Quotes and Sayings about Facts
"It has something to do with the facts and the law and who the judges are. So I think lawyers sometimes exaggerate their role in winning and losing. Lawyers do have a role, and a major role, but they're not the only players in this game."
- Floyd Abrams
(Related: Winning, Facts, Judges, Law, Lawyers, Losing)
"Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts."
- Henry B. Adams
(Related: Power, Energy, Facts)
"Practical politics consists in ignoring facts."
- Henry B. Adams
(Related: Politics, Facts)
"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."
- Henry B. Adams
(Related: Education, Facts, Ignorance, Nothing)
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
- John Adams
(Related: Facts, May, State, Wishes)
"The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea."
- Mortimer Adler
(Related: Idea, Facts)
"Facts are stupid until brought into connection with some general law."
- Louis Agassiz
(Related: Connection, Facts, Law)
"When does she do all this thinking? We're together all the time but she thinks deeply about things and with feeling and she can remember the facts. We've been married 48 years."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Time, Facts, Feeling, Thinking, Years)
"These are facts, these are not imaginary things."
- Iyad Allawi
(Related: Facts)
"Legends are material to be moulded, and not facts to be recorded."
- Hervey Allen
(Related: Facts, Legends)
"The facts of life are very stubborn things."
- Cleveland Amory
(Related: Life, Facts)
"It desirable to add one or two facts bearing on the domestic political aspects of the problem."
- Dillon Anderson
(Related: Facts)
"There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth."
- Maya Angelou
(Related: Truth, Difference, Facts, World)
"I believe that historians and analysts of historical events need the authority of facts supplied by living witnesses to the events, which they make their subject."
- Ibrahim Babangida
(Related: Authority, Events, Facts, Historians, Living)
"The most difficult thing in any negotiation, almost, is making sure that you strip it of the emotion and deal with the facts. And there was a considerable challenge to that here and understandably so."
- Howard Baker
(Related: Challenge, Emotion, Facts, Negotiation)
"When you seek advice, do not withhold any facts from the person whose advice you seek."
- Abu Bakr
(Related: Advice, Facts)
"Let's face facts, this is visual medium, there's a very high premium put on people who are good-looking. But the minute you rely on that you get yourself in trouble. You certainly don't make a career out of that anymore as an actor."
- Alec Baldwin
(Related: People, Actor, Career, Facts, Trouble)
"Don't confuse facts with reality."
- Robert D. Ballard
(Related: Facts, Reality)
"There is other disturbing facts surround the hideous 911 attacks, which my family and I could see from the third floor bathroom window of our homes!"
- Amiri Baraka
(Related: Family, Facts)
"The interpretation of facts in a certain way stimulates other scientists' thoughts."
- Robert Barany
(Related: Thoughts, Facts, Scientists)
"Let me share some facts with you about the law in most of our country. California is in many ways a little different from the rest of the world, and California has better gun laws than many states, although California's need to be improved."
- Michael D. Barnes
(Related: Country, Facts, Law, Laws, Rest, states, World)
"If you get all the facts, your judgment can be right; if you don't get all the facts, it can't be right."
- Bernard Baruch
(Related: Facts, Judgment, Right)
"Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts."
- Bernard Baruch
(Related: Facts, Man, Opinion, Right, Wrong)
"I don't think his life has been in any way disfigured by the film. The film did disclose some difficult facts."
- Martin Bashir
(Related: Life, Facts, Film)
"A lawyer's performance in the courtroom is responsible for about 25 percent of the outcome; the remaining 75 percent depends on the facts."
- Melvin Belli
(Related: Performance, Facts)
"The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions."
- Walter Benjamin
(Related: Life, Power, Facts, Present)
"With time, many of the facts I learned were forgotten but I never lost the excitement of discovery."
- Paul Berg
(Related: Time, Discovery, Excitement, Facts)
"Our job is to bring the dead facts to life."
- William Bernbach
(Related: Life, Facts, Job)
"There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented. The common man, I think, is the great protection against war."
- Ernest Bevin
(Related: War, Facts, Folk, Man, Protection)
"While day by day the overzealous student stores up facts for future use, he who has learned to trust nature finds need for ever fewer external directions. He will discard formula after formula, until he reaches the conclusion: Let nature take its course."
- Larry Bird
(Related: Nature, Trust, Day, Facts, Formula, Future, Will)
"The reporter is the daily prisoner of clocked facts. On all working days, he is expected to do his best in one swift swipe at each story."
- Jim Bishop
(Related: Facts)
"Instead of explaining the sober facts of mechanics and electricity, I want to say a few words about the debt which we owe to youth; and with your permission I shall consider you as representing here not only the academic youth of Sweden nor even of Europe but also of America."
- Felix Bloch
(Related: America, Debt, Electricity, Europe, Facts, Want, Words, Youth)
"The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines."
- Marc Bloch
(Related: Facts)
"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."
- Niels Bohr
(Related: Poetry, Atoms, Facts, Language)
"I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up."
- Erma Bombeck
(Related: Computer, Facts, Mind, Theory, Will)
"I want this book to be facts, to be important, to be history."
- Anatoli Boukreev
(Related: History, Facts, Want)
"In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink."
- Catherine Drinker Bowen
(Related: Biography, Fact, Facts, Fiction, Writing)
"Decisions should be based on facts, objectively considered."
- Marvin Bower
(Related: Decisions, Facts)
"Since 1980, we've used reconciliation 22 times, and out of those times, Republicans used it 16 times. So, earth to my Republican friends, you can have your option but you cannot change these facts. They're in the Congressional Record."
- Barbara Boxer
(Related: Change, Earth, Facts, Friends, Republican, Republicans)
"In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy."
- Andrew Coyle Bradley
(Related: Idea, Drama, Facts, Famous, Theories, Tragedy, Will)
"Mr. Speaker, the Delaware River deepening project is important for my constituents, for our region and for the entire nation. I trust that, when they examine the facts about it, every one of my colleagues will join me in supporting it."
- Robert Brady
(Related: Trust, Facts, Nation, Project, Will)
"Our main agenda is to have ALL guns banned. We must use whatever means possible. It doesn't matter if you have to distort facts or even lie. Our task of creating a socialist America can only succeed when those who would resist us have been totally disarmed."
- Sarah Brady
(Related: Lie, America, Facts, Succeed)
"To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean."
- James H. Breasted
(Related: Civilization, Doubt, Facts, Now, Present, Study, Writer)
"Independence means you decide according to the law and the facts."
- Stephen Breyer
(Related: Facts, Independence, Law)
"Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level."
- Joyce Brothers
(Related: Trust, Facts)
"There I was limited to what happened the same way I am with Riel. It doesn't feel like a great burden to have your story, to some degree, set. I am enjoying figuring out what I think is the most dramatic way of telling this set of historical facts."
- Chester Brown
(Related: Burden, Facts)
"Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves."
- Jerome Bruner
(Related: Facts, Relationships)
"I've always believed that the facts about dancing are more interesting than the myths, and this was a great chance for me to explore how the human body does such incredible things."
- Deborah Bull
(Related: Body, Chance, Dancing, Facts, Myths)
"Science is knowledge arranged and classified according to truth, facts, and the general laws of nature."
- Luther Burbank
(Related: Nature, Science, Truth, Knowledge, Facts, Laws)
"Facts are to the mind what food is to the body."
- Edmund Burke
(Related: Food, Body, Facts, Mind)
"I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts."
- Ken Burns
(Related: Music, Composers, Facts, Research)
"To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another."
- John Burroughs
(Related: Imagination, Facts)
"Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts."
- William S. Burroughs
(Related: Facts, Paranoia)
"The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values."
- William S. Burroughs
(Related: Education, Knowledge, Values, Facts)
"Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble."
- Joseph Campbell
(Related: Religion, Facts, Metaphors, Trouble)
"I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil."
- Thomas Carlyle
(Related: God, Devil, Fact, Facts, Theory)
"What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease."
- Bliss Carman
(Related: Fact, Facts, Investigation)
"I often wish... that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease."
- Bliss Carman
(Related: Fact, Facts, Investigation, Tyranny, World)
"There's a great argument about how many men he actually killed. People would tell stories and then as we all know as stories get told over and over again, they get embellished, facts get changed, elaborated upon, exaggerated."
- Keith Carradine
(Related: Men, People, Argument, Facts)
"The fundamental laws of physics do not describe true facts about reality. Rendered as descriptions of facts, they are false; amended to be true, they lose their explanatory force."
- Nancy Cartwright
(Related: Facts, Force, Laws, Physics, Reality)
"Advocates of unrestricted abortion do not want the public to focus on these undeniable facts of fetal development, but the facts cannot be ignored."
- Robert Casey
(Related: Development, Abortion, Facts, Focus, Public, Want)
"The facts will speak for themselves. Credit them or not, but read!"
- Ralph Chaplin
(Related: Credit, Facts, Will)
"You may have read that I went to M.I.T. In 1982 I filled out a Who's Who survey with joking responses, and they never bothered to check the facts."
- Chevy Chase
(Related: Facts, May)
"The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts."
- Samuel Chase
(Related: Facts, Jury, Law, Right)
"How, possibly, could the police have made the 'mistake' of charging the wrong man with the notorious Red Light Bandit crimes? That also is something that is fully revealed in the Pandora's Box of facts I have prepared."
- Caryl Chessman
(Related: Facts, Light, Man, Police, Wrong)
"I am sorry to upset my colleagues by saying we wasted four years in opposition, but if you do get so badly defeated as a party you do have to face up to some painful facts and you do have to change."
- Kenneth Clarke
(Related: Change, Facts, Opposition, Party, Saying, Years)
"Looking back 25 years later, what I may say is that the facts have been far better than the dreams. In the long course of cell life on this earth it remained, for our age for our generation, to receive the full ownership of our inheritance."
- Albert Claude
(Related: Age, Life, Dreams, Earth, Facts, Inheritance, May, Ownership, Years)
"I am appreciative of the Bush administration's commitment to fair trade by looking at the facts in this case and ruling affirmatively for the implementation of quotas in this specific category."
- Howard Coble
(Related: Commitment, Facts, Trade)
"In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. One motto on the show is, 'Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.'"
- Stephen Colbert
(Related: Truth, Facts, Order)
"Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don't know whether it's a new thing, but it's certainly a current thing, in that it doesn't seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything."
- Stephen Colbert
(Related: Perception, Argument, Country, Facts, Opinion, Word)
"It is intellectually dishonest to look backwards with all the facts and judge the decisions that were made with almost none of the facts, or the facts that existed hidden in the normal cloud of endless speculation of what might happen."
- Norm Coleman
(Related: Decisions, Facts)
"General principles... are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree are to its leaves."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Facts, Principles)
"He has a number of curious facts in illustration of the power of mere goodness to protect against outrage."
- George Combe
(Related: Power, Facts, Goodness)
"We used to speak familiarly of an agent, now do more, who was accustomed to manufacture evidence, and to invent facts in his cases, or at least to alter the aspects of facts to such an extent that they might fairly be viewed as new."
- George Combe
(Related: Facts, Now)
"The AEC scientists were so narrowly focused on arming the United States for nuclear war that they failed to perceive facts - even widely known ones - that were outside their limited field of vision."
- Barry Commoner
(Related: War, Vision, Facts, Scientists, states, United)
"Show me a better man. Name one and I am answered; but do not point, as a disqualification, to the very facts which make this man fit beyond all others."
- Roscoe Conkling
(Related: Facts, Man, Name)
"The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society."
- Charles Horton Cooley
(Related: Society, People, Facts)
"The police had already found the cartridges and the rifles and the bag in the Texas School Depository and within a half an hour, those facts were known."
- John Sherman Cooper
(Related: Facts, Police, School)
"The intelligence investigation under the leadership of Senator Church, which I know has helped cause this investigation by you, points out that the agencies did not disclose certain facts to us and that certain plots were going on."
- John Sherman Cooper
(Related: Intelligence, Leadership, Church, Cause, Facts, Investigation)
"I would like that to be known; these facts are in the summary which I think is a very good one."
- John Sherman Cooper
(Related: Facts)
"My head was always bubbling over with facts and it seems to me this had little to do with my paying close attention in school and more to do with my voracious and omnivorous reading habits."
- Eric Allin Cornell
(Related: Attention, Facts, Habits, Reading, School)
"Optimism doesn't wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time."
- Norman Cousins
(Related: Time, Optimism, Pessimism, Deals, Facts, Waste)
"We ask the great masses of India to be patient a short time longer, while the cause of freedom is being fought out, not because we want to delay, but because the hard facts of war make a complete change impossible at the moment."
- Stafford Cripps
(Related: Change, Time, War, Being, Cause, Delay, Facts, Freedom, Want)
"It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom."
- Quentin Crisp
(Related: Boredom, Effect, Facts, Freedom, Repetition, Result, Tolerance)
"The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them."
- Samuel McChord Crothers
(Related: Facts, Trouble)
"Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life."
- Aleister Crowley
(Related: Life, Faces, Facts)
"Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales."
- Aleister Crowley
(Related: Nature, Morality, People, Facts, Fighting, Manners)
"Entertaining these opinions of the course to be pursued, I beg of gentlemen to look at the question, as I have done, in a calm review of facts and of principles."
- Caleb Cushing
(Related: Facts, Gentlemen, Opinions, Principles, Question)
"My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts."
- Charles Darwin
(Related: Facts, Laws, Machine, Mind)
"I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions."
- Charles Darwin
(Related: Facts, Machine)
"False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness."
- Charles Darwin
(Related: Science, Progress, Facts, Harm, Pleasure)
"Creatures whose mainspring is curiosity enjoy the accumulating of facts far more than the pausing at times to reflect on those facts."
- Clarence Day
(Related: Curiosity, Facts)
"The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions."
- Paul Deman
(Related: Knowledge, Facts)
"There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination."
- Denis Diderot
(Related: Nature, Knowledge, Facts, Observation, Reflection, Result)
"The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter."
- Wilhelm Dilthey
(Related: Experience, Knowledge, Existence, Facts, Limits, Question, World)
"If the president is failing to disclose material facts with regard to legislation being presented to the Congress on a question as important as war and peace, I think it does impair the level of trust that the House and the Senate have for this administration."
- John Dingell
(Related: Trust, War, Peace, Being, Congress, Facts, Legislation, President, Question, Senate)
"To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge."
- Benjamin Disraeli
(Related: Knowledge, Facts)
"The Blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling, and understanding."
- Willie Dixon
(Related: Life, Inspiration, Facts, Feeling, Song, Understanding, Words)
"Scientists often have a naive faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a compelling and true solution."
- Theodosius Dobzhansky
(Related: Faith, Facts, Scientists, Solution)
"Despite recent media reports that have clouded, or even misrepresented, the facts, there is compelling evidence that al-Qaida and Iraq have been linked for more than a decade."
- Elizabeth Dole
(Related: Facts, Iraq, Media)
"In light of these facts Republicans have put forth a variety of proposals to make Social Security remain solvent for future generations. But up to this point, Democrats have chosen to oppose our good faith efforts and insist that indeed there is no problem."
- John Doolittle
(Related: Faith, Democrats, Facts, Future, Generations, Light, Republicans, Security, Variety)
"Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience."
- Carl Clinton Van Doren
(Related: Experience, Imagination, Power, Knowledge, Facts, Learning, Literature, Sound)
"I worked hard at memorizing lists of facts and figures, and carried with me a book of facts."
- Charles Van Doren
(Related: Facts)
"If the facts are contrary to any predictions, then the hypothesis is wrong no matter how appealing."
- David Douglass
(Related: Facts, Wrong)
"Truth in science is always determined from observational facts."
- David Douglass
(Related: Science, Truth, Facts)
"Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them."
- Arthur Conan Doyle
(Related: Facts, Sense)
"Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
- Arthur Conan Doyle
(Related: Time, Knowledge, Facts, Forget, Importance)
"A torn rotator cuff is a cancer for a pitcher and if a pitcher gets a badly torn one, he has to face the facts, it's all over baby."
- Don Drysdale
(Related: Baby, Cancer, Facts)
"Alcohol is necessary for a man so that he can have a good opinion of himself, undisturbed be the facts."
- Finley Peter Dunne
(Related: Alcohol, Facts, Man, Opinion)
"A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case."
- Finley Peter Dunne
(Related: Facts, Man)
"News reports don't change the world. Only facts change it, and those have already happened when we get the news."
- Friedrich Durrenmatt
(Related: Change, Facts, News, World)
"The worst enemy of human hope is not brute facts, but men of brains who will not face them."
- Max Eastman
(Related: Men, Hope, Enemy, Facts, Will)
"Nothing matters but the facts. Without them, the science of criminal investigation is nothing more than a guessing game."
- Blake Edwards
(Related: Science, Facts, Investigation, Nothing)
"But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before."
- Bob Edwards
(Related: Being, Living, Slavery)
"The more facts you tell, the more you sell. An advertisement's chance for success invariably increases as the number of pertinent merchandise facts included in the advertisement increases."
- Charles Edwards
(Related: Success, Chance, Facts)
"The facts are the vice president's company that he was CEO of, that did business with sworn enemies of the United States, paid millions of dollars in fines for providing false financial information, it's under investigation for bribing foreign officials."
- John Edwards
(Related: Business, Financial, Company, Enemies, Facts, Information, Investigation, President, states, United, Vice)
"Facts are God's arguments; we should be careful never to misunderstand or pervert them."
- Tryon Edwards
(Related: God, Arguments, Facts)
"The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Science, Facts)
"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Change, Facts, Theory)
"In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled."
- Paul Eldridge
(Related: Truth, Facts)
"All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords."
- T. S. Eliot
(Related: Character, Facts, Public)
"A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Facts, Man)
"Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures."
- Evan Esar
(Related: Science, Facts)
"Tact and diplomacy are fine in international relations, in politics, perhaps even in business; in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts."
- Hans Eysenck
(Related: Science, Politics, Business, Diplomacy, Facts, Tact)
"Because when we think about the real facts: 44 million Americans without health insurance, millions without jobs, a 50-year high on mortgage foreclosures, an historic high the third year in a row on personal bankruptcies."
- Chaka Fattah
(Related: Health, Americans, Jobs)
"Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other."
- William Faulkner
(Related: Truth, Facts)
"What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity."
- Lion Feuchtwanger
(Related: Development, Facts, Humanity)
"I have always made an effort to render every detail of my reality with the greatest accuracy; but I have never paid attention to whether my presentation of historical facts was an exact one."
- Lion Feuchtwanger
(Related: Accuracy, Attention, Detail, Effort, Facts, Reality)
"Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature."
- Martin H. Fischer
(Related: Science, Facts, Literature)
"Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification."
- Martin Henry Fischer
(Related: Wisdom, Knowledge, Facts, Lies)
"As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use."
- Gustave Flaubert
(Related: Facts, Theories)
"Anyone who says businessmen deal in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections."
- Malcolm Forbes
(Related: Facts, Fiction, Old)
"Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known."
- Richard Ford
(Related: Life, Facts, Mystery)
"The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death."
- E. M. Forster
(Related: Death, Life, Love, Food, Facts, Sleep)
"To some lawyers, all facts are created equal."
- Felix Frankfurter
(Related: Facts, Lawyers)
"I deal in facts."
- Louis Freeh
(Related: Facts)
"Social Security, a critically important, great program which does serve as the cornerstone of support for senior citizens, now faces challenges that threaten its long-term stability and well-being. The facts are there. The facts are crystal clear."
- Bill Frist
(Related: Faces, Facts, Now, Security, Stability, Support)
"I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death."
- Robert Fulghum
(Related: Death, Dreams, Imagination, Love, Experience, History, Knowledge, Hope, Cure, Facts, Grief, Laughter, Myth)
"Get the facts, or the facts will get you. And when you get em, get em right, or they will get you wrong."
- Thomas Fuller
(Related: Facts, Right, Will, Wrong)
"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten."
- Neil Gaiman
(Related: Facts, Shadow, Will)
"Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty."
- Galileo Galilei
(Related: Beauty, Facts, First, Will)
"I have barely time to give you a brief statement of facts as I find them."
- John White Geary
(Related: Time, Facts)
"If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology."
- Clifford Geertz
(Related: Anthropology, Facts)
"Facts from paper are not the same as facts from people. The reliability of the people giving you the facts is as important as the facts themselves."
- Harold S. Geneen
(Related: People, Facts, Giving)
"Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to discover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me."
- Alberto Giacometti
(Related: Facts)
"I will try to cram these paragraphs full of facts and give them a weight and shape no greater than that of a cloud of blue butterflies."
- Brendan Gill
(Related: Butterflies, Facts, Weight, Will)
"Telling a teenager the facts of life is like giving a fish a bath."
- Arnold H. Glasow
(Related: Life, Facts, Fish, Giving)
"The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion."
- Arnold H. Glasow
(Related: Facts, Opinion)
"We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts."
- William Glasser
(Related: Knowledge, Facts, Focus, Schools, Thinking)
"As soon as you sit down to write about something you are pressing your nose deeper into the sewer of facts."
- Theo Van Gogh
(Related: Facts)
"I have fully cooperated with the investigation and before the grand jury, and I'm quite confident at the end of the day that we'll know what facts are in this particular case."
- Alberto Gonzales
(Related: Day, End, Facts, Investigation, Jury)
"This nation's elected leaders owe all Americans the duty of formulating an Iraqi policy based on sound analysis of the actual facts."
- Charlie Gonzalez
(Related: Policy, Americans, Duty, Facts, Leaders, Nation, Sound)
"The facts are always less than what really happened."
- Nadine Gordimer
(Related: Facts)
"Never give up. And never, under any circumstances, face the facts."
- Ruth Gordon
(Related: Circumstances, Facts)
"When you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. When you have the law on your side, argue the law. When you have neither, holler."
- Al Gore
(Related: Facts, Law)
"If we had failed to pursue the facts as far as they led, we would have denied the public any knowledge of an unprecedented scheme of political surveillance and sabotage."
- Katharine Graham
(Related: Knowledge, Facts, Public)
"There is a class, moreover, by whom all these scientific theories, and more are held as ascertained facts, and as the basis of philosophical inferences which strike at the root of theistic beliefs."
- Asa Gray
(Related: Beliefs, Class, Facts, Theories)
"The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment."
- Celia Green
(Related: Facts, Research)
"Proceeding further, to inquire whether the facts related by the Four Evangelists are proved by competent and satisfactory evidence, we are led, first, to consider on which side lies the burden of establishing the credibility of the witnesses."
- Simon Greenleaf
(Related: Burden, Credibility, Facts, First, Lies)
"The importance of the facts testified, and their relations to the affairs of the soul, and the life to come, can make no difference in the principles or the mode of weighing the evidence."
- Simon Greenleaf
(Related: Life, Soul, Difference, Facts, Importance, Principles)
"When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos."
- Edith Hamilton
(Related: Chaos, Facts, Mind)
"Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed."
- Edith Hamilton
(Related: Nature, Facts, Human nature, Theories)
"We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information."
- Friedrich August von Hayek
(Related: Facts, Information, Measure)
"Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?"
- Friedrich August von Hayek
(Related: Economics, Facts, Ignorance, Information, Theory)
"It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world."
- Friedrich August von Hayek
(Related: Causes, Events, Facts, Limits, World)
"Here are the facts we confront. No one is against conservation. No one is against alternative fuel sources."
- J. D. Hayworth
(Related: Conservation, Facts)
"You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the law courts. Passions are facts and not dogmas."
- Alexander Herzen
(Related: Facts, Law, Logic)
"Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable."
- Werner Herzog
(Related: Power, Truth, Bizarre, Facts)
"From a consideration of the immense volume of newly discovered facts in the field of physics, especially atomic physics, in recent years it might well appear to the layman that the main problems were already solved and that only more detailed work was necessary."
- Victor Francis Hess
(Related: Work, Consideration, Facts, Physics, Problems, Years)
"I am not making spiteful assertions now but merely stating the facts-that, for instance, among Hungarian generals there is such a considerable percentage of men of German origin, who of course had, in most cases, to alter their names if they wanted to get anywhere."
- Heinrich Himmler
(Related: Men, Facts, Names, Now)
"All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain."
- Thomas Hobbes
(Related: Horror)
"Facts are counterrevolutionary."
- Eric Hoffer
(Related: Facts)
"Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
(Related: People, Facts, Quick)
"The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
(Related: Education, Facts, Learning)
"I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
(Related: End, Facts, Hate, Man, Worth)
"A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
(Related: Death, Character, Cause, Facts, Judges, Jury)
"The facts are on our side."
- Karen Hughes
(Related: Facts)
"Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Ideas, Facts, Mankind)
"History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections."
- Johan Huizinga
(Related: History, Facts, Sense)
"If all consciousness is subject to essential laws in a manner similar to that in which spatial reality is subject to mathematical laws, then these essential laws will be of most fertile significance in investigating facts of the conscious life of human and brute animals."
- Edmund Husserl
(Related: Life, Animals, Consciousness, Facts, Laws, Reality, Will)
"To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect."
- Robert M. Hutchins
(Related: Facts)
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
- Aldous Huxley
(Related: Facts)
"My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations."
- Thomas Huxley
(Related: Business, Aspirations, Fact, Facts)
"I have always found that if I move with seventy-five percent or more of the facts that I usually never regret it. It's the guys who wait to have everything perfect that drive you crazy."
- Lee Iacocca
(Related: Facts, Regret)
"The aim of education is the knowledge not of facts but of values."
- William Ralph Inge
(Related: Education, Knowledge, Values, Facts)
"We talked about the Internet and Wikipedia and how facts and history are being collectively created online."
- Joichi Ito
(Related: History, Being, Facts, Internet)
"I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains no pertinent facts."
- Shirley Jackson
(Related: Work, Facts, Writing)
"The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour."
- William James
(Related: Power, Nature, Alcohol, Earth, Facts, Human nature, Mankind)
"Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout."
- William James
(Related: Facts, Religious, Temper)
"One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child."
- Randall Jarrell
(Related: Facts, Obvious)
"I began the study of medicine, impelled by a desire for knowledge of facts and of man. The resolution to do disciplined work tied me to both laboratory and clinic for a long time to come."
- Karl Jaspers
(Related: Time, Work, Knowledge, Desire, Facts, Man, Medicine, Resolution, Study)
"In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts."
- Denis Johnson
(Related: Truth, Accuracy, Facts, Language, Prose, Trying)
"You're under pressure when you produce facts. You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations."
- Denis Johnson
(Related: Expectations, Facts, Journalism, Pressure)
"To conclude that women are unfitted to the task of our historic society seems to me the equivalent of closing male eyes to female facts."
- Lyndon B. Johnson
(Related: Society, Women, Eyes, Facts)
"I want to hold a series of meetings all over the country and get the facts before the American people."
- Mary Harris Jones
(Related: People, American, Country, Facts, Meetings, Want)
"I'm duty-bound to follow the law and apply to the law to the facts as I find them."
- Stephanie Tubbs Jones
(Related: Duty, Facts, Law)
"If you ever want to get the facts straight about me or the Batman, please write to the original source, myself, for the truth, instead of second guessing."
- Bob Kane
(Related: Truth, Facts, Want)
"There are many facts showing that Putin's people enriched themselves by using power mechanisms so that's why for them losing power means losing their fortunes."
- Garry Kasparov
(Related: Power, People, Facts, Losing)
"Those who believe in God because their experience of life and the facts of nature prove his existence must have led sheltered lives and closed their hearts to the voice of their brothers' blood."
- Walter Kaufmann
(Related: Experience, Life, Nature, God, Blood, Brothers, Existence, Facts, Voice)
"Whatever hysteria exists is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it."
- Elia Kazan
(Related: Facts, Mystery, Secrecy, Suspicion, Will)
"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
- John F. Kennedy
(Related: Truth, People, Ideas, Values, American, Facts, Falsehood, Nation, Open)
"To state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust."
- John F. Kennedy
(Related: Trust, Despair, Facts, Future, Heir, Obligation, Past, State)
"Facts are, insurance ratings are really dependent on the notion that some people are higher risk than others."
- Patrick J. Kennedy
(Related: People, Facts, Risk)
"To hell with facts! We need stories!"
- Ken Kesey
(Related: Hell)
"Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are."
- Soren Kierkegaard
(Related: Being, Facts)
"Just when we most need to be clearheaded, in order to face the hard facts before us, there is all too frequently a very real inclination to give way to dangerous tendencies merely as an escape from realities."
- William Lyon Mackenzie King
(Related: Facts, Order)
"What I would ask the Democrat Party is to put your plan on the table, because most people agree with the facts, and the facts are that Social Security is running out of money."
- Jack Kingston
(Related: Money, People, Facts, Party, Running, Security)
"We are the recorders and reporters of facts - not the judges of the behaviors we describe."
- Alfred Kinsey
(Related: Facts, Judges)
"My style is where you see the individual and where a personality is communicated through actions, decisions, single objects and facts, where the whole draws together to form a history."
- Martin Kippenberger
(Related: History, Actions, Decisions, Facts, Personality, Style)
"Some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up and touch everything. If you never let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you."
- E. L. Konigsburg
(Related: Facts)
"The Administration should never have walked away from the Kyoto Treaty. Global warming is real and it is here today. The facts aren't the issue. The policy is the issue. I think the Administration's policy on global warming is dead wrong."
- Ted Kulongoski
(Related: Policy, Facts, Global warming, Today, Wrong)
"Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one."
- Imre Lakatos
(Related: Idea, Character, Growth, Facts, Theories)
"No religious position is loyally served by refusing to consider annoying theories which may well turn out to be facts."
- Norman Lamm
(Related: Facts, May, Religious, Theories)
"May this plain statement of facts prevail on the friends of the rising generation to interpose for their welfare; that the education of children may no longer be to parent and master a lottery, in which the prizes bear no proportion to the enormous number of blanks."
- Joseph Lancaster
(Related: Education, Children, Facts, Friends, May, Prizes, Welfare)
"Internationalism is a community theory of society which is founded on economic, spiritual, and biological facts. It maintains that respect for a healthy development of human society and of world civilization requires that mankind be organized internationally."
- Christian Lous Lange
(Related: Society, Civilization, Development, Community, Facts, Mankind, Respect, Spiritual, Theory, World)
"In order to dream, you need to have a springboard which is the facts... It gives it that touch of reality, and I think that's quite important... truth with fiction."
- Janet Leigh
(Related: Truth, Dream, Facts, Fiction, Order, Reality)
"Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen - the Internet - has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology."
- Lawrence Lessig
(Related: Fact, Facts, Ideology, Internet, Property, Space)
"One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination."
- Sam Levenson
(Related: Imagination, Being, Facts)
"I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts."
- Abraham Lincoln
(Related: Truth, People, Crisis, Facts)
"My heart has been heavy and I have deliberated within my own conscience, knowing that my decision should not come out of my initial emotion of anger toward the President for such reckless behavior, but should be based on the facts."
- Blanche Lincoln
(Related: Anger, Heart, Decision, Behavior, Conscience, Emotion, Facts, President)
"Washington's entire honesty of mind and his fearless look into the face of all facts are qualities which can never go out of fashion and which we should all do well to imitate."
- Henry Cabot Lodge
(Related: Honesty, Facts, Fashion, Mind, Washington)
"The hypothesis of surviving intelligence and personality - not only surviving but anxious and able with difficulty to communicate - is the simplest and most straightforward and the only one that fits all the facts."
- Oliver Joseph Lodge
(Related: Intelligence, Difficulty, Facts, Personality)
"The facts of life are that a child who has seen war cannot be compared with a child who doesn't know what war is except from television."
- Sophia Loren
(Related: Life, War, Facts, Television)
"So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean."
- Frank Luntz
(Related: Business, America, Corporate, Facts, Results)
"Knowledge is power only if man knows what facts not to bother with."
- Robert Lynd
(Related: Power, Knowledge, Facts, Man)
"Darwin investigated the numerous facts obtained by naturalists in living nature and analysed them through the prism of practical experience."
- Trofim Lysenko
(Related: Experience, Nature, Facts, Living)
"Attitudes are more important than facts."
- George MacDonald
(Related: Facts)
"You check to see the facts are correct where business is concerned but if I read everything that was written about me, I'd end up feeling totally insecure about myself."
- Elle Macpherson
(Related: Business, End, Facts, Feeling)
"Once we thought, journalists and readers alike, that if we put together enough "facts" and gave them a fast stir, we would come up with something that, at least by the standards of short-order cooks, could be called the truth."
- Melvin Maddocks
(Related: Truth, Thought)
"Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists."
- Norman Mailer
(Related: Facts)
"Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts."
- Paul de Man
(Related: Facts, Metaphors)
"For us, Marxism is always open because there are always new xperiences, there are always new facts, including facts about the past, which have to be incorporated in the corpus of scientific socialism."
- Ernest Mandel
(Related: Facts, Marxism, Open, Past, Socialism)
"My music will go on forever. Maybe it's a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever."
- Bob Marley
(Related: Music, Facts, Fool, Will)
"The facts are plain: Religious leaders who preside over marriage ceremonies must and will be guided by what they believe. If they do not wish to celebrate marriages for same-sex couples, that is their right. The Supreme Court says so. And the Charter says so."
- Paul Martin
(Related: Marriage, Court, Facts, Leaders, Religious, Right, Will)
"Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves; of all matters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact."
- Henry Mayhew
(Related: Ideas, Fact, Facts)
"A fact must be assimilated with, or discriminated fromm, some other fact or facts, in order to be raised to the dignity of a truth, and made to convey the least knowledge to the mind."
- Henry Mayhew
(Related: Truth, Knowledge, Dignity, Fact, Facts, Mind, Order)
"We may either proceed from principles to facts, or recede from facts to principles."
- Henry Mayhew
(Related: Facts, May, Principles)
"Any clod can have the facts; having opinions is an art."
- Charles McCabe
(Related: Art, Facts, Opinions)
"In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality."
- Mary McCarthy
(Related: Equality, Science, Facts)
"I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts."
- John McGahern
(Related: Truth, Facts, Fiction)
"The secret to discovery is to never believe existing facts."
- Bryant H. McGill
(Related: Discovery, Facts)
"When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion."
- Phyllis McGinley
(Related: Argument, Conviction, Facts, Fool, May, Mind, Opinion, Prejudice, Providence, Reason)
"The media tends to report rumors, speculations, and projections as facts... How does the media do this? By quoting some "expert"... you can always find some expert who will say something hopelessly hopeless about anything."
- Peter McWilliams
(Related: Facts, Media, Rumors, Will)
"One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways."
- Karl A. Menninger
(Related: Facts)
"We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests."
- Henry Miller
(Related: Facts, Newspapers, Talk, Theories)
"Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that."
- Rick Moody
(Related: Life, Facts, Fiction)
"Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities - that's training or instruction - but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed."
- Thomas Moore
(Related: Education, Facts, Information, Learning, Training)
"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."
- Daniel Patrick Moynihan
(Related: Facts, Opinion)
"All I'm going to tell you is investigations, whether it be this and others, where you have partial facts, analysts, agents are always trying to interpret what those facts mean, extrapolate from them what they mean."
- Robert Mueller
(Related: Facts, Trying)
"As I said before, there are often disagreements as to what a particular set of facts mean. That is not at all unusual, and one shouldn't read into it more than is there."
- Robert Mueller
(Related: Disagreements, Facts)
"I would say in just about every investigation we have, there will be differences of opinion, where you have partial facts, as to what those facts mean."
- Robert Mueller
(Related: Facts, Investigation, Opinion, Will)
"He who feels compelled to consider the consequences of these facts cannot but realize that the specific sensibility of nerves for certain impressions is not enough, since all nerves are sensitive to the same cause but react to the same cause in different ways."
- Johannes P. Muller
(Related: Cause, Consequences, Facts, Nerves, Sensibility)
"To do so, we are creating a Fairness for Switzerland Committee that will not only disseminate some of the facts, but also protect a relationship that is important to all of us in North America."
- Peter Munk
(Related: America, Committee, Facts, Will)
"Our political leaders must be honest and forthcoming with data that will allow citizens to use facts and figures to judge for themselves what state Social Security is in."
- Grace Napolitano
(Related: Facts, Leaders, Political leaders, Security, State, Will)
"Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes."
- Jawaharlal Nehru
(Related: Facts, Will)
"The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case."
- Howard Nemerov
(Related: Facts, Nothing)
"The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened."
- Howard Nemerov
(Related: Bible, Facts, Freedom)
"Let us take things as we find them: let us not attempt to distort them into what they are not... We cannot make facts. All our wishing cannot change them. We must use them."
- John Henry Newman
(Related: Change, Facts, Wishing)
"There are no facts, only interpretations."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
(Related: Facts)
"There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
(Related: Facts)
"Howard Dean is not the first politician to distort facts in his own interests. But many activists in the party he now leads are puzzled over what he thinks he is accomplishing politically. Is it good politics to contend that Iraq was better off under Saddam Hussein than even a flawed Islamic republic?"
- Robert Novak
(Related: Politics, Facts, First, Iraq, Now, Party)
"When you decide to do this kind of music then you just accept the facts."
- Gary Numan
(Related: Music, Facts)
"Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared."
- Barack Obama
(Related: Politics, Science, Time, Winning, Argument, Day, Facts, Now, Reason, Right)
"Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country's scared."
- Barack Obama
(Related: Politics, Science, Time, Winning, Argument, Country, Day, Facts, Now, Reason, Right)
"All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome."
- George Orwell
(Related: People, Facts, Future, Obvious, Past, Thinking, Wishes, Years)
"But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts."
- Richard Owen
(Related: History, Facts)
"Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error."
- Robert Owen
(Related: Religion, Error, Facts, Mankind)
"Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education."
- Chuck Palahniuk
(Related: Education, Facts)
"The safest words are always those which bring us most directly to facts."
- Charles Henry Parkhurst
(Related: Facts, Words)
"The importance of certain problems concerning the facts will be inherent in the structure of the system."
- Talcott Parsons
(Related: Facts, Importance, Problems, Will)
"In so far as such a theory is empirically correct it will also tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set of circumstances."
- Talcott Parsons
(Related: Circumstances, Facts, Theory, Will)
"Empirical interest will be in the facts so far as they are relevant to the solution of these problems."
- Talcott Parsons
(Related: Facts, Interest, Problems, Solution, Will)
"If observed facts of undoubted accuracy will not fit any of the alternatives it leaves open, the system itself is in need of reconstruction."
- Talcott Parsons
(Related: Accuracy, Facts, Open, Will)
"A theoretical system does not merely state facts which have been observed and that logically deducible relations to other facts which have also been observed."
- Talcott Parsons
(Related: Facts, State)
"The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That's the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!"
- George S. Patton
(Related: Time, Fear, Decision, Battle, Facts)
"Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly."
- Linus Pauling
(Related: Facts, Scientists)
"Our experiments not only proved the existence of a nervous apparatus in the above-mentioned glands, but also disclosed some facts clearly showing the participation of these nerves in normal activity."
- Ivan Pavlov
(Related: Existence, Facts, Nerves, Participation)
"Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise."
- Ivan Pavlov
(Related: Science, Facts, Man, May, Will)
"Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin."
- Ivan Pavlov
(Related: Facts, Mystery)
"There seem to me to be very few facts, at least ascertainable facts, in politics."
- Robert Peel
(Related: Politics, Facts)
"It will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system."
- Charles Sanders Peirce
(Related: Belief, Facts, Harmony, Man, Will)
"Our best teachers do more than impart facts and figures - they inspire and encourage students and instill a true desire to learn. That's a fine art in itself."
- Sonny Perdue
(Related: Art, Desire, Facts, Students, Teachers)
"With acknowledgement of residues, we can be more easily prepared to grant the unit of science, the overlapping of disciplines, and the total coherence of all facts."
- Kenneth L. Pike
(Related: Science, Facts)
"So I see that Christianity in believing in a Creator pulls together more facts, data, inner experience and ability than any mechanistic view could hold for me."
- Kenneth L. Pike
(Related: Experience, Christianity, Ability, Facts)
"So I think it's important to communicate with the people in terms of what the real facts are on these proposals and try to have a discussion and a dialogue that gives people information. I think they're hungry for that rather than just political rhetoric."
- John Podesta
(Related: People, Facts, Information, Rhetoric)
"Science is built up of 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
(Related: Science, Facts)
"Science is facts."
- Henri Poincare
(Related: Science, Facts)
"The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge of a physical law."
- Henri Poincare
(Related: Knowledge, Being, Facts, Law, Leading)
"Just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts."
- Henri Poincare
(Related: Science, Facts, Houses)
"Facts do not speak."
- Henri Poincare
(Related: Facts)
"Scientia is knowledge. It is only in the popular mind that it is equated with facts."
- John Charles Polanyi
(Related: Knowledge, Facts, Mind, Popular)
"My reading is extremely eclectic. Lately I've been teaching myself computer graphics, so I'm reading a lot about that. I read books of trivia, of facts."
- Jack Prelutsky
(Related: Books, Computer, Facts, Reading, Teaching)
"We need to ask our policy makers and those we elect to office who are supposed to make decisions to give us the evidence of the facts that are behind the decisions that we make. We should be skeptical."
- Dixie Lee Ray
(Related: Policy, Decisions, Facts, Office)
"Facts are stubborn things."
- Ronald Reagan
(Related: Facts)
"I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever... and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed. Without knowing how to do it, I began to record some facts around me, and the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded."
- Frederic Remington
(Related: Facts, Land)
"It is kind of tedious after a while, to parse politicians doing the same thing over and over again. The facts change from week to week, but the sort of masquerade doesn't."
- Frank Rich
(Related: Change, Facts, Politicians)
"As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable."
- Abraham Robinson
(Related: Idea, Facts, Mathematicians, May, Minority)
"The facts are always friendly, every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true."
- Carl Rogers
(Related: Facts)
"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."
- Will Rogers
(Related: Government, Facts, Jokes)
"People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe."
- Andy Rooney
(Related: Truth, People, Facts, Will)
"Claims of right and insistence upon obligations may depend upon treaty stipulations, or upon the rules of international law, or upon the sense of natural justice applied to the circumstances of a particular case, or upon disputed facts."
- Elihu Root
(Related: Circumstances, Facts, Justice, Law, May, Right, Rules, Sense)
"I know that some endeavor to throw the mantle of romance over the subject and treat woman like some ideal existence, not liable to the ills of life. Let those deal in fancy who have nothing better to deal in; we have to do with sober, sad realities, with stubborn facts."
- Ernestine Rose
(Related: Life, Romance, Existence, Facts, Fancy, Nothing, Woman)
"I might show facts as plain as day: but, since your eyes are blind, you'd say, 'Where? What?' and turn away."
- Christina G. Rossetti
(Related: Blind, Eyes, Facts)
"I might show facts as plain as day: but, since your eyes are blind, you'd say, "Where? What?" and turn away."
- Christina Rossetti
(Related: Blind, Eyes, Facts)
"The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts - we have learned only recently how close we were to war - but I knew enough to make me tremble."
- Joseph Rotblat
(Related: Life, War, Crisis, Facts, October)
"Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts."
- Philip Roth
(Related: Imagination, Experience, Facts, Memories, Past)
"The lonely wanderer, who watches by the seashore the waves that roll between him and his home, talks of cruel facts, material barriers that, just because they are material, and not ideal, shall be the irresistible foes of his longing heart."
- Josiah Royce
(Related: Home, Heart, Facts, Lonely, Longing)
"Don't divide the world into "them" and "us." Avoid infatuation with or resentment of the press, the Congress, rivals, or opponents. Accept them as facts. They have their jobs and you have yours."
- Donald Rumsfeld
(Related: Congress, Facts, Infatuation, Jobs, Opponents, Press, Resentment, World)
"Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts."
- Salman Rushdie
(Related: Facts, Legends, Reality)
"The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions."
- John Ruskin
(Related: Science, Work, Facts)
"The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts."
- Bertrand Russell
(Related: Knowledge, Emotions, Facts)
"Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires."
- Bertrand Russell
(Related: Evil, Facts, Forget, World)
"When I was there, something clicked in my head; I found myself interviewing people, searching out facts and figures. Later on I became much more self-conscious of what I was doing."
- Joe Sacco
(Related: People, Facts, Self)
"One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name."
- George Saintsbury
(Related: History, Absence, Facts, Fiction, Literary, Literature, Name, Prose)
"Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts."
- Margaret Sanger
(Related: Business, Facts)
"I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads."
- George Santayana
(Related: Ideas, Facts)
"Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts."
- George Santayana
(Related: Facts, Ignorance, Theory)
"She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away."
- Dorothy L. Sayers
(Related: Cows, Facts)
"Let me dispel a few rumors so they don't fester into facts."
- Tom Schulman
(Related: Facts, Rumors)
"Every woman needs to know the facts. And the fact is, when it comes to breast cancer, every woman is at risk."
- Debbie Wasserman Schultz
(Related: Cancer, Fact, Facts, Needs, Risk, Woman)
"I am not politically correct. I am all about the facts, I am all about the truth and I am all about Godly pursuits and what this country was built on, and I am not apologetic about it."
- Luke Scott
(Related: Truth, Country, Facts)
"Your desires and true beliefs have a way of playing blind man's bluff. You must corner the inner facts."
- David Seabury
(Related: Beliefs, Blind, Facts, Man)
"We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions."
- John Searle
(Related: Machines, Metaphor, Nothing)
"But that the reasoning from these facts, the drawing from them correct conclusions, is a matter of great difficulty, may be inferred from the imperfect state in which the Science is now found after it has been so long and so intensely studied."
- Nassau William Senior
(Related: Science, Difficulty, Facts, May, Now, State)
"I have learned that the state of Israel cannot be ruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism. These are historical facts that cannot be altered."
- Moshe Sharett
(Related: Deceit, Facts, Israel, State)
"He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts."
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
(Related: Imagination, Facts, Memory)
"I make up my opinions from facts and reasoning, and not to suit any body but myself. If people don't like my opinions, it makes little difference as I don't solicit their opinions or votes."
- William Tecumseh Sherman
(Related: People, Body, Difference, Facts, Opinions)
"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are."
- William Tecumseh Sherman
(Related: Truth, Facts, Hate, Rumors)
"The facts of a person's life will, like murder, come out."
- Norman Sherry
(Related: Life, Facts, Murder, Will)
"I criticize a lot of players and coaches. But I back it up with facts. A lot of times guys get mad at me because someone told them what I said. I say, 'You're wrong: Go check the tape.'"
- Phil Simms
(Related: Coaches, Facts)
"Facts can be turned into art if one is artful enough."
- Paul Simon
(Related: Art, Facts)
"The quarrel of the sociologists with the historians is that the latter have learned so much about how to do it that they have forgotten what to do. They have become so skilled in finding facts that they have no use for the truths that would make the facts worth finding."
- Albion W. Small
(Related: Facts, Historians, Quarrel, Worth)
"We give you the facts. I told you information is power - knowledge is power. We can't be in an ideological battle to redeem the soul of this country if we don't have the facts."
- Tavis Smiley
(Related: Power, Soul, Knowledge, Battle, Country, Facts, Information)
"This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts."
- Adam Smith
(Related: Imagination, Facts)
"The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation."
- Adam Smith
(Related: Detail, Facts, Observation, Opinion, Theory)
"But I love honesty, and, therefore; do I make great account of facts."
- Gerrit Smith
(Related: Love, Honesty, Facts)
"Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them."
- Huston Smith
(Related: Knowledge, Facts, Libraries)
"But if it not be true, the myth itself requires to be explained, and every principle of philosophy and common sense demand that the explanation be sought, not in arbitrary allegorical categories, but in the actual facts of ritual or religious custom to which the myth attaches."
- William Robertson Smith
(Related: Common sense, Custom, Facts, Myth, Philosophy, Religious, Ritual)
"Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see."
- Sonia Sotomayor
(Related: Facts, Judges)
"We apply law to facts. We don't apply feelings to facts."
- Sonia Sotomayor
(Related: Feelings, Facts, Law)
"Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities."
- Thomas Sowell
(Related: Facts, Theories, Visions)
"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
(Related: Vision, Attention, Facts, Mistakes, Will)
"Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division; and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts."
- Joseph Stalin
(Related: Facts, Mankind, Poor, Property)
"At the head of these new discoveries and insights comes the establishment of the facts that electricity is composed of discrete particles of equal size, or quanta, and that light is an electromagnetic wave motion."
- Johannes Stark
(Related: Electricity, Facts, Light)
"Whether the story reflects the facts is obviously a different matter."
- Kenneth Starr
(Related: Facts)
"The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent."
- Neal Stephenson
(Related: People, Difference, Facts, Nothing)
"You find that all men are successes or failures. Success is the stamp of truth. I will say all men who fail to place their feet on the dome of facts do so by not sieving all truth and throwing the faulty to one side."
- Andrew Taylor Still
(Related: Men, Success, Truth, Facts, Feet, Will)
"The purpose of sealing the records was not to conceal them or to conceal the facts from the American people."
- Louis Stokes
(Related: People, Purpose, American, Facts)
"You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed."
- Oliver Stone
(Related: Facts, Historians, Judgment, Order, Will)
"From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts."
- Tom Stoppard
(Related: Truth, Certainty, Facts, Principles)
"And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life."
- Mark Strand
(Related: Life, Facts, Poems)
"The supernatural birth of Christ, his miracles, his resurrection and ascension, remain eternal truths, whatever doubts may be cast on their reality as historical facts."
- David Friedrich Strauss
(Related: Christ, Facts, May, Miracles, Reality, Supernatural)
"Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words."
- Theodore Sturgeon
(Related: Courage, Facts, Words, Writing)
"Facts are many, but the truth is one."
- Rabindranath Tagore
(Related: Truth, Facts)
"Since the masses are always eager to believe something, for their benefit nothing is so easy to arrange as facts."
- Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
(Related: Facts, Nothing)
"I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information."
- Studs Terkel
(Related: Intelligence, People, American, Books, Decency, Deep, Facts, Information)
"Never face facts; if you do you'll never get up in the morning."
- Marlo Thomas
(Related: Facts)
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Life, Facts)
"The un-conscious distortion of the facts is almost harmless compared to the unconscious neglect of an animal's mental life until it verges on the unusual and marvelous."
- Edward Thorndike
(Related: Life, Facts, Neglect, Unconscious)
"There's no such thing as 'facts of life'. Only standing theories that haven't been disproved as of yet."
- Simon Travaglia
(Related: Life, Theories)
"You can never get all the facts from just one newspaper, and unless you have all the facts, you cannot make proper judgements about what is going on."
- Harry S. Truman
(Related: Facts)
"Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Facts, Statistics)
"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Facts, First)
"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Class, Congress, Facts)
"Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art."
- John Updike
(Related: Art, Change, People, Facts)
"That's always an interesting concept when you try to make your dream into a reality and you come up against the facts of exactly what it is you're attempting to do."
- Karl Urban
(Related: Dream, Facts, Reality)
"What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions."
- Gore Vidal
(Related: Facts, Opinions, Question)
"Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?"
- Alfred de Vigny
(Related: Evil, Example, Facts, Memory)
"I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in."
- Alfred de Vigny
(Related: Experience, Events, Facts, First, Longing, Man, Sight)
"Neither facts nor pictures seem to sink into our centers of feeling any more."
- Robert Welch
(Related: Facts, Feeling)
"The mainstream media has its own agenda. They do not want to print the facts. They have an agenda, they have a slant, they have a bias. It is outrageous to me."
- Curt Weldon
(Related: Facts, Media, Want)
"A judgment pronounced in accordance with the facts can therefore assign to it an historical place only within that movement of reformation which was brought to a victorious issue by King Josiah."
- Julius Wellhausen
(Related: Facts, Judgment)
"I am more fond of achieving than striving. My theories must prove to be facts or be discarded as worthless. My efforts must soon be crowned with success, or discontinued."
- Carolyn Wells
(Related: Success, Facts, Theories)
"We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions."
- Jessamyn West
(Related: Change, Facts, Want)
"The system becomes more coherent as it is further extended. The elements which we require for explaining a new class of facts are already contained in our system. In false theories, the contrary is the case."
- William Whewell
(Related: Class, Facts, Theories)
"Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts."
- E. B. White
(Related: Time, Facts, Opinions, Prejudice)
"I'm just one of the kids, and all because the students at Hamilton Heights High School listened to the facts, educated their parents and themselves, and believed in me."
- Ryan White
(Related: Facts, Kids, Parents, School, Students)
"Listening to medical facts was not enough. People wanted one hundred percent guarantees."
- Ryan White
(Related: Medical, People, Facts, Listening)
"The facts fairly and honestly presented; truth will take care of itself."
- William Allen White
(Related: Truth, Care, Facts, Will)
"Civil libertarians have raised concerns that some of the Patriot Act's provisions infringe on Constitutional rights. Those concerns are not supported by the facts."
- Roger Wicker
(Related: Act, Facts, Rights)
"Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away."
- Oscar Wilde
(Related: Death, Facts, Vulgarity)
"Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts."
- Garry Winogrand
(Related: Change, Facts, Photography)
"The world is the totality of facts, not of things."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Related: Facts, World)
"Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul."
- Victoria Woodhull
(Related: Dreams, Society, Wife, Soul, Corruption, Facts, Hypocrisy, Visions, Wail)
"Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders."
- Virginia Woolf
(Related: Fact, Facts)
"All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible experience, through evidence toward which the intellect is merely passive, and over which the individual will and character have no control."
- Chauncey Wright
(Related: Experience, Character, Control, Facts, Intellect, Senses, Will)
"Surely it is time to examine into the meaning of words and the nature of things, and to arrive at simple facts, not received upon the dictum of learned authorities, but upon attentive personal observation of what is passing around us."
- Francis Wright
(Related: Nature, Time, Facts, Meaning, Observation, Words)
"Instead of establishing facts, we have to overthrow errors; instead of ascertaining what is, we have to chase from our imaginations what is not."
- Francis Wright
(Related: Errors, Facts)
"We have seen that no religion stands on the basis of things known; none bounds its horizon within the field of human observation; and, therefore, as it can never present us with indisputable facts, so must it ever be at once a source of error and contention."
- Francis Wright
(Related: Religion, Contention, Error, Facts, Observation, Present)
"The truth is more important than the facts."
- Frank Lloyd Wright
(Related: Truth, Facts)
"Physiology and psychology cover, between them, the field of vital phenomena; they deal with the facts of life at large, and in particular with the facts of human life."
- Wilhelm Wundt
(Related: Life, Facts, Psychology)
"The effectiveness of our memory banks is determined not by the total number of facts we take in, but the number we wish to reject."
- Jon Wynne-Tyson
(Related: Banks, Facts, Memory)
"Seek truth from facts."
- Deng Xiaoping
(Related: Truth, Facts)
"Pessimism only describes an attitude, and not facts, and hence is entirely subjective."
- Francis Parker Yockey
(Related: Attitude, Pessimism, Facts)
"To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them."
- Francis Parker Yockey
(Related: Facts, Illness, Talk)
"As a world view, Darwinism cannot of course be refuted, since Faith is, always has been, and always will be, stronger than facts."
- Francis Parker Yockey
(Related: Faith, Facts, Will, World)