Quotes About Evidence

People who claim lactose intolerance tend to also voice a belief that they're gluten-intolerant. Usually with no evidence of either.

My bias is that it does exist. But I would never say that I know that. Until I prove it.

On being charged with the fact, the poor girl confirmed the suspicion in a grat measure by her extreme confusion of manner.

There were no facts in her universe, and no issue of trust. There was power. Power demanded respect. Power conferred the right to speak and not be challenged. Being right was a question of power, not evidence.

Fomenko was a classic conspiracy theorist: he proved his assertions by way of relentlessly logical constructions based on random mathematical assumptions, and he dismissed all contrary evidence as falsification by his enemies.

There was never a better illustration of the validity of the Enlightenment dream – that order can emerge where nobody is in charge. The genome, now sequenced, stands as emphatic evidence that there can be order and complexity without any management.

TP53 seems to encode the greater good, like a suicide pill in the mouth of a soldier that dissolves only when it detects evidence that he is about to mutiny.

Further evidence for the man-made nature of gods comes from their evolutionary history. It is a little-known fact, but gods evolve.

When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.

The difference is that whereas hey defer to common sense, empathy, and decency in the case of human consciousness, in the case of animals they do the opposite. The creatures are held to an impossible standard of evidence, an ever receding empirical horizon, allowing us to declare in theory that since we can never really know how they think and feel, we may safely conclude that they do not and act accordingly.

Did you hear? he asked. They found another body around nine this morning. It's the Ripper, definitely. Good morning, I replied. Morning. Listen to this. The second victim...

I've got a murder mansion, a house full of suspects, a pile of evidence, and nothing.

Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason; his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.

A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest – but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason; his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.

We do not tell—we show. We do not claim—we prove.

I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don't exist. That this book has been written—and published—is my proof that they do.

Trust your subconscious. If it does not deliver the kind of material you want, it will at least give you the evidence of what is wrong.

In this way, she learned, Islamic law regulated the public sphere: if a couple committed adultery, they knew to keep their own betrayal private, so as to avoid gradually tearing away at the sanctity of marriage for others. It was inconceivable to her that a judge would have been able to meet the evidential standards required to correctly implement the punishment for adultery.

The stubborn embrace of austerity by key European leaders, despite all of the contrary evidence, was more than a little frustrating.

For scientists, reality is not optional.

Scientists are not like other people, sir. We cannot slam our portals. We have to follow evidence where it leads, even if no one likes that place. Even if it suggests that all we have ever believed might be mistaken.

When people run for their lives they frequently neglect to bring along their file cabinets of evidence," she said. Mattie wasn't often bitter but when she was, she was. I didn't want to believe the world could be so unjust. But of course it was right there in front of my nose.

Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.