Quotes About Verification

Mr. Herschel brought with him the calculations of the computers, and we commenced the tedious process of verification. After a time many discrepancies occurred, and at one point these discordances were so numerous that I exclaimed, "I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam," to which Herschel replied, "It is quite possible."

David Copperfield from head to foot! Calls a house a rookery when there's not a rook near it, and takes the birds on trust, because he sees the nests!

What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?

A person is never known till a person is proved.

Now, what I want is Facts.

I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can show better than my history whether that prediction was verified or falsified by the result.

The problem with Internet quotes is that you cannot always depend on their accuracy.

I mention this only to shew that the citations of the most judicious authors frequently deceive us, and consequently that prudence obliges us to examine quotations, by whomsoever alleged.

Crank theories always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.

I must follow the journalistic instinct of being skeptical of everything until I personally have proved it true.

There is one way to find out if a man is honest; ask him! If he says yes you know he's crooked.

A healthy skepticism is good, even God-given. However, a need to cynically dismiss anything we cannot personally verify is arrogance. God

I saw it on an X-ray." He stared at me with horror in his eyes. He turned off his laptop and closed the lid. "You have a memory chip that small implanted in you," he verified. I nodded, guessing this was somewhat worse than having cooties.

Believe half of what you see and only some of what you hear, unless you hear it from me.

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.

Do not jump the gun because of gossip.

Give your trust sparingly and only to those who have earned it.

In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.

No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.

All science is based on models, and every scientific model comprises three distinct stages: statement of well-defined hypotheses; deduction of all the consequences of these hypotheses, and nothing but these consequences; confrontation of these consequences with observed data.

We certainly should support both parties having observers at the polling stations to make sure that neither side does anything that allowed a fraudulent vote. That's a very healthy check on the process.

a skeptic is just a person who wants to see and evaluate the evidence before believing. In its truest sense, a skeptic is someone who keeps an open mind, but requires rigorous investigation before choosing to believe something.

Get the facts, or the facts will get you. And when you get them, get them right, or they will get you wrong.

We therefore should be more skeptical than we seem to be about evidence presented to us secondhand. We should become accustomed to asking ourselves where the information originated, and how much distortion—deliberate or otherwise—is likely to have been introduced along the way.