Quotes About Evidence

Even the conspirators' mistakes fed into the desired result. The term 'rifle among Oswald's possessions' passed into the evidence and Report despite the fact that it was an order, not an evidentiary observation.

Atta selected early September after determining Congress would be in session. Although bin Laden continued to lobby for the White House as a target, Atta still favored the Capitol, believing it would be easier to strike; the evidence suggests the decision may have remained unresolved until the very end.35

the United States constructed its most active regional counterterrorism partnerships with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, despite evidence that both governments had been penetrated by al Qaeda.

they could not prove bin Laden's personal responsibility for the attack—at least, the evidence would not meet the standards of a criminal indictment. Nor could they provide specific proof of bin Laden's role that Clinton could cite if he wished to publicly justify retaliation. Yet the CIA's officers told colleagues that they were dead certain of bin Laden's involvement.

The Movies have always been here. The Movies were here before God. Time is round like a reel of film. God hates the Movies because the Movies are the evidence of what He's done.

The first movement in human history to trust the ordinary person's ability to judge the weight of evidence for themselves was the drive to get people to read the Bible for themselves.

In the end, though, science is what matters; scientists not a bit.

Creationists have an argument not with science, but with argument.

In this country, a federal grand jury probe is the closest thing to Courts of Inquisition or a Star Chamber that exists. There are few rights, nothing that comes close to cross-examination, and no right to counsel inside the jury room. There are no real rules of evidence. The only thing they can't do is torture you, and on that you must take the government's word.

Just look what happens to poets," I used to tell my honors class on the first day of school. "Half the time they go mad. And you know why I think that happens? Too much truth distilled to its essence, all surrounding evidence ignored or discarded. And I'm not faulting them for that.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

Relate your facts compellingly and your argument will tend to take care of itself.

I'm like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life - in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God.

Credulity is belief in slight evidence, with no evidence, or against evidence.

I think the intellectual consistency of Christianity in historical evidence is frankly overwhelming, but my materialist colleagues regard me as a slightly sad case.

Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill.

If you don't have the smoking gun, then it's pointless to hector interviewees. Because you just shut people up instead of opening them up.

Even if you are planning a birth with an epidural, the evidence suggests that a doula can help make things go much more smoothly.

The fact that you can even make a record and leave a document that you were here, that's nothing to sneeze at.

So many people are alleging so many things without evidence against Modi. That itself is proof that he is not a dictator.

I wasn't with Joseph, but I believe him. My faith did not come to me through science, and I will not permit so-called science to destroy it.

I am not a writer, a philosopher, or a great figure of intellectual life. I am a teacher. […] My role is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes that have been built up at a certain moment in history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people—that is the role of an intellectual.

Science, however, is never conducted as a popularity contest, but instead advances through testable, reproducible, and falsifiable theories.

The brain, like it or not, is a machine. Scientists have come to that conclusion, not because they are mechanistic killjoys, but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. —STEVEN PINKER