Quotes About Evidence

once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth.

Be a positive evidence collector

A trial is nothing but a competition to tell the best story. Whoever sways the jury wins the trial.

The best theology would need no advocates; it would prove itself.

The discovery of instances which confirm a theory means very little if we have not tried, and failed, to discover refutations. For if we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmation, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favour of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.

Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testabilty: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.

A tapasztalatok motiválhatnak egy döntést, és így egy állítás elfogadását vagy elvetését is, de velük épp úgy nem lehet egy alapállítást igazolni, mint azzal, hogy ököllel rácsapunk az asztalra.

In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by 'proof' an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory.

Simply shovel everything that seems to support their view into the box marked 'Evidence' and say, ''See? Look at all this stuff. We must be right!'' Never mind the contradictions. Never mind the lack of independent supporting fact. Never mind the blatant absurdities.

It is not allowable in science to make a statement of fact based solely on your own opinion.

You well know that if a lie is repeated often enough, in the face of the clearest evidence to the contrary, even the most level-headed of men start to believe in it. Falsehood easily becomes accepted truth.

Moors who converted to Christianity were not allowed to take baths, and a damning piece of evidence at the Inquisition, levelled against both Moors and Jews, was that the accused "was known to bathe.

Just because you don't believe it[] [...]doesn't mean that it's not true.

The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.

We cannot go into court with merely suspicions; we must get facts.

The seriousness of a theorem, of course, does not lie in its consequences, which are merely the evidence for its seriousness.

It means nothing if I say yes or no. If I say yes, you cannot verify it, if I say no, you are none the wiser. You have no business to believe me. I ask you to believe nothing that you cannot verify for yourself.

Today like every day roughly 5,000 people on the face of the planet will experience one-chance-in-a-million things and not one of them will refuse to believe the evidence of their senses.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.

See now the power of truth; the same experiment which at first glance seemed to show one thing, when more carefully examined, assures us of the contrary.

Our advertising and even our arts convey the idea that we [Americans] as a society are brash, irreverent, and free of all constraint, when the best available evidence would suggest that we are in fact tame, spayed, and easily brought to heel.

Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum.

If one settles, instead, for a substitute past, an illusion of it, then that fragile construct must be protected from the challenge of complex or contradictory evidence, from any test of evidence at all. That explains Americans' extraordinary tacit bargain with each other not to challenge Reagan's version of the past. The power of his appeal is the great joint confession that we cannot live with our real past, that we not only prefer but need a substitute.