quotations about facts
I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
The Story of the Malakand Field Force
Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
HENRI POINCARE
Science and Hypothesis
Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
letter to Charles Kingsley, September 23, 1860
There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.
MAYA ANGELOU
attributed, Sheroes
But no one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those "easy speeches that comfort cruel men."
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
preface, Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name
I might show facts as plain as day:
But, since your eyes are blind, you'd say,
"Where? What?" and turn away.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
"A Sketch"
Most facts that we don't use in some way will be lost to us.
ROBERT MADIGAN
How Memory Works
This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.
SUSAN JACOBY
The Age of American Unreason
Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.
EDITH WHARTON
Xingu and Other Stories
Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
THOMAS SOWELL
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
letter to Michele Besso, October 8, 1952
Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Tallulah", Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection
Facts have to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
A History of Western Philosophy
Facts, therefore, have merely a potential and, as it were, subsequent value, and the only advantage of possessing them is the possibility of drawing conclusions from them; in other words, of rising to the idea, the principle, the law which governs them. Our knowledge is composed not of facts, but of the relations which facts and ideas bear to themselves and to each other; and real knowledge consists not in an acquaintance with facts, which only makes a pedant, but in the use of facts, which makes a philosopher.
HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE
Essays
Facts are lonely things.
DON DELILLO
Libra
Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.
G.K. CHESTERTON
"On the Classics,", Selected Essays
Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.
CHARLES DICKENS
Hard Times