Selected fact quotes

1. Truth never was indebted to a lie.

2. We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion.

3. We've more important studies than your fantasies and fears You know that rock's been perched up there for a hundred thousand years.

4. I will not vote against the truths of the multiplication table.

5. Mel Gibson's father doesn't think there was a Holocaust? Great. I don't think there's a movie. We're even.

6. Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.

7. What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

8. The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.

9. Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

10. I don't believe in magic, either.

11. It is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking of 'raging waves,' 'remorseless floods,' 'ravenous billows,' etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact, out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one.

12. The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

13. Truth...never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her forth.

14. That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say 'I did look it up, and that's not true.' That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.

15. Great artists are always far-seeing. They easily avoid the big stumbling blocks of fact. They rely on their own simplicity and vision. It is fact-fetichism that has given us those scores and scores of American books on America, the works of sociologists, anthropologists, topical 'problem' hunters, working-parties and statisticians, which in the end leave us empty. Henry James succeeds because he rejects information. He was himself the only information he required.

16. Now the perpetrating of miracles constitutes a brazen attempt to loosen up the universe. When you set up something as MIRACLE, you deny the very concept of FACT, establish a shadowy and spurious court infested by every variety of coyote and shady fixer beyond Court of Fact.

17. The first major president to be elected after the War of 1812 was President Monroe Doctrine, who became famous by developing the policy for which he is named. This policy, which is still in effect today, states that:

18. Quotations attributed to Herman Melville, but for which no citation is provided

19. Jack Johnson (boxer) - (1878-1946), first African-American world heavyweight champion

20. Jack Johnson (musician) - (born 1975), Hawaiian surfer, singer-songwriter and documentary filmmaker

21. [T]his theme of mutually invisible life at widely differing scales bears an important implication for the 'culture wars' that supposedly now envelop our universities and our intellectual discourse in general [:]. One side of this false dichotomy features the postmodern relativists who argue that all culturally bound modes of perception must be equally valid, and that no factual truth therefore exists. The other side includes the benighted, old-fashioned realists who insist that flies truly have two wings, and that Shakespeare really did mean what he thought he was saying. The principle of scaling provides a resolution for the false parts of this silly dichotomy. Facts are facts and cannot be denied by any rational being. (Often, facts are also not at all easy to determine or specify-but this question raises different issues for another time.) Facts, however, may also be highly scale dependent-and the perceptions of one world may have no validity or expression in the domain of another. The one-page map of Maine cannot recognize the separate boulders of Acadia, but both provide equally valid representations of a factual coastline.

22. May 3, 325: Rome built.

23. Just what not why...

24. As true as I live.

25. This is petrified truth.

26. 'I am simply stating a fact and it was not meant to be racist' - reaction to subsequent calls for an apology.

27. All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it. But all determinations of the understanding are not right; because they have a reference to something beyond themselves, to wit, real matter of fact; and are not always conformable to that standard.

28. The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.

29. If somebody believes that the world is only (...) a few thousand years old, when the true age of the Earth is of the order of a few billion years old, that means they are out by a factor of... a million. Which is not a trivial error.

30. All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr, - never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a truth.