Quotes About Verification

Let us, rather, gather facts, all the facts, regardless of aesthetic appeal or theoretical social worth, and spread those facts before us not as the soothsayer spreads the innards of a turkey but as a newspaper spreads its columns. Let us be journalists, then. And like all good journalists, we shall present our facts in an order that will satisfy the famous five W's: wow, whoopee, wahoo, why-not and whew.

You should demand extraordinary evidence in order to believe extraordinary claims.

Don't trust everything I say.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

You can look it up.

Testing may convincingly demonstrate the presence of bugs, but can never demonstrate their absence."- Edsger W. Dijkstra, Computing Pioneer (1930–2002), "Programming as a discipline of mathematical nature," Am. Math. Monthly, 81 (1974), No. 6, pp. 608–12.

I can tell you that I have taken all the names I have found in the newspapers and looked them up myself. I didn't find a single one of these names. This Mafia boss, this politician, Osama bin Laden. None of them have accounts here, nor are they delegates to accounts.

When we hear news we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge.

Remember, son, many a good story has been ruined by over-verification.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

In nature, when you conduct science, it is the natural world that is the ultimate decider in what is true and what is not.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule.

We must never assume that which is incapable of proof.

Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment

The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts.

Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay falsehood by haste and uncertainty.

His denomination, he says, is Empiricism. If you can't count it, measure it, or gauge wit with science, it didn't happen.

Namely, we have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.

Speculation replaces fact. It's very easy to see news outlets running with information that is unconfirmed or erroneous.

Men trust their ears less than their eyes.

A god or revelation capable of proof or rational verification by an autonomous man would be worthless.

The three-ringer gives her a quick look, just long enough to make sure she is really a person, not a sack of flour or an engine block or a tree stump.