Non Facts Quotes & Sayings

The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica. — Stephen Leacock

Life is an interpretation of a series of facts, and that interpretation is really what life is about. So the division between non-fiction and fiction has a certain logic, but it's a very limited one. And by and large, it isn't helpful. — Yann Martel

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

An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact. — Francis Bacon

The life of a non-Muslim to Muslim is worth as much as the life of a chicken is worth to you and me. We don't go around killing every chicken we see. In fact we keep them and feed them as long as they are useful to us. But we don't lose sleep when we have to slaughter them. So it is not that Muslims will necessarily go around massacring every non-Muslim. As long as these non-Muslims are useful to them, they are granted protection. — Ali Sina

There is no need of words; believe facts.
[Lat., Non opus est verbis, credite rebus.] — Ovid

The truth is that the phenomena of artistic production are still so obscure, so baffling, we are still so far from an accurate scientific and psychological knowledge of their genesis or meaning, that we are forced to accept them as empirical facts; and empirical and non-explanatory names are the names that suit them best. — Logan Pearsall Smith

There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well. — Charles Sanders Peirce

Friendship is such an elastic word. There never was an age when it stood for so many things in private, and was yet so absolutely non-existent in fact. — Ouida

If I want to understand something, I must observe, I must not criticize, I must not condemn, I must not pursue it as pleasure or avoid it as non-pleasure. There must merely be the silent observation of a fact. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Over the years I have written creative non-fiction related to the curricula I produced, first as an elementary school art instructor, then for nearly two decades as a museum education curator. While any curriculum I wrote was based on facts as well as best and accepted practices, to add imaginative interest and encourage my students' engagement I put those facts in the context of stories, invented situations that brought to life the remote or unfamiliar — Susan Bass Marcus

One of the most remarkable facts of this age is the negligible direct personal power which scientists have in the control of the world's affairs. The marvelous means they so successfully produce are always used by non-scientists against whom the scientists themselves seem to be powerless and even purposeless. What clever sheep they are. — Nanamoli Thera

The proof given by Wright, that non-adaptive differentiation will occur in small populations owing to "drift," or the chance fixation of some new mutation or recombination, is one of the most important results of mathematical analysis applied to the facts of neo-mendelism. It gives accident as well as adaptation a place in evolution, and at one stroke explains many facts which puzzled earlier selectionists, notably the much greater degree of divergence shown by island than mainland forms, by forms in isolated lakes than in continuous river-systems. — Julian Huxley

Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies. — V.S. Naipaul

It is an old saying, abundantly justified, that where sciences meet there growth occurs. It is true moreover to say that in scientific borderlands not only are facts gathered that [are] often new in kind, but it is in these regions that wholly new concepts arise. It is my own faith that just as the older biology from its faithful studies of external forms provided a new concept in the doctrine of evolution, so the new biology is yet fated to furnish entirely new fundamental concepts of science, at which physics and chemistry when concerned with the non-living alone could never arrive. — Frederick Gowland Hopkins

But the hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights. — Nelson Mandela

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. — Ray Bradbury

Memory means different things to psychologists. Autobiographical memory is an interesting case because it straddles the most basic of the distinctions that scientists make between types of memory: that between semantic memory (memory for facts) and episodic memory (memory for events). Our memory for the events of our own lives involves the integration of details of what happened (episodic memory) with long-term knowledge about the facts of our lives (a kind of autobiographical semantic memory). Another important distinction is that between explicit or declarative memory (in which the contents of memory are accessible to consciousness) and implicit or non-declarative memory (which is unconscious). As we will see, this distinction is particularly important when it comes to the question of how memory is affected by trauma and extreme emotion. — Charles Fernyhough

In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctrines in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honoured. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored. — Aldous Huxley

In spite of the fundamental importance of economic facts in determining politics and beliefs of an age or nation, I do not think that non-economic factors can be neglected without risks of error which may be fatal in practice. — Bertrand Russell

events are due to decisions, and choices are based on our intentions. What we get is the result of these choices, even though they are unconscious, rather than what we think we want. When we surrender the pressure of wantingness, we are clear to make wiser choices and decisions. We think that our happiness depends on controlling events, and that facts are what upset us. Actually, it is our feelings and thoughts about these facts that are the real cause of our upset. Facts in and of themselves are neutral things. The power we give them is due to our attitude of acceptance or non-acceptance and our overall feeling state. — David R. Hawkins

Facts that have been forges into history first appear as incoherent text scribbled on aged paper. Only as we examine the whole of that which we know, can we surmise the elements of that which we do not. — Ron Mayes

Materialists try to live in the lower story NON-MATERIAL WORLD Subjective, Superstitious, Mental Constructs MATERIAL WORLD Objective, Scientific, Knowable Facts — Nancy Pearcey

It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. — Kingsley Amis

For me, love is very non-academic. Love, it's a very physical thing. I don't mean physical in terms of - I mean, it can be sexual. But those moments when I'm aware of the fact that I love someone or love something, it really manifests physically. — Moby

For the facts that make up the world need the non-factual as a vantage point from which to be perceived. — Ingeborg Bachmann

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the "unfairness" of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact - in defiance of facts. It is not equality before the law that they seek, but inequality: the establishment of an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy on top - the aristocracy of non-value. — Ayn Rand

Historical facts are the vital framework around which non-fiction writers construct their narratives; they are, quite simply, indispensable. — Saul David

Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload. — Richard Saul Wurman

The fact that a man has no claim on others ... does not preclude or prohibit good will among men and does not make it immoral to offer or to accept voluntary, non-sacrificial assistance. — Ayn Rand

What the Nation must realize is that the home, when both parents work, is non-existent. Once we have honestly faced that fact, we must act accordingly. — Agnes Meyer Driscoll

There are some current 'theories' that, when divested of begged questions, reduce to the non-controversial statement, 'Here are some facts and there may be some relation between them.' — Harold Jeffreys

In the ensuing chapters, we will look in some detail at particular manifestations of the modern scientific ideology and the false paths down which it has led us. We will consider how biological determinism has been used to explain and justify inequalities within and between societies and to claim that those inequalities can never be changed. We will see how a theory of human nature has been developed using Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to claim that social organization is also unchangeable because it is natural. We will see how problems of health and disease have been located within the individual so that the individual becomes a problem for society to cope with rather than society becoming a problem for the individual. And we will see how simple economic relationships masquerading as facts of nature can drive the entire direction of biological research and technology. — Richard C. Lewontin