Demonstrably Quotes & Sayings

All education in a country has got to be demonstrably in promotion of the progress of the country in which it is given. — Mahatma Gandhi

Should one continue to base one's life on a system of belief that
for all its occasional wisdom and frequent beauty
is demonstrably untrue? — Charles Templeton

Every country in the world is battling the rising cost of health care. No community anywhere has demonstrably lowered its health-care costs (not just slowed their rate of increase) by improving medical services. They've lowered costs only by cutting or rationing them. — Atul Gawande

What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all? — Richard Dawkins

My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends about faces of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Mother Teresa, being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in the specific direction of being symmetrical. — Richard Dawkins

By this point in history - after the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and in the midst of layers of ecological crises - free market fundamentalists should, by all rights, be exiled to a similarly irrelevant status, left to fondle their copies of Milton Friedman's Free to Choose and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are saved from this ignominious fate only because their ideas about corporate liberation, no matter how demonstrably at war with reality, remain so profitable to the world's billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes of Charles and David Koch, owners of the diversified dirty energy giant Koch Industries, and ExxonMobil. — Naomi Klein

I should say here that being chronically sleep-deprived is so demonstrably similar to being drunk that hospitals often feel like giant, ceaseless office Christmas parties. Except that at a Christmas party the schmuck standing next to you isn't about to fillet your pancreas with something called a hot knife. — Josh Bazell

Even if drugs are fully as destructive as they are usually claimed to be, it is morally wrong and demonstrably more destructive for government to deprive people of their unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to make an utter mess of their own lives. Since human beings are inclined to learn more from the mistakes they make, rather than from their triumphs, the right to fail, for individuals and groups alike, may be even more important than the right to succeed, and it must be fiercely protected at almost any cost. — L. Neil Smith

Correlation does not equal causality. When two things travel together, it is tempting to assume that one causes the other. Married people, for instance, are demonstrably happier than single people; does this mean that marriage causes happiness? Not necessarily. The data suggest that happy people are more likely to get married in the first place. As one researcher memorably put it, If you're grumpy, who the hell wants to marry you? — Anonymous

The placebo effect is well documented and not even very mysterious. Dummy pills, with no pharmacological activity at all, demonstrably improve health. That is why double-blind drug trials must use placebos as controls. It's why homoeopathic remedies appear to work, even though they are so dilute that they have the same amount of active ingredient as the placebo control - zero molecules. — Richard Dawkins

By packaging a full album into a bundle of music with ringtones, videos and other combinations and variations, we found products that consumers demonstrably valued and were willing to purchase at premium prices. And guess what? We've sold tons of them. — Edgar Bronfman Jr.

The heart of the Christian Gospel is precisely that God is the all holy One; the all powerful One is also the One full of mercy and compassion. He is not a neutral God inhabiting some inaccessible Mount Olympus. He is a God who cares about His children and cares enormously for the weak, the poor, the naked, the downtrodden, the despised. He takes their side not because they are good, since many of them are demonstrably not so. He takes their side because He is that kind of God, and they have no one else to champion them. — Desmond Tutu

Whatever the occasion, [the Queen] has a face which demonstrably says 'I don't give a royal s**t.' — John Oliver

As the work progresses the careful reader will insert mental interrogation points here and there. He will find that his interest increases as the interrogation points become more frequent, and that it culminates where they are changed to marks of positive dissent. I venture to record the opinion that the value of the work reaches a maximum in a passage that is demonstrably incorrect. — John Bates Clark

The problem with today's world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it.
The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense! — Brian Cox

What did trust, cooperation, progressive taxation and the interventionist state bequeath to western societies in the decades following 1945? The short answer is, in varying degrees, security, prosperity, social services and greater equality. We have grown accustomed in recent years to the assertion that the price paid for these benefits - in economic inefficiency, insufficient innovation, stifled entrepreneurship, public debt and a loss of private initiative - was too high. Most of these criticisms are demonstrably false. — Tony Judt

The idealist's program of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be a competing idealism; something must be offered that is not only less objectionable but more desirable. — Charles Horton Cooley

All religions are sick men's dreams, false - demonstrably false - and pernicious. — Ibn Warraq

How often have you know it for the butler who is on everyone's lips one day as the greatest of his generation to be proved demonstrably within a few years to have been nothing of the sort? — Kazuo Ishiguro

Every single policy Hillary Clinton espouses and every single policy of President [Barack] Obama has been demonstrably bad for women! — Ted Cruz

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. — Francis Spufford

I've made plenty of violent games in my life. I play violent games. They don't affect people in the way that a lot of people think they do. They just don't. It's demonstrably true that they don't, and anybody who thinks they do is just not thinking. — Warren Spector

I must be absolutely clear about this. Britain cannot accept the present situation on the budget. It is demonstrably unjust. It is politically indefensible. I cannot play Sister Bountiful to the Community while my own electorate are being asked to forego improvements in the fields of health, education, welfare and the rest — Margaret Thatcher

As liberty of thought is absolute, so is liberty of speech, which is 'inseparable' from the liberty of thought. Liberty of speech, moreover, is essential not only for its own sake but for the sake of truth, which requires absolute liberty for the utterance of unpopular and even demonstrably false opinions. — Gertrude Himmelfarb

School performance, public health, crime rates, clinical depression, tax compliance, philanthropy, race relations, community development, census returns, teen suicide, economic productivity, campaign finance, even simple human happiness - all are demonstrably affected by how (and whether) we connect with our family and friends and neighbours and co-workers. — Robert D. Putnam

All sorts of cultists and queer fish teach all kinds of techniques for achieving health, contentment, peace of mind; and for many of their hearers, many of these techniques are demonstrably effective. but do we see respectable psychologists, philosophers and clergymen boldly descending into those odd and sometimes malodorous wells, at the bottom of which poor Truth is so often condemned to sit? yet once more the answer is, no. — Aldous Huxley

There's a sense amongst liberals - who read identity politics into most everything - that conservative women are somehow traitors to their gender (much the same way that black conservatives are traitors to their race and young conservatives are traitors to their generation). To be a conservative woman in the 21st century is to be...ripe for scorn and ridicule by the demonstrably intolerant left. — S. E. Cupp

Once, on a walk by a river- Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow- his daughter quoted to him an opening verse by her favourite poet. Apparently, not many young women loved Phillip Larkin the way she did. 'If I were to construct a religion/ I should make use of water.' She said she liked the laconic use of 'called in'- as if he would be, as if anyone ever is. They stopped to drink coffee from a flask, and Perowne, tracing a line of lichen with a finger, said that if he ever got the call, he'd make us of evolution. What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities- and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true. — Ian McEwan

When facts are misrepresented in order to serve an opinion or to promote it aggressively - especially an opinion which demonstrably results in people being victimized, persecuted, and their lives destroyed in many places in the world, it should be a matter of concern to everyone who wants people to be treated equally, fairly and justly. — Christina Engela

While we may be able to demonstrably prove to any rational person that substance X will boil at temperature Y at elevation Z, we cannot so prove what we believe about justice and human rights, or that people are all equal in dignity and worth, or what we think is good and evil human behavior. If we used the same standard of evidence on our other beliefs that many secular people use to reject belief in God, no one would be able to justify much of anything. The — Timothy J. Keller

Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle. — Alain De Botton

If antiquity be the only test of nobility, then cheese is a very noble thing ... The lineage of cheese is demonstrably beyond all record. — Hilaire Belloc

I was always eh, kinda want to like consider myself kind of a pioneer of the palette, a restaurateur if you will. I've wined, dined, sipped and supped in some of the most demonstrably beamer epitomable bistros in the Los Angles metropolitan region. Yeah, I've had strange looking patty melts at Norms. I've had dangerous veal cutlets at the Copper Penny. Well what you get is a breaded salsbury steak in a shake-n-bake and topped with a provocative sauce of Velveeta and uh, half-n-half. Smothered with Campbell's tomato soup. See I have kinda of a uh ... well I order my veal cutlet, Christ it left the plate and it walked down to the end of the counter. Waitress, ? she's wearing those rhinestone glasses with the little pearl thing clipped on the sweater. My veal cutlet come down, tried to beat the shit out of my cup of coffee. Coffee just wasn't strong enough to defend itself. — Tom Waits

If the empire were to collapse, I should personally feel extremely sad. I absolutely do not believe that the personal rule of Napoleon III has been corrupting and oppressive for France-but quite the contrary, it is demonstrably necessary, conciliatory, progressive, and generally intelligent and democratic in the best sense of the word. — Franz Liszt

Pres. Lyndon Johnson was a middle-aged man of smalltown America, both a Westerner and a Southerner, and except where politics had demonstrably forced his growth-as on the question of civil rights-he functioned like most men, as a product of his background. — Tom Wicker

Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, & those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink. — Mark Twain

A science is something which is constructed from truth on workable axioms. There are 55 axioms in scientology which are very demonstrably true, and on these can be constructed a great deal. — L. Ron Hubbard

Yet Malone, remarkably, was a model of restraint compared with others, such as John Payne Collier, who was also a scholar of great gifts, but grew so frustrated at the difficulty of finding physical evidence concerning Shakespeare's life that he began to create his own, forging documents to bolster his arguments if not, ultimately, his reputation. He was eventually exposed when the keeper of mineralogy at the British Museum proved with a series of ingenious chemical tests that several of Collier's "discoveries" had been written in pencil and then traced over and that the ink in the forged passages was demonstrably not ancient. It was essentially the birth of forensic science. This was in 1859. — Bill Bryson

Theism, as a way of conceiving God, has become demonstrably inadequate, and the God of theism not only is dying but is probably not revivable. If the religion of the future depends on keeping alive the definitions of theism, then the human phenomenon that we call religion will have come to an end. If Christianity depends on a theistic definition of God, then we must face the fact that we are watching this noble religious system enter the rigor mortis of its own death throes. — John Shelby Spong

That was the way with Casaubon's hard intellectual labours. Their most characteristic result was not the 'Key to all Mythologies', but a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited - a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage - a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.
Thus his intellectual ambition which seemed to others to have absorbed and dried him, was really no security against wounds — George Eliot

People - pardon me, journalists and politicians - have often accused me of believing that I'm above the law. And yet, who isn't? Everywhere you prod it, even with the shortest stick, the established system isn't simply corrupt, it's unequivocally putrescent. The law is created by demonstrable criminals, enforced by demonstrable, interpreted by demonstrable criminals, all for demonstrably criminal purposes. Of course I'm above the law. And so are you. — L. Neil Smith

As with God so with the Bible; just because our tradition tells us that the Bible says and means one thing or another, that does not excuse us from the challenging task of studying it afresh in the light of the best knowledge we have about its world and context, to see whether these things are indeed so. For me the dynamic of a commitment to Scripture is not "we believe the Bible, so there is nothing more to be learned," but rather "we believe the Bible, so we had better discover all the things in it to which our traditions, including our 'protestant' or 'evangelical' traditions, which have supposed themselves to be 'biblical' but are sometimes demonstrably not, have made us blind." And — N. T. Wright

Crime, carefully planned and executed, is demonstrably the royal high road to pecuniary success in the United States. — Ferdinand Lundberg

If there really was one true god, it should be a singular composite of every religion's gods, an uber-galactic super-genius, and the ultimate entity of the entire cosmos. If a being of that magnitude ever wrote a book, then there would only be one such document; one book of God. It would be dominant everywhere in the world with no predecessors or parallels or alternatives in any language, because mere human authors couldn't possibly compete with it. And you wouldn't need faith to believe it, because it would be consistent with all evidence and demonstrably true, revealing profound morality and wisdom far beyond contemporary human capacity. It would invariably inspire a unity of common belief for every reader. If God wrote it, we could expect no less. But what we see instead is the very opposite of that. — Aron Ra

The public debate plays out in an infinite regress of blame over who's responsible for those who fail to fit the standard erotic mold. This is variously ascribed to the people choosing to be the deviants they are, porn, the Devil (always a shoo-in), bad parents, poor role models, our sexually repressed culture, or the psychiatrists who keep needling sexual minorities by branding them mentally ill. It's a rabbit hole of endless (and usually endlessly bad) arguments. Morally, all that matters - and allow me to reiterate that because I feel it's quite important, all that matters - is whether a person's sexual deviancy is demonstrably harmful. If it's not, and we reject the person anyway, then we're not the good guys in this scenario; we're the bad guys. — Jesse Bering

Our popular economics writers, however, are not in the business of giving their readers a ringside seat on the research action; with no exception I can think of, they use their books to do an end run around the normal structure of scholarship, to preach ideas that few serious economists share. Often, these ideas are not just at odds with the professional consensus; they are demonstrably wrong, and sometimes terminally silly. But they sound good to the unwary reader. — Paul Krugman

Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false. — E. O. Wilson

For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations ...
Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle. — Alain De Botton

America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality. — Bruce Jackson

That language is demonstrably stereotypical -- in either the Bible or the modern Mediterranean cultures -- is not the same thing as saying that a language is demonstrably fraudulent -- or that it is language that is not reacting to real trauma. (p. 103) — Daniel L. Smith-Christopher

In essence, art lies embedded in the conceptual leap between pieces, not in the pieces themselves. And simply put, there's a greater conceptual jump from one work of art to the next than from one work of craft to the next. The net result is that art is less polished - but more innovative - than craft. The differences between five Steinway grand pianos - demonstrably works of consummate craftsmanship - are small compared to the differences between the five Beethoven Piano concerti you might perform on those instruments. A — David Bayles

Yes, the pursuit of love and the pursuit of wealth have much in common. Both have the potential to inspire, motivate, uplift and kill. But whereas achieving a massive bank balance demonstrably attracts fine physical specimens desperate to give their love in exchange, achieving love tends to do the opposite. It dampens the fire in the steam furnace of ambition, robbing of essential propulsion an already fraught upriver journey to the heart of financial success. — Mohsin Hamid

But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad's coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit? — Stefan Zweig

Wherever politics intrudes upon economic life, political success is readily attained by saying what people like to hear rather than what is demonstrably true. Instead of safeguarding truth and honesty, the state then tends to become a major source of insi — Hans F. Sennholz

Every time someone started shouting about the supposed monopoly of the Circle, or the Circle's unfair monetization of the personal data of its users, or some other paranoid and demonstrably false claim, soon enough it was revealed that that person was a criminal or deviant of the highest order. — Dave Eggers

And there was a wonderful thing that tended to happen, something that felt like poetic justice: every time someone started shouting about the supposed monopoly of the Circle, or the Circle's unfair monetization of the personal data of its users, or some other paranoid and demonstrably false claim, soon enough it was revealed that that person was a criminal or deviant of the highest order. One was connected to a terror network in Iran. One was a buyer of child porn. Every time, it seemed, they would end up on the news, footage of investigators leaving their homes with computers, on which any number of unspeakable searches had been executed and where reams of illegal and inappropriate materials were stored. And it made sense. Who but a fringe character would try to impede the unimpeachable improvement of the world? — Dave Eggers

Bellgrove, eminently lovable, because of his individual weakness, his incompetence, his failure as a man, a scholar, a leader or even as a companion, was neverless utterly alone. For the weak, above all, have their friends. Yet his gentleness, his pretence at authority, his palpable humanity were unable, for some reason or other, to function. He was demonstrably the type of venerable and absent-minded professor about whom all the sharp-beaked boys of the world should swarm. — Mervyn Peake

Simply put: because nonviolence worked so well as a tactic for effecting change and was demonstrably improving their lives, some black people chose to use weapons to defend the nonviolent Freedom Movement. — Charles E. Cobb

And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackens, that his life had consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order, and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it. — John Le Carre

Imagine a life spent having to overcome an endless line of people like St. Vincent and Nelson. I am right - demonstrably right - repeatedly; yet, instead of receiving their support, I get their condemnation and contempt. — Tom Grundner