Quotes About Evidence

All birds are incipient or would-be songsters in the spring. I find corroborative evidence of this even in the crowing of the cock.

Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.

In history, one gathers clues like a detective, tries to present an honest account of what most likely happened, and writes a narrative according to what we know and, where we aren't absolutely sure, what might be most likely to have happened, within the generally accepted rules of evidence and sources.

Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.

There is no love; there are only proofs of love." Whatever love I might feel in my heart, others will see only my actions.

It isn't enough to love; we must prove it.

I was surprised to learn from my research, however, that the well-known notion of anger catharsis is poppycock. There's no evidence for the belief that "letting off steam" is healthy or constructive. In fact, studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn't relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.

Pierre Reverdy: "There is no love; there are only proofs of love.

There's no evidence for the belief that "letting off steam" is healthy or constructive. In fact, studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn't relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.

Learning by anecdote is risky, but waiting for scientific proof is too.

I certainly can't see any sensible position to assume aside from that of complete scepticism tempered by a leaning toward that which existing evidence makes most probable.

nothing is true that cannot be proven--and therefore, it's not true.

A]ll historical and political evidence clearly points to the more-than-intimate connection between the lesser and the greater evil.… The natural conclusion from the true insight into a century so fraught with danger of the greatest evil should be a radical negation of the whole concept of the lesser evil in politics, because far from protecting us against the greater ones, the lesser evils have invariably led us into them.

Experience cannot beat logic, and interpretations of observational evidence which are not in line with the laws of logical reasoning are no refutation of these but the sign of a muddled mind (or would one accept someone's observational report that he had seen a bird that was red and non-red all over at the same time as a refutation of the law of contradiction rather than the pronouncement of an idiot?).

Intuition was often a way of cutting corners, a nifty technique of replacing hard evidence and facts with something far more elusive and capricious. The worst investigators Carlson knew relied on so-called intuition.

You can't change your fingerprints. You have only ten of them. And you leave them on everything you touch; they are definitely not a secret.

If you have this idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old, you are denying, if you will, everything that you can touch and see. You're not paying attention to what's happening in the universe around you.

One of the earliest resurrection scenes in the Bible is that of Thomas demanding evidence - he wanted to see, to touch, to prove. Those who question and probe and debate are heirs of the apostles just as much as the most fervent of believers.

A quick example of that is a woman who said she'd been healed of throat cancer where the faith healer admitted he touched her on the forehead.

All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible experience, through evidence toward which the intellect is merely passive, and over which the individual will and character have no control.

Nations are reorienting toward the national interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables. The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.

The Environmental Protection Agency rarely follows up prosecuting coal companies and their fellow polluters, even when the evidence is clear-cut that they are dumping and poisoning entire towns near their projects, and the state regulators are even worse.

True-crime shows and podcasts aren't the only ones flattening the complexity of forensic science into easy-to-grasp narratives: journalists do so, too. They say DNA or trace evidence 'matches' a suspect, when scientists can't be so definitive.