quotations about facts
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
The more power a person has, the more his or her opinions can be pawned off as facts.
LEE THAYER
How Executives Fail
To no circumstance is the wide diffusion of error in the world more owing than to our habit of adopting conclusions from insufficiently established data. An indispensable preliminary, then, in every investigation, is to get at facts. Until these are arrived at, every opinion, theory, or system, however ingeniously framed, must necessarily rest upon an uncertain basis.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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
People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.
SHELBY FOOTE
"Shelby Foote Profile", Academy of Achievement
Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
THOMAS SOWELL
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
GORE VIDAL
"French Letters: Theories of the New Novel", Encounter, December 1967
Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.
G.K. CHESTERTON
"On the Classics,", Selected Essays
Facts sometimes don't spread as far as they should. Therein lies the curious situation of hidden knowledge.
SAMUEL ARBESMAN
The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
A Scandal in Bohemia
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
Fiction is fact distilled into truth.
EDWARD ALBEE
New York Times, September 18, 1966
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 have to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
A History of Western Philosophy
Both forms of consciousness, the one that bows before the facts and the other that mistakes itself for an overlord or creator of facts, are like the shattered halves of the truth that was not fulfilled in the world and the failure of which also affects thought. The truth cannot be patched together from its pieces.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords
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 alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.
CHARLES DICKENS
Hard Times
The facts that you actually see with your own eyes don't always tell the truth, because sometimes there is something going on under it all that you don't see.
LINDA MARIE IRISH
It's a God Thing