Quotes & Sayings About Having All The Facts

Seeing things from a different point of view can help us understand why other people act the way they do. We too often judge people without having all the facts. — Sean Covey

By extrapolating a little from Freud, it becomes possible to think of nationalism as a kind of narcissism. A nationalist takes the neutral facts about a people - their language, habitat, culture, tradition and history- and turns these facts into a narrative, whose purpose is to illuminate the self-consciousness of a group, to enable them to think of themselves as a nation with a claim to self-determination. A nationalist, in other words, takes "minor differences"- indifferent in themselves- and transforms them into major differences. For this purpose, traditions are invented, a glorious past is gilded and refurbished for public consumption, and a people who might not have thought of themselves as a people at all suddenly begin to dream of themselves as a nation. — Michael Ignatieff

If certain Jewish communities had distinctive qualities, they were due to history, not biology. — Shlomo Sand

Feelings could override facts, as facts could alter feelings. Choose the truth first, rather than following after feelings. — Anthony Liccione

Do you know, I sometimes, catch myself wishing that I too were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They're wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight living is a worthless act. To labor at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me. I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you — Jack London

Ability to persevere begins with you, the individual. However, change is rarely easy. In fact, sometimes it is downright formidable. — Paul G. Stoltz

A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cynics know the answers without having penetrated deeply enough to know the questions. When challenged by mysterious truths, they marshall 'facts. — Marilyn Ferguson

One can get closer to reality and the facts by using words, questions and answers. — Sandor Marai

The outright propagandist sets up in me such a fury of opposition I am not apt to care much whether he has got his facts straight or not. He is like someone standing on your toes between you and an open window, describing the view to you. All I ask of him to do is to open the window, stand out of the way, and let me look at the view for myself. — Katherine Anne Porter

It must never be lost sight of what observation is for. It is not for the sake of piling up miscellaneous information or curious facts, but for the sake of saving life and increasing health and comfort — Katharine Kolcaba

I came into my teens unaware that most Americans, blacks as well as whites, were ignorant of the main facts of Negro history. And so it was the facts of other histories that I found most intriguing. I fell into a U.S. history major by chance late in my second year at Fisk University. — David Levering Lewis

An individual's demarcations as a being, not his trespass of them, create his identity and preserve his illusion of being something special and not a freak of chance, a product of blind mutations. Transcending all illusions and their emergent activities - having absolute control of what we are and not what we need to be so that we may survive the most unsavory facts of life and death - would untether us from the moorings of our self-limited selves. — Thomas Ligotti

I have always believed and promoted the fact that education and access to the knowledge society involves lifelong learning. — Ken Wyatt

I don't have any problem with a reporter or a news person who says the President is uninformed on this issue or that issue. I don't think any of us would challenge that. I do have a problem with the singular focus on this, as if that's the only standard by which we ought to judge a president. What we learned in the last administration was how little having an encyclopedic grasp of all the facts has to do with governing. — David Gergen

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life ... Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy? — Aldous Huxley

The impossibility of separating the nomenclature of a science from the science itself, is owing to this, that every branch of physical science must consist of three things; the series of facts which are the objects of the science, the ideas which represent these facts, and the words by which these ideas are expressed. Like three impressions of the same seal, the word ought to produce the idea, and the idea to be a picture of the fact. — Antoine Lavoisier

Confidence is the feeling we have before knowing all the facts — John Dryden

But facts are facts and flinch not. — Robert Browning

The very fact of a Christian being here, and not in Heaven, is a proof that some work awaits him. — William Arnot

Reputations are shaped not by facts but by prejudices. — Barbara Mertz

By ethical argument and moral principle the greatest crimes are eventually shown to have been necessary, and, in fact, a signal benefit to mankind. — Zhuangzi

Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

One hears a lot of talk about the hostility between scientists and engineers. I don't believe in any such thing. In fact I am quite certain it is untrue ... There cannot possibly be anything in it because neither side has anything to do with the other. — David Hilbert

Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision. — Thomas Sowell

There's a vast difference between having a carload of miscellaneous facts sloshing around loose in your head and getting all mixed up in transit, and carrying the same assortment properly boxed and crated for convenient handling and immediate delivery. — George Horace Lorimer

Our lives are often a continuous betrayal and denial of what came before, we twist and distort everything as time passes, and yet we are still aware, however much we deceive ourselves, that we are the keepers of secrets and mysteries, however trivial. How tiring having always to move in the shadows or, even more difficult, in the half-light, which is never the same, always changing, every person has his light areas and his dark areas, they change according to what he knows and to what day it is and who he's talk to and what he wants ... Sometimes it is only the weariness brought on by the shadow that impels one to tell all the facts, the way someone hiding will suddenly reveal himself, either the pursuer or the pursued, simply in order to bring the game to an end and to step free from what has become a kind of enchantment. — Javier Marias

His eyes took in the details of my body with a conflicted gaze that I knew well: even having seen all the facts of the case, he still wanted me. He wanted me despite knowing what that meant about him. — Alissa Nutting

It's great that people get together and collaborate, talk about the facts and the analysis, all in the interest of having a great financial system. — Jamie Dimon

Anything that someone's interested in should be very, very easy to call up onto the screen. And in fact the computer over time will see what you're interested in and make that immediately available without your having to be give any commands at all. — Bill Gates

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one — Clifford Geertz

We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all. Or perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are loth to have them disturbed by facts. And yet how little we really know of these millions, - of their daily lives and longings, of their homely joys and sorrows, of their real shortcomings and the meaning of their crimes! All this we can only learn by intimate contact with the masses, and not by wholesale arguments covering millions separate in time and space, and differing widely in training and culture. To-day, — W.E.B. Du Bois

Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts. — William S. Burroughs

The first is the result of a decision to act - to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it's impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encouraged. Fortune favors the bold. The second is the result of a decision of sloth - to not do something - wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of fear despite having all the facts. This is how learning experiences become terminal punishments, bad relationships become bad marriages, and poor job choices become lifelong prison sentences. — Timothy Ferriss

On the subject of the history of the American Revolution, you ask who shall write it? Who can write it? And who will ever be able to write it? Nobody, except merely its external facts ... all its councils, designs and discussions having been conducted by Congress [behind] closed doors - and no members, as far as I know, having even made notes of them. These, which are the life and soul of history, must forever be unknown. — Thomas Jefferson

Fears are not facts. — Chaz Bono

Whether greater cybersecurity requires a greater sacrifice of our digital freedoms is an important debate that we should be having, preferably with all the facts in front of us. — Evgeny Morozov

Darwin investigated the numerous facts obtained by naturalists in living nature and analysed them through the prism of practical experience. — Trofim Lysenko

Facts are such horrid things! — Jane Austen

Built into bad news is that sense of profound disbelief. The mind struggles to absorb the bare facts, defending itself against the larger implications. — Sue Grafton

The Greeks not only face facts. They have no desire to escape from them. — Edith Hamilton

Science is a lie in day-light, with a lot witnesses. Religion is a truth in darkness, without any need for such witness! — Thiruman Archunan

The death rate is a fact; anything beyond this is an inference. — William Farr

The close observer soon discovers that the teacher's task is not to implant facts but to place the subject to be learned in front of the learner and, through sympathy, emotion, imagination, and patience, to awaken in the learner the restless drive for answers and insights which enlarge the personal life and give it meaning. — Nathan M. Pusey

The world is not a great place because racist people come with a race type of agenda, and it don't make the world great, it makes it worst than ever. — Werley Nortreus

It seems everyone is converging on a simple set of facts: Our lives are digital, and we wish to share our lives. Pinterest came at it through images, artfully curated. Facebook came at it through friends, cunningly organized. Dropbox came to it via files, cleverly clouded. — John Battelle

NAEP data show beyond question that test scores in reading and math have improved for almost every group of students over the past two decades; slowly and steadily in the case of reading, dramatically in the case of mathematics. Students know more and can do more in these two basic skills subjects now than they could twenty or forty years ago... So the next time you hear someone say that the system is "broken," that American students aren't as well educated as they used to be, that our schools are failing, tell that person the facts. — Diane Ravitch

My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of facts; my book is more like a collection of Ready-mades. — Edward Ruscha

State a benefit in your headline that clearly enhances their life, using power words like: Announcing, Breakthrough, Discover, Facts, New, Now, Sale, Yes, You, Free, Fast, Easy, Proven, Guaranteed, How to, Save, Increase, Secret, More, 54% (or any specific percentage of increase or decrease) — Jim McCraigh

I know about an actual murder over a watch, it's in all the newspapers now. If a writer had invented it, the critics and connoisseurs of popular life would have shouted at once that it was incredible; but reading it in the newspapers as a fact, you feel that it is precisely from such facts that you learn about Russian reality. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Facts are stupid things. — Ronald Reagan

Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow. — Cyril Connolly

The Nature of Familiar Letters, written, as it were, to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on Events undecided, must plead an Excuse for the Bulk of a Collection of this Kind. Mere Facts and Characters might be comprised in a much smaller Compass: But, would they be equally interesting? — Samuel Richardson

[About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections. — Niels Bohr

People have been brainwashed into believing that it's got to be down or it wouldn't be blues. But it's not so. It's got to be a fact or it wouldn't be blues. — Willie Dixon

Childhood hunger in America is as much a paradox as it is a tragedy. Why, in the wealthiest country in the world, should hunger darken the lives and dreams of 12 million children and their families? I believe that, when Americans learn the facts and understand how their involvement can make a difference, banishing childhood hunger will be a national, local and personal priority. — Martin Sheen

The great fact is, that life is a service. The only question is, Whom will we serve? — Frederick William Faber

The very word "sorrow" colours the fact of sorrow, the pain of it. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

We lose track of everything, and of everyone, even ourselves. The facts of my father's life are less known to me than those of the life of Hadrian. My own existence, if I had to write of it, would be reconstructed by me from externals, laboriously, as if it were the life of someone else: I should have to turn to letters, and to the recollections of others, in order to clarify such uncertain memories. What is ever left but crumbled walls, or masses of shade? — Marguerite Yourcenar

The sad fact is that the vast majority of drunks stay drunks. There's a small minority of us who reach that fork in the road where one side says 'live' and the other says 'drink'. — John Larroquette

Gnosis is lived upon facts, withers away in abstractions, and is difficult to find even in the noblest of thoughts. — Samael Aun Weor

Everything we have and everything we enjoy, including our very life, is due to the kindness of others. In fact, every happiness there is in the world arises as a result of others' kindness. — Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

Real intelligence is a creative use of knowledge, not merely an accumulation of facts. The slow thinker who can finally come up with an idea of his own is more important to the world than a walking encyclopedia who hasn't learned how to use this information productively. — Susan Winebrenner

The businessman who wishes to gain a market by throttling a superior competitor, the worker who wants a share of his employer's wealth, the artist who envies a rival's higher talent - they're all wishing facts out of existence and destruction is the only means of their wish. If they pursue it, they will not achieve a market, a fortune, or an immortal fame - they will merely destroy production — Ayn Rand

When you talk to a Republican, many of them just outright say, 'Yeah. Climate change isn't real,' without assessing the facts, and it's a big problem. It's not a red or blue issue, it's a green issue ... Not because of facts or science but because of emotion. — Philippe Cousteau Jr.

Most philosophers do not want intellectual matters to reduce to a question of morality (obedience or rebellion to God's Word). They want to hold the intellect or reason to be above matters of moral volition. They hold that truth is obtainable and testable no matter what ethical condition the thinker is in.
Hence, they maintain that all disputes must be rationally resolvable, and a rational case for a philosophic position relies on a valid chain of discursive argumentation that takes us back to incontestable first principles or facts. — Greg L. Bahnsen