quotations about facts
Assumptions are dangerous things. I like facts a lot better.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Winner
Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.
JOHN UPDIKE
Buchanan Dying
Detached facts are like sand. We may fill the hand with it, and firmly grasp it, yet it begins at once to ooze out at every crevice till the palm is left empty. Moisten it, till it coheres in a ball, and the open hand will hold with ease twice the quantity.
JOHN BASCOM
The Science of the Mind
We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
At some point the mind must grammaticize facts and convert them to narratives. The facts of the world do not for the most part come in narrative form. We have to do that.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
"The Kekulé Problem: Where did language come from?", Nautilus, April 20, 2017
The facts will be known to our children's children, though not to us.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
HILARY MANTEL
Wolf Hall
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
MARK TWAIN
interview with Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel
The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away.
The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"On the Fifth Day"
There are no facts -- only observational postulates in an endlessly regenerative hodgepodge of predictions.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
The totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
We accumulate scientific knowledge like clockwork, with the result that facts are overturned at regular intervals in our quest to better understand the world.
SAMUEL ARBESMAN
The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
The world divides into facts.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
The solid facts are like peaks rising up few and far between. But these peaks bespeak not only mountain ranges but a vast continent of connected territory with important discoveries enough for many an explorer.
THEODORE H. BULLOCK
Perspectives in Marine Biology
The practical man--an especial favorite in this age--often takes the field with his single fact against a great principle, in the reckless spirit of one who would not hesitate to sever the thread on which he is unable to string his own individual pearl--perhaps a false one--even though he should scatter man jewels worthy of a prince's diadem.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
The Concept of Nature
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Not only are facts and theories in constant disharmony, they are never as neatly separated as everyone makes them out to be.
PAUL KARL FEYERABEND
Against Method