favored conclusion has been reached—whether about the supposed success of affirmative action in college admissions or the conclusiveness of the case for catastrophic global warming—are all part of the pattern of preempting issues rather than confronting them.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: "You're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts."1

a brazen disdain for scholarly norms and the actual facts. But it makes a certain kind of sense: you have to tell lots of little lies to promote one big lie.

Barton's pseudo-history is too valuable to the Christian nationalist machine to let facts and scholarship get in the way, and his standing with his own audience has continued to soar.

Marie had professors who said, "don't trust what people teach you, and above all what I teach you." In other words, think independently and test supposed "facts." She was in heaven.

cause humans, above all, fear intelligence. how humans, scared out of their minds, gather whatever intelligence they can put their hands on and put it all in a central penitentiary named facts...

With acknowledgement of residues, we can be more easily prepared to grant the unit of science, the overlapping of disciplines, and the total coherence of all facts.

But facts are chiels that winna ding, and downa be disputed.

La mentira y la verdad eran relativas, ya que los hechos que eran los referentes del discurso estaban cambiando siempre.

The newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation, must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free but facts are sacred.

For underlying all philosophies and all religions are the facts of the human soul, which may ultimately be the arbiters of truth and error.

Sensation establishes what is actually given, thinking enables us to recognize its meaning, feeling tells us its value, and finally intuition points to the possibilities of the whence and whither that lie within the immediate facts. In this way, we can orientate ourselves with respect to the immediate world as completely as when we locate a place geographically by latitude and longitude.

But since I could find nothing equivocal or neurotic in the facts about the son's relation to his father, I had no warrant for disturbing the young man's feelings with such a destructive pronouncement. To do so would have prejudiced the outcome of the treatment.

It was by recognizing these facts that science discovered the psyche, and we are now in honour bound to admit its reality. It has been shown that the drive, or instinct, is a condition of psychic activity, while at the same time the psychic processes seem to condition the instincts.

Creative ideas, in my opinion, show their value in that, like keys, they help to "unlock" hitherto unintelligible connections of facts and thus enable man to penetrate deeper into the mystery of life.

Men were not as yet possessed of that distrust of language which animates us moderns and frequently causes us to see in words a far from adequate expression of the facts. On the contrary, there was a simple and unsuspecting faith that the range of an idea and the range of the word roughly corresponding to it must in every case exactly coincide.18