134 Facts Quotes

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

Psychologically, you have to have confidence in yourself and this confidence should be based on fact.

The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies - easily checkable, blatant lies - and I'm not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men - 15 of them are Saudis - and five minutes later the whole country thinks they're from Iraq - how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors.

A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.

Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise.

Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.

Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as the sunbeam.

If facts weren't funny, or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

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

Do not let either the medical authorities or the politicians mislead you. Find out what the facts are, and make your own decisions about how to live a happy life and how to work for a better world.

Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly.

Facts per se can neither prove nor refute anything. Everything is decided by the interpretation and explanation of the facts, by the ideas and the theories.

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.

It is not the facts which guide the conduct of men, but their opinions about facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can only make them right by discussion.

Facts are many, but the truth is one.

There is no such place as Budapest. Perhaps you are thinking of Bucharest, and there is no such place as Bucharest, either.

Round numbers are always false.

It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.

If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact - not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

Acts themselves alone are history, and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.

So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.

Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would be hardly moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge the facts.

There's no smoke without fire.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying 'Arise, sir Knight' deserves a life sentence in Camelot.

I never know how much of what I say is true. If I did, I'd bore myself to death.

Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. And human beings evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered. [...] Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.

We have a right to think that truth with a capital letter is relative. But facts are facts. And whoever says that the sky is blue when it is gray is prostituting words and preparing the way for tyranny.

Education: 'The secret to discovery is to never believe existing facts.'

'There were no Palestinians riding on planes on September 9th.'

How are moral assertions connected with the world of facts?

Most of my news, I get from the radio news stations. One of the stations' advertising lines is 'Give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world.' In 22 minutes, they just have time for the headlines, so they can only really tell you what happened - which, by the way, is the news. They tell you how many people were killed in Iraq today, but they don't then bring on some Republican senator to explain to you how that's good. Or, on the contrary, they don't bring in a bunch of Democrats to tell you why it's bad. They just tell you what happened. That's the news. I am capable of analyzing my own news. What makes these people qualified to analyze my news for me? No matter what side they're on, I never agree with them.

The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur'an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.

Well, actually, he forgot Poland.

A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief.

We may still find weapons. We haven't found them yet.

We have a serious ongoing investigation here. I think it's best that people wait until the investigation is complete before you jump to conclusions. I don't know all the facts. I want to know all the facts.

Politeness does not interfere with facts, politeness is just another fact.

Obviously we know now their nuclear claims were wholly inaccurate. But more troubling is the fact that a lot of intelligence experts were telling the Administration then that its claims about Saddam's nuclear capabilities were false.

La pensee ne doit jamais se soumettre, ni a un dogme, ni a un parti, ni a une passion, ni a un interet, ni a une idee preconcue, ni a quoi que ce soit, si ce n'est aux faits eux-memes, parce que, pour elle, se soumettre, ce serait cesser d'etre.

It is your task, of course, to put the best interpretation on the facts. Sometimes they will bear it. What do you propose?

I think lobbying is really an honest profession. Lobbying means trying to persuade Congress to accept your point of view. Sometimes you can give them a lot of facts they didn't have before.

Something I was not aware had happened suddenly turned out not to have happened.

History is nothing other than a collection of fables and useless trifles messed up with a mass of unnecessary dates and proper names....Why should any one have to know that the second marriage of Ivan the Terrible to the daughter of Temryuk took place on August 21, 1562, or that the fourth to Ann Alekseyevna Koltovski happened in 1572? Yet they demand that I learn all this by heart, and if I do not know it, they give me a 'one.'

The period leaves no one indifferent. And that was our goal. We present the facts. It's up to the public to decide.

In certain intellectual circles in France, the very basis for discussion -- a minimal respect for facts and logic -- has been virtually abandoned.

It's a very vulgar, arithmetical, pragmatic way of arguing anyway. If you do that, then get the facts and figures wrong, well then you're really fucked. You're fucked twice. --Christopher Hitchens, May 2002 [244]

Noam Chomsky, the Dr. No of the hate-America crowd, is accused (by his own fans, of all people) of playing a little too fast and a little too loose with the facts in his latest screed, 'Failed States.' Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor for the London Guardian, writes that he wants to agree with Dr. No but can't find many reasons to in this latest book. --Suzanne Fields, June 22, 2006 [255]

A CIA officer's name was blown and there was a leak and we needed to figure out how that happened, who did it, why, whether a crime was committed, whether we could prove it, whether we should prove it. Given national security was at stake, it was especially important that we find out accurate facts.

In the real world, mice do exist and they generally go about their business whether we see them or not.

Nothing is more sacred than the facts.

I am by the law of my nature a reasoner. A person who should suppose I meant by that word, an arguer, would not only not understand me, but would understand the contrary of my meaning. I can take no interest whatever in hearing or saying any thing merely as a fact - merely as having happened. It must refer to something within me before I can regard it with any curiosity or care. My mind is always energic - I don't mean energetic; I require in every thing what, for lack of another word, I may call propriety, - that is, a reason why the thing is at all, and why it is there or then rather than elsewhere or at another time.

How can one trust a person so prejudiced as to neglect overwhelming evidence?

What's your favorite planet? ... Mine's the sun! Its like the king of planets!

No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.

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.

How could I not have known that there are little things the size of 'Planck length' in the universe, which are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter? Imagine if you dropped one in a dark theater how hard it would be to find.

'(talking to a man in Florida, New York) Shit, I didn't know New York had a Florida. That doesn't sound right. I don't think you know geography very well, you're being silly.' (from 'Florida, the Tropical State')

More on this misattribution at Snopes.com

I was talking like this to the Princeton professor and he said well if these are the facts there is no hope and I said well what is hope hope is just contact with the facts. ~ Ch. 3

I'm a tall girl, I am five nine

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

Put it on Wikipedia.

Just what not why...

Some men are just as sure of the truth of their opinions as are others of what they know.

You can't handle the truth!

Facts are stubborn things.

I am not keeping back facts. Every fact that I know is in your possession. You can draw your own deductions from them.

Exactly! It is absurd - improbable - it cannot be. So I myself have said. And yet, my friend, there it is! one cannot escape from the facts.

I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be.

All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in 'irreducible and stubborn facts': all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophic temperament, who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principles.

'Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.' (Source: The Act of Creation)

Ignorance never settles a question.

Lack of knowledge concerning all the factors and the failure to include them in our integral imposes false conclusions.

We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools. (ch. 1)

Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact; it must be acknowledged, that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors.

To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.

Too often critics seem more intent on seeking new ways to alter Congress than to truly learn how it functions. They might well profit from the advice of Thomas Huxley, who said a century ago: 'Sit down before facts as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion - or you shall learn nothing.'

The fatal futility of Fact.

What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end.

If Switzerland were flat as a pancake, it would be larger than Prussia.

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

No man is the wiser for his learning.