Quotes About Evidence

The theory reaches out, as it were, from its finite origins inside one brain that has been affected only by scraps of patchy evidence from a small part of one hemisphere of one planet – to infinity. This reach of explanations is another meaning of 'the beginning of infinity'. It is the ability of some of them to solve problems beyond those that they were created to solve.

Science cannot promise eternal truths; only the elimination of false hypotheses and the establishment of what is currently the most likely explanation of an aspect of reality

L`essentiel, c`est que ces mots aient été écrits. Le reste n`a pas d`importance. Nous ne devons pas laisser de preuves aux chiens. Il faut ranger nos livres et nous souvenirs en nous.

L`essentiel, c`est que ces mots aient été écrits. Le reste n`a pas d`importance. Nous ne devons pas laisser de preuves aux chiens. Il faut ranger nos livres et nos souvenirs en nous.

C]ameras, in the right hands-or at least in more and more hands of average citizens-may help create a culture in which the previously powerless have the welcome recourse of evidence against the culpable.

One of the puzzling things about all the theories about the origins of money that we've been looking at so far is that they almost completely ignore the evidence of anthropology. Anthropologists do have a great deal of knowledge of how economies within stateless societies actually worked.

Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It's striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority. These latter are usually treated as a default mode of history: the kind of social structures you would simply expect to see in the absence of evidence for anything else.

Taking guidance from indigenous critics like Kandiaronk, we need to approach the evidence of the human past with fresh eyes.

You could never prove innocence, not in the match with the man who only had to imply guilt.

History is cyclical in nature, the evidence shows us. What is today, was before. What was yesterday, will be tomorrow. We need to learn from our mistakes, so that instead of travelling endlessly in a repetitious cycle, we move in an upward spiral toward perfection and utopia.

But I have tried to go over it very carefully, not merely what the evidence is, but with psychoanalysts and psychologists, and I think we're just about all agreed that Lincoln and Speed did not have a homosexual relationship.

One could drive a schooner through any part of his argument and never scrape against a fact.

There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves.

The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence

Here then we are first to consider a book, presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant people, written in an age when they were still more barbarous, and in all probability long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimony, and resembling those fabulous accounts, which every nation gives of its origin.

A body of ten ounces raised in any scale may serve as a proof, that the counterbalancing weight exceeds ten ounces; but can never afford a reason that it exceeds a hundred.

All beliefs about matters of fact or real existence are derived merely from something that is present to the memory or senses, and a customary association of that with some other thing.

In our reasonings concerning fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance. A wise man therefore proportions his belief to the evidence.

Where men are heated by zeal and enthusiasm, there is no degree of human testimony so strong as may not be procured for the greatest absurdity. - Of Miracles

But should this miracle be ascribed to any new system of religion; men, in all ages, have been so much imposed on by ridiculous stories of that kind, that this very circumstance would be a full proof of a cheat, and sufficient, with all men of sense, not only to make them reject the fact, but even reject it without farther examination.

But should this miracle be ascribed to any new system of religion; men, in all ages, have been so much imposed on by ridiculous stories of that kind, that this very circumstance would be a full proof of a cheat, and sufficient, with all men of sense, not only to make them reject the fact, but even reject it without further examination

In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence .

Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.