Quotes About Accuracy

When writing about historical characters I try to be as accurate as possible, and in particular not to misrepresent the view they held. With a real historical figure you have to be fair, and this is not an obligation you have in dealing with your own creations, so it is quite different.

As a journalist - or as a writer - my obligation is to come as close to the truth as I possibly can. And that's not as close to someone else's truth, but the truth as I see it.

A good commentator is someone who obviously people like listening to, who gets the blend between description, entertainment and accuracy of conveying the event right. If you can do that in an interesting way, you are a good commentator.

The only thing that words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together. Accuracy of description in language is not possible beyond a certain point: the most faithfully descriptive account of anything will always turn away from what it describes into its own self-contained grammatical fictions of subject and predicate and object.

I'm not stupid! In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.

A broken clock is right two times a day.

That was the difference between her and the idiots of the world. They were all trying to look smart and keep their social standing. Whereas Valentine didn't care about social standing, she cared about getting it right. Getting the truth.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

I don't play accurately--any one can play accurately--but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life.

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.

That's the problem with models—they only include the details people think are relevant

It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong.

it might be well to remind ourselves that you cant misrepresent what has yet to occur.

That's because humans are imperfect, so they make errors, which is why every book you've ever read has typos in it.

There's an old joke about a skydiver who's blown off course and ends up landing in a tree, dangling above the ground. After awhile someone walks by and the skydiver asks where he is. The passerby answers, "You're about 20 feet off the ground." The skydiver replies "You must be a software analyst." "You're right. How did you know?" asks the passerby. "Because what you told me was 100 percent accurate, but completely worthless.

She wasn't wrong, which wasn't the same as the idea being a wise one.

If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can't be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?

Inferior translation, which consequently we may define as the inaccurate transmission of an inessential content.

Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution

A physicist is one who's concerned with the truth," he later said. "An engineer is one who's concerned with getting the job done.

Respete los hechos.

Sometimes the difference between geniuses and jerks hinges on whether their ideas turn out to be right.

It would be better to miss than to turn out the wrong thing.

when truth has fair play, it will always prevail over falsehood.