Evidence And Facts Quotes & Sayings

Today's Republican Party ... is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance. — Thomas E. Mann

Recondition your reactions to dominant people. Try to visualize yourself behaving in a firm manner, armed with well-prepared facts and evidence. Practice saying things like "Hold on a minute - I need to consider what you have just said." Also practice saying "I'm not sure about that. It's too important to make a snap decision now." Don't cave in for fear that someone might shout at you or have a tantrum. Have faith that your own abilities will work if you use them. Non-assertive people are often extremely strong in areas of process, detail, dependability, reliability, and working cooperatively with others. These capabilities all have the potential to undo a dominating personality who has no proper justification. Recognize your strengths and use them to defend and support your position. — Dale Carnegie

The normal curve is a distribution most appropriate to chance and random activity. Education is a purposeful activity and we seek to have students learn what we would teach. Therefore, if we are effective, the distribution of grades will be anything but a normal curve. In fact, a normal curve is evidence of our failure to teach. — Benjamin Bloom

The strongest wish of a vast number of earnest men and women to-day is for a basis of religious belief which shall rest, not upon tradition or external authority or historical evidence, but upon the ascertainable facts of human experience. The craving for immediacy, which we have seen to be characteristic of all mysticism, now takes the form of a desire to establish the validity of the God-consciousness as a normal part of the healthy inner life. — William Ralph Inge

It is the desire for explanations that are at once systematic and controllable by factual evidence that generates science; and it is the organization and classification of knowledge on the basis of explanatory principles that is the distinctive goal of the sciences. — Ernest Nagel

I think we're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional.
We have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressmen and presidents about nuclear energy.
They're not a decade old, and they're being thrown these kinds of questions that can absorb the lifetime of a very brilliant and learned man. And they're being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about.
It's important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more important to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something, they hear some rhetoric, and they run with it. — Thomas Sowell

In public and in private life, it often happens that there is simply no time to collect the relevant facts or to weigh their significance. We are forced to act on insufficient evidence and by a light considerably less steady than that of logic. With the best will in the world, we cannot always be completely truthful or consistently rational. All that is in our power is to be as truthful and rational as circumstances permit us to be, and to respond as well as we can to the limited truth and imperfect reasonings offered for our consideration by others. — Aldous Huxley

Our Jewishness is not a creed, it is ourself, our totality. Indeed, it may be fairly said that the surest evidence of your lack of seriousness in religion is the fact that your religions are not national, that you are not compromised and dedicated, en masse, to the faith. — Maurice Samuel

At this point, any scientist, doctor, journalist, or policy maker who denies or minimizes the importance of a whole food, plant-based diet for individual and societal well-being simply isn't looking clearly at the facts. There's just too much good evidence to ignore anymore. — T. Colin Campbell

couldn't be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's, the white man always wins. They're ugly, but those are the facts of life." "Doesn't make it right," said Jem stolidly. He beat his fist softly on his knee. "You just can't convict a man on evidence like that - you can't." "You couldn't, but they could and did. — Harper Lee

I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called education people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from fiction. — Coretta Scott King

It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else's opinion. — Thomas Sowell

He has given ample evidence of qualities hardly any other living statesman has demonstrated to the same degree: the courage to look facts in the face and to seek flexible solutions, respect for others, give-and-take in dialog situations, absence of hypocrisy, a complete absence of grandeur in the conduct of his personal life. He has never been driven by blind self-assertion to make absurd decisions. — Alice Miller

I'm a career prosecutor. I have been trained, and my experience over decades, is to make decisions after a review of the evidence and the facts. And not to jump up with grand gestures before I've done that. Some might interpret that as being cautious. I would tell you that's just responsible. — Kamala Harris

There's been a certain amount of opportunism in the wake of the Paris attacks in 2015, when there was almost a reflexive assumption that, "Oh, if only we didn't have strong encryption out there, these attacks could have been prevented." But, as more evidence has come out - and we don't know all the facts yet - we're seeing very little to support the idea that the Paris attackers were making any kind of use of encryption. — Matt Blaze

Defenseless peasant societies in Laos and Cambodia were savagely bombed in "secret" - the "secrecy" resulting from the refusal of the mass media to make public facts for which they had ample evidence. — Noam Chomsky

We have heard talk enough. We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess, vapid sermons that we wish to hear. We have read your Bible and the works of your best minds. We have heard your prayers, your solemn groans and your reverential amens. All these amount to less than nothing. We want one fact. We beg at the doors of your churches for just one little fact. We pass our hats along your pews and under your pulpits and implore you for just one fact. We know all about your mouldy wonders and your stale miracles. We want a this year's fact. We ask only one. Give us one fact for charity. Your miracles are too ancient. The witnesses have been dead for nearly two thousand years. — Robert G. Ingersoll

And all of the scientific data, statistical facts and empirical evidence can't compete with the indefinable heart's desire. For if in the end, she loves you, and she chooses you ... none of the rest of this will matter. — Ruth Clampett

It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us. — Sam Harris

I don't believe in a golden mean; I don't believe you find policy wisdom between two polar points. I don't dismiss that possibility, but I look at the platform that's so ideologically based, that's so dismissive of facts, of evidence, of science, and it's frankly hard to take seriously. — Thomas E. Mann

It's unnecessary to make that, you know, strong of a statement. Let the facts, let the case, you know, and the evidence there speak for itself. You want to be careful that you're not poisoning the jury pool. — Kimberly Guilfoyle

After all the evidence is in
after you've run all the facts by everything you know
and you're still lost, you have to do some things on faith. — Christopher Moore

We used to speak familiarly of an agent, now do more, who was accustomed to manufacture evidence, and to invent facts in his cases, or at least to alter the aspects of facts to such an extent that they might fairly be viewed as new. — George Combe

I personally think honestly disclosing rather than hiding one's subjective values makes for more honest and trustworthy journalism. But no journalism - from the most stylistically 'objective' to the most brazenly opinionated - has any real value unless it is grounded in facts, evidence, and verifiable data. — Glenn Greenwald

It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around ... It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord. — Barbara Tuchman

It is entirely possible for wise and educated persons to disagree about points of fact. But facts are stubborn things. Whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter facts and evidence. We must strip away the rest. The happiness of the people is the aim of any good government. — Jeff Wheeler

We must speak truth to power and confront ignorance with facts. — DaShanne Stokes

Gerontologists studying the aging process find increasing evidence that most of us will age with a fair degree of success. There's far less institutionalization and disability than one might have guessed. While the size of social networks shrink with age, the quality of the relationships improves. There are types of cognitive skills that improve in old age (these are related to social intelligence and to making good strategic use of facts, rather than merely remembering them easily). The average elderly individual thinks his or her health is above average, and takes pleasure from that. And most important, the average level of happiness increases in old age; fewer negative emotions occur and, when they do, they don't persist as long. Connected to this, brain-imaging studies show that negative images have less of an impact, and positive images have more of an impact on brain metabolism in older people, as compared to young. — Robert M. Sapolsky

Citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true. — Alexander Hamilton

As one half of our nature seeks to create heroes to worship, the other must ceaselessly attempt to cast them down and discover evidence of feet-of-clay, in order to label them as mere lucky fellows, or as villains-were-the-facts-but-known, and the eminent and great are ground between the millstones of envy, and reduced again to common size. — Oakley Hall

Intuition is the wisdom formed by feeling and instinct - a gift of knowing without reasoning ... Belief is ignited by hope and supported by facts and evidence - it builds alignment and creates confidence. Belief is what sets energy in motion and creates the success that breeds more success. — Angela Ahrendts

All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other, and I much fear that British juries have not yet attained that pitch of intelligence when they will give the preference to my theories over Lestrade's facts. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. — John Adams

The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors' premises. The effects of incommensurability ensure that protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this. The — Alasdair MacIntyre

After invoking the language and symbols of religion to bypass reason and convince the country to go to war, Bush found it increasingly necessary to disdain and dispute inconvenient facts that began to surface in public discussions. He sometimes seemed to wage war against reason itself in his effort to deny obvious truths that were totally inconsistent with the false impressions the nation had been given prior to making the decision to invade. He and his team seemed to approach every question of fact as a partisan fight to the finish. Those who questioned the faulty assumptions on which the war was based were attacked as unpatriotic. Those who pointed to the forged evidence and glaring inconsistencies were accused of supporting terrorism. One of Bush's congressional allies, John Boehner, then House majority leader, said, If you want to let the terrorists win in Iraq, just vote for the Democrats. — Al Gore

The motives of the writer form as important an ingredient in the analysis or his history, as the facts he records. Probability is a powerful and troublesome test; and it is by this troublesome standard that a large portion of historical evidence is sifted. — Homer

I was then and am now very much a happy warrior, very much joyful. Not engaging in character attacks myself, just putting out, "Here are the facts, here are the evidence."And I noted, for example, that both of them [Marco Rubio and Donald Trump] were relying on fabrications. — Ted Cruz

Anyone who wants to understand the world should be open to new facts and new arguments, even on subjects where his or her views are very well established. Similarly, anyone truly interested in morality - in the principles of behavior that allow people to flourish - should be open to new evidence and new arguments that bear upon questions of happiness and suffering. Clearly, the chief enemy of open conversation is dogmatism in all its forms. Dogmatism — Sam Harris

Knowledge signifies things known. Where there are no things known, there is no knowledge. Where there are no things to be known, there can be no knowledge. We have observed that every science, that is, every branch of knowledge, is compounded of certain facts, of which our sensations furnish the evidence. Where no such evidence is supplied, we are without data; we are without first premises; and when, without these, we attempt to build up a science, we do as those who raise edifices without foundations. And what do such builders construct? Castles in the air. — Frances Wright

Proceeding further, to inquire whether the facts related by the Four Evangelists are proved by competent and satisfactory evidence, we are led, first, to consider on which side lies the burden of establishing the credibility of the witnesses. — Simon Greenleaf

Although it is easier to find information these days, it is easier than ever before to find misinformation, pseudo-facts, unsupported and fringe opinions, and the like. Children should be taught at an early age what constitutes evidence, how to detect biases or distortions in newspaper accounts, and that there exist hierarchies of information sources. In the medical field, for example, a controlled experiment published in a peer-reviewed journal is a better source than a blog by the Ginseng Growers Association, promoting the health benefits of their own product. — Daniel Levitin

Louis Brandeis actually changes his mind about women's suffrage because he works with these brilliant women in the women's suffrage movement like Josephine Goldmark, his sister-in-law, where he writes a Brandeis brief which convinced the court to uphold maximum hour laws for women by collecting all these facts and empirical evidence. — Jeffrey Rosen

But if I've learned anything, it is that goodness prevails, not in the absence of reasons to despair, but in spite of them. If we wait for clean heroes and clear choices and evidence on our side to act, we will wait forever, and my radio conversations teach me that people who bring light into the world wrench it out of darkness, and contend openly with darkness all of their days. [ ... ] They were flawed human beings, who wrestled with demons in themselves as in the world outside. For me, their goodness is more interesting, more genuinely inspiring because of that reality. The spiritual geniuses of the ages and of the everyday simply don't let despair have the last word, nor do they close their eyes to its pictures or deny the enormity of its facts. They say, "Yes, and ... ," and they wake up the next day, and the day after that, to live accordingly. — Krista Tippett

People have a right to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. Evidence must be located, not created, and opinions not backed by evidence cannot be given much weight. — James W. Loewen

Witness testimony is always flawed. It's better than circumstantial evidence, sure, but people aren't camcorders; they don't record every action and reaction, and the very act of remembering involves chosing words, actions and images. In other words, any witness who was supposed to be giving a court facts is really just giving them a version of fiction. — Jodi Picoult

It necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, and of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among many other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition - or the hope - that on this score our position is ever likely to be revised. There is no scientific concept, in any of the sciences, more destructive of anthropocentrism than this one. — Jacques Monod

We need to ask our policy makers and those we elect to office who are supposed to make decisions to give us the evidence of the facts that are behind the decisions that we make. We should be skeptical. — Dixie Lee Ray

Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood. — George Eliot

We have reached a situation where a theory has been accepted as fact by some, and possible contrary evidence is shunted aside. [This is] mythology rather than science. — Robert Shapiro

Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. In order to improve society it is first necessary to understand the laws by which society lives. The operation of these laws being impervious to our preferences, men will challenge them only at the risk of failure.
Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects, however imperfectly and one-sidedly, these objective laws. It believes also, then, in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opinion - between what is true objectively and rationally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment, divorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking. — Hans J. Morgenthau

Perhaps it had something to do with the case becoming too neat, all the evidence suddenly lining up and cooperating with their theory. Or maybe his doubts were based on something as unreliable as "intuition," though Carlson had never been a big fan of that particular aspect of investigative work. Intuition was often a way of cutting corners, a nifty technique of replacing hard evidence and facts with something far more elusive and capricious. The worst investigators Carlson knew relied on so-called intuition. He — Harlan Coben

A historian cannot pick and choose his facts; he must deal with all the evidence. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The importance of the facts testified, and their relations to the affairs of the soul, and the life to come, can make no difference in the principles or the mode of weighing the evidence. — Simon Greenleaf

It is necessary, first of all, to find a correct logical starting point, one which can lead us to a natural and sound interpretation of the empirical facts. — Ernst Cassirer

When all the facts are in, swift and clear decision is another mark of a true leader. A visionary may see, but a leader must decide. An impulsive person may be quick to declare a preference; but a leader must weigh evidence and make his decision on sound premises. — J. Oswald Sanders

Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction. — Martin Luther King Jr.

The beauty of new media is that no evidence is necessary. The brave blog-troopers have stormed the cockpit of news, and wrestled the joystick of authority away from the seasoned pilots of the press who would land our country at the Facts International Airport. — Stephen Colbert

An insane person believes his world is consistent. If he
believes the government is trying to kill him, he will see
ample evidence of his belief in the so-called real world. He
will be wrong, but his evidence is no better or worse than
your evidence that it rained this morning. Both of you will
be converting evidence of the present into impressions
stored in your minds and you will both be certain your evidence
is solid and irrefutable. Your mind will mold the facts
and shape the clues until it all fits. — Scott Adams

Chemistry is necessarily an experimental science: its conclusions are drawn from data, and its principles supported by evidence from facts. — Michael Faraday

What should we think of someone who never admits error, never entertains doubt but adheres unflinchingly to the same ideas all his life, regardless of new evidence? Doubt and skepticism are signs of rationality. When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence. — Diane Ravitch

The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is - second only to American political campaigns - the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time. — Larry Laudan

That general warrants, whereby an officer or messenger may be commanded to search suspected places without evidence of a fact committed, or to seize any person or persons not named, or whose offence is not particularly described and supported by evidence, are grievous and oppressive, and ought not to be granted. — George Mason

With respect to those points, on which the declaration of Scripture is positive and decisive, as, for instance, in asserting the low antiquity of the human race; the evidence of all facts that have yet been established in Geology coincides with the records of Sacred History and Profane Tradition to confirm the conclusion that the existence of mankind can on no account be supposed to have taken its beginning before that time which is assigned to it in the Mosaic writings. — William Buckland

The first job of the historian and of the journalist is to find facts. Not the only job, perhaps not the most important, but the first. Facts are the cobblestones from which we build roads of analysis, mosaic tiles that we fit together to compose pictures of past and present. There will be disagreement about where the road leads and what reality or truth is revealed by the mosaic picture. The facts themselves must be checked against all the available evidence. But some are round and hard
and the most powerful leaders in the world can trip over them. So can writers, dissidents and saints. — Timothy Garton Ash

Of course UFOs are real-and they are interplanetary ... The cumulative evidence for the existence of UFOs is quite overwhelming and I accept the fact of their existence. — Hugh Dowding, 1st Baron Dowding

In Darwin's time no serious attempt had been made to examine the manifestations of variability. A vast assemblage of miscellaneous facts could formerly be adduced as seemingly comparable illustrations of the phenomenon "Variation." Time has shown this mass of evidence to be capable of analysis. When first promulgated it produced the impression that variability was a phenomenon generally distributed amongst living things in such a way that the specific divisions must be arbitrary. When this variability is sorted out, and is seen to be in part a result of hybridisation, in part a consequence of the persistence of hybrids by parthenogenetic reproduction, a polymorphism due to the continued presence of individuals representing various combinations of Mendelian allelomorphs, partly also the transient effect of alteration in external circumstances, we see how cautious we must be in drawing inferences as to the indefiniteness of specific limits from a bare knowledge that intermediates exist. — William Bateson

So much of what we imagine to be the testimony of reason or the clear and unequivocal evidence of our senses is really only an interpretive reflex, determined by mental habits impressed in us by an intellectual and cultural history. Even our notion of what might constitute a "rational" or "realistic" view of things is largely a product not of a dispassionate attention to facts, but of an ideological legacy. — David Bentley Hart

The public's dilemma is to know how to consume the news with an ability to extract opinion from the simple facts and evidence... The best solution to the fact/opinion dilemma is to acquire more diverse information across the ideological and geological divide. If you find yourself relying on one source of information for the news, whether right or left, you are likely to be exposed to more opinion that reinforces rather than challenges your own. — Nancy Snow

Religion could never be made compatible with science without diluting it so seriously that it was no longer religion but a humanist philosophy. And so I learned what other opponents of creationism could have told me: that persuading Americans to accept the truth of evolution involved not just an education in facts, but a de-education in faith - the form of belief that replaces the need for evidence with simple emotional commitment. — Jerry A. Coyne

Jews, Germans, and Allies is an important historical document, especially in light of those revisionists who would impose a universal amnesia about the suffering and losses incurred during the Holocaust. The grim statistics that Ms. Grossmann presents in her carefully researched and well-organized book carry evidence of the terrible truth. But the testimony of the survivors she quotes contains the final, ineradicable facts of history. — Hilma Wolitzer

Today bursty search patterns explain an amazingly wide range of behavioral phenomena, from how people recall facts stored in their memory to how they locate information on the World Wide Web. In publication after publication, scientists have offered evidence that the most effective strategy for locating a given target is not the one that is the most obvious, systematic, and regular but a search strategy that is bursty, intermittent, and even haphazard. — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

There are some people in politics and in the press who can't be confused by the facts. They just will not live in an evidence-based world. And that's regrettable. — Hillary Clinton

The power of administrative bodies to make finding of fact which may be treated as conclusive, if there is evidence both ways, is a power of enormous consequence. An unscrupulous administrator might be tempted to say Let me find the facts for the people of my country, and I care little who lays down the general principles. — Charles Evans Hughes

Religion is based upon blind faith supported by no evidence. Science is based upon confidence that results from evidence - and that confidence can be modified and/or reversed by further observations and experimentation. Science approaches truth, closer and closer, by hard dedicated work. Religion already has it all decided, and it's in the book. It's dogma, unchangeable, and unaffected by reality and whatever facts we come upon in the real world. — James Randi

Whatever my current beliefs are, on any topic, they're all open to being changed by the right facts and the right evidence. — Ramez Naam

The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker. — Nick Hanauer

... the American reader cannot bear a surprise. He knows that this is the greatest country on earth ... and evidence to the contrary is not admissible. That means no inconvenient facts, no new information. If you really want the reader's attention, you must flatter him. Make his prejudices your own. Tell him things he already knows. He will love your soundness. — Gore Vidal

Today the earth speaks with resonance and clearness and every ear in every civilized country of the world is attuned to its wonderful message of the creative evolution of man, except the ear of William Jennings Bryan; he alone remains stone-deaf, he alone by his own resounding voice drowns the eternal speech of nature. — Henry Fairfield Osborn

Scientists still do not appear to understand sufficiently that all earth sciences must contribute evidence toward unveiling the state of our planet in earlier times, and that the truth of the matter can only be reached by combing all this evidence ... It is only by combing the information furnished by all the earth sciences that we can hope to determine 'truth' here, that is to say, to find the picture that sets out all the known facts in the best arrangement and that therefore has the highest degree of probability. Further, we have to be prepared always for the possibility that each new discovery, no matter what science furnishes it, may modify the conclusions we draw. — Alfred Wegener

All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible experience, through evidence toward which the intellect is merely passive, and over which the individual will and character have no control. — Chauncey Wright

Facts are often faint and flickering. They are the achievements of subtle investigations that must painstakingly stabilize evanescent effects or ingeniously combine several strands of evidence into a strong, weight-bearing cord. Above all, as their etymology suggests, [...] the most interesting and useful facts are not given but made, artifacts in the best sense of the word. — Lorraine Daston

The final and conclusive evidence against evolution is the fact that the Bible denies it. — Henry M. Morris

The denial of Christ has less to do with facts and more to do with the bent of what a person is prejudiced to conclude. — Ravi Zacharias

When one ponders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the past three billion years or so, the prodigious wealth of structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective teleonomic performances of living beings from bacteria to man, one may well find oneself beginning to doubt again whether all this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at random. [Nevertheless,] a detailed review of the accumulated modern evidence [shows] that this conception alone is compatible with the facts. — Jacques Monod

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not. — Ronald Reagan

The reassuring smile was now useless. I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information
these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything together yet, so the mind built up a defense, and the evidence was restructured, and that was what I tried to do on that morning
to restructure the evidence so it made sense
and that is what I failed at. — Bret Easton Ellis

Ironically, tendency to ignore inconvenient facts and unwelcome evidence is actually President Reagan's true legacy, as I noted in 'The Nation' back in 2000, before the current right-wing mania for President Reagan gained its full force. — Eric Alterman

If, occasionally, historical evidence does not square with formulated laws, it should be remembered that a law is but a deduction from experience and experiment, and therefore laws must conform with historical facts, not facts with laws. — Immanuel Velikovsky

The tendency to variation in living beings, which all admitted as a matter of fact; the selective influence of conditions, which no one could deny to be a matter of fact, when his attention was drawn to the evidence; and the occurrence of great geological changes which also was matter of fact; could be used as the only necessary postulates of a theory of the evolution of plants and animals which, even if not at once, competent to explain all the known facts of biological science, could not be shown to be inconsistent with any. — Thomas Henry Huxley

From the very fact the universe is on the whole orderly, in a manner comprehensible to our intellect, is evidence that we and it were fashioned by a common intelligence. — Philip Johnson

Debating, doubting, or rejecting the basic scientific facts about climate change in the face of the overwhelming evidence and overwhelming scientific opinion will not change those facts. — Bernie Sanders

A mind unwilling to believe or even undesirous to be instructed, our weightiest evidence must ever fail to impress. It will insist on taking that evidence in bits and rejecting item by item. As all the facts come singly, anyone who dismisses them one by one is destroying the condition under which the conviction of a new truth could ever arise in the mind. — F. C. S. Schiller

The peculiarity of the evidence of mathematical truths is, that all the argument is on one side. There are no objections, and no answers to objections. But on every subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends on a balance to be struck between two sets of confliting reasons. Even in natural philosophy, there is always some other explanation possible of the same facts; some geocentric theory instead of heliocentric, some phlogiston instead of oxygen; and it has to be shown why that other theory cannot be the true on: and until this is shown, and until we know how it is shown, we do not understand the grounds of our opinion. But when we turn to subjects infinitely more complicated, to morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life, three-fourths of the arguments for every disputed opinion consist in dispelling the appearances which favour some opinion different from it. — John Stuart Mill

Why did everyone keep demanding "evidence" and "facts"? I swear, cop and courtroom dramas were ruining the good name of gut instinct. — Chloe Neill

Despite recent media reports that have clouded, or even misrepresented, the facts, there is compelling evidence that al-Qaida and Iraq have been linked for more than a decade. — Elizabeth Dole

Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion.
For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it. So upon logic was founded the nonsense that displays itself in the tales and rhymes of Lewis Carroll. If men really could not distinguish between frogs and men, fairy-stories about frog-kings would not have arisen. — J.R.R. Tolkien

The prevalence and power of a vision is shown, not by what its evidence or logic can prove, but precisely by its exemption from any need to provide evidence or logic
by the number of things that can be successfully asserted because they fit the vision, without having to meet the test of fitting the facts. — Thomas Sowell

Miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidence of any revelation. — John Stuart Mill

There is no other proposition in economics that has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis ... In the literature of finance, accounting, and the economics of uncertainty, the EMH is accepted as a fact of life. — Michael Jensen

Such is the strange situation in which modern philosophy finds itself. No former age was ever in such a favourable position with regard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an astoundingly rich and constantly increasing body of facts. Our technical instruments for observation and experimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have become sharper and more penetrating.
We appear, nonetheless, not yet to have found a method for the mastery and organization of this material. When compared with our own abundance the past may seem very poor. But our wealth of facts is not necessarily a wealth of thoughts. Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost in a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data which seem to lack all conceptual unity. — Ernst Cassirer