Quotes About Evidence

That is partly because of the new ways of looking at the old evidence, and the different questions we choose to put to it. It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors. We are not. But we come to Roman history with different priorities

Cicero may even have convinced himself, whatever the evidence, that Catiline was a serious threat to the safety of Rome. That, as we know from many more recent examples, is how political paranoia and self-interest often work.

There is no earlier period in the history of the West that it is possible to get to know quite so well or so intimately (we have nothing like such rich and varied evidence from classical Athens). It is not for more than a millennium, in the world of Renaissance Florence, that we find any

The law, which even in those hard days — popularly known as the good old times, by the way — was supposed to regard an accused person as innocent until his or her guilt was duly established, did not afford the suspected individual much opportunity of proving that innocence. The prisoner's counsel was not allowed to plead for his client.

Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him [her husband, George Boole]; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to give rest had no tendency to prove them.

Why not take a photograph of the fairies? It would stop the teasing once and for all. It would be splendid.

Death would soon carry off Zola as well, although in his case the suspicion existed, and still exists, that he was murdered. No concrete evidence was ever produced to prove this, and yet the circumstances of his death were sufficiently odd to encourage speculation.

I've done an informal, anecdotal survey about marriage, and I've found no evidence that it brings happiness.

And what if it were only a story?" said Mrs. May quickly, "so long as it was a good story? Keep your sense of wonder, child, and don't be so literal. Anything we haven't experienced for ourselves sounds like a story. All we can ever do is sift the evidence.

What Ireland shares with many societies around the world is a dangerous reality: once a group of people is isolated as being in some way inferior, the general population becomes less concerned with how they are treated, even in the face of evidence of cruelty and abuse. In Ireland's case, the thousands of victims of industrial schools bear witness to a society unwilling to question its own comfortable certainties out of a fear that those beliefs might turn out to have been built on sand.

How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?

The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there.

Like a milk mustache, faint traces of you persist; love leaves evidence.

For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert; but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact. —Thomas Sowell, American economist

foundation of morality is to ... give up pretending to believe that or which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about this beyond the possibilities of knowledge." So wrote Thomas Henry Huxley, who thought-in the tradition of writers and philosophers like David Hume and Thomas Paine-that we have a moral duty to distinguish sense from nonsense.

These and similar examples are easy enough to uncover, and they make two crucial points: first, good science does not require experiments, it can be done with an intelligent use of observational evidence; second, there is more than one way to do science, depending on the nature of the questions and the methods typical of the field.

Bueno, la teoría de Darwin no deja de ser sólo una teoría —comenté—. Si, a estas alturas, hubieran podido demostrarla, sería la ley de Darwin.

Love pouring out of you is evidence of God pouring into you.

That is how science works, not through blind faith, but continual doubt.

The superior nature of Christ is proved from his superior name.

But you don't prove anything at all when you say it's something you just can't imagine happening.

If you are uncertain, or lack evidence, about whether a particular outcome was caused by a preceding event, you are more likely to quickly associate them together," says Sang Wan Lee, a postdoctoral scholar in neuroscience at Caltech

The unity on the right is in fact prima facie evidence of its duplicity.

In science, truth always wins