Quotes About Evidence

Too often our unexamined and deluded story-lines become self-fulfilling prophecies. We can always marshal any evidence we want in support of a particular view, and then believe it even if it is patently not true. This is delusion.

The United States Violence Against Women Act of 2005 requires that all victims of sexual assault be given free access to an evidence collection kit

We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.

Psychologists try and remind anxiety sufferers that 'what if' worries are irrational ones. If you find yourself thinking, 'What if I just came across as racist?' the 'what if' is evidence that nothing bad actually happened. It's just thoughts swirling frantically around.

The more you delve into science, the more it appears to rely on faith.

because, no matter how he'd come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize intellect, constructing his rhyme schemes.

Salazar y Frias concluded that the witch panic had been called into existence by the witch-hunters: "I have not found the slightest evidence," he reported, "from which to infer that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred.

For Cicero, censure of a blatant racist or homophobe was not only useless but fatally boring. The power residing in such accusations was best wielded at random, against the most avowedly sympathetic and correct colleague or student. Cicero routinely dropped a casual "But of course, you realize you're a racist" into friendly interactions. The less evidence on hand, the more destabilizing the result.

and when is enough proof enough?

And you can't force someone to believe, not even with better and louder and more virtuous arguments, not even with irrefutable evidence

Are you an optimist or a pessimist? I can't remember. Which? Do you know what those words mean? Not really. An optimist is positive and hopeful. A pessimist is negative and cynical. I'm an optimist. Well, that's good, because there's no irrefutable evidence. There's nothing that could convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to.

There's nothing that could convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced. But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to.

The controversy between Darwinism and intelligent design has the characteristics of major scientific revolutions in the past. Darwinists are losing power because they treat with contempt the very people on whom they depend the most: American taxpayers. The outcome of this scientific revolution will be decided by young people who have the courage to question dogmatism and follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Teaching students the evidence for and against Darwinism is not the same as teaching intelligent design. The U.S. Congress has officially endorsed teaching students 'the full range of scientific views' about Darwinian evolution.

it is a very risky thing for anyone to go about proclaiming the truth simply because he finds himself in possession of concrete documentary proofs or on the evidence of his own eyes, which is always overestimated.

Quién se resigna a buscar pruebas de algo no creído por él o cuya prédica no le importa?

Si un científico se empecina en explicar eso con razones naturales lo único que demuestra es lo poco razonable que puede llegar a ser. Es decir, demostraría que está usando la razón a su antojo, como un medio para llegar a una verdad que ya ha decidido de antemano.

The Neanderthal graves and bear sanctuaries, our earliest certain evidences of religious ritual, point to an attempt to cope with the imprint of death.

How the resurrection of Hittites has been accomplished, by putting together the fragmentary evidence of Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions, of strange-looking monuments in Asia Minor, and of still undeciphered hieroglyphics

There are no traces of the Hittites at Shechem or on the eastern side of the Jordan

From what I've read of detective stories, inspectors always do want to drag the pond first.

The Imperium is right, and that makes it mighty", so say our iterators, so the Word is written, and so shall it be. We succeed where every other human culture has failed. We rise where alien breeds fall. We defeat every solar empire or lonely world that refuses benevolent unity. What more evidence is needed that we, and we alone, walk the right path?

A good scientist," Gideon explained, "modifies his operational hypotheses to accord with fresh data.