Quotes About Accuracy

You propound a complicated arithmetical problem: say cubing a number containing four digits. Give me a slate and half an hour's time, and I can produce a wrong answer.

It's crucial that people are on the right measure at the right time.

I time everything. I'm a scientist at heart.

Because Mathematicians frequently make use of Time, they ought to have a distinct idea of the meaning of that Word, otherwise they are Quacks.

Television reflects our society in a more accurate way than at any time in the past.

With respect to the present time, there are few persons who unite the qualifications of good observers with a situation favourable for accurate observation.

It's hard to say where is the bigger hubris, in their convictions or in the arrogance of carrying them to a third decimal point

Therefore, if you want to use your intuition or develop the skill for accuracy, it is important to be aware of it.

No horoscope matches this accuracy. No theory of human causality, Freudian, Marxist, Christian or animist, has ever been so precise. No prophet in the Old Testament, no entrail-grazing oracle in ancient Greece, no crystal-ball gypsy clairvoyant on the pier at Bognor Regis ever pretended to tell people exactly when their lives would fall apart, let alone got it right.

In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies.

What I would say to my successor is that it is important not just to shoot but to aim

No reporter worth his buttons will let the facts intrude on a good story.

and do not for the love of the Lord say you're laying down if you mean lying down.

As Benjamin Disraeli said, It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

When you hear the same story everywhere you look and listen, you assume it must be true. And the more people believe it's true, the more likely they are to repeat it, and thus the more likely you are to hear it. This is how inaccurate information can create a bandwagon effect, leading quickly to a broad, but mistaken, consensus.

There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

An "orthonymous" (literally, "rightly named") writing is one that really is written by the person who claims to be writing it.

Making these "predictions" of the future was relatively easy when the real author was living after the events he "predicted.

If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don't have the very words of scripture?

these sources were not intending to present what we think of as historically accurate information; that's a modern imposition on these Gospels that they can't bear.

In one of my earlier books, Misquoting Jesus, I discuss the fact that we do not have the original copy of Luke, or Mark, or Paul's writings, or any of the early Christian texts that make up the New Testament.

If communities of believers obtained copies of various Christian books in circulation, how did they acquire those copies? Who was doing the copying? And most important for the ultimate subject of our investigation, how can we (or how could they) know that the copies they obtained were accurate, that they hadn't been modified in the process of reproduction?

Only literary cultures have a concern for exact replication of the facts "as they really are.

there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.