Facts Quotes

I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side -- I've noticed those with the most opinions often have the fewest facts.

Bethania McKenstry

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 afraid of its people.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

The scientific method of examining facts is not peculiar to one class of phenomena and to one class of workers; it is applicable to social as well as to physical problems, and we must carefully guard ourselves against supposing that the scientific frame of mind is a peculiarity of the professional scientist.

Karl Pearson

I sometimes react to making a mistake as if I have betrayed myself. My fear of making a mistake seems to be based on the hidden assumption that I am potentially perfect and that if I can just be very careful I will not fall from heaven. But a 'mistake' is a declaration of the way I am, a jolt to the way I intend, a reminder I am not dealing with the facts. When I have listened to my mistakes I have grown.

Hugh Prather

What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.

E. H. Carr

In the field one has to face a chaos of facts, some of which are so small that they seem insignificant; others loom so large that they are hard to encompass with one synthetic glance. But in this crude form they are not scientific facts at all; they are absolutely elusive, and can be fixed only by interpretation, by seeing them sub specie aeternitatis, by grasping what is essential in them and fixing this. Only laws and gerneralizations are scientific facts, and field work consists only and exclusively in the interpretation of the chaotic social reality, in subordinating it to general rules.

Bronislaw Malinowski

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

Sir James George Frazer

In the fevered state of our country, no good can ever result from any attempt to set one of these fiery zealots to rights, either in fact or principle. They are determined as to the facts they will believe, and the opinions on which they will act. Get by them, therefore, as you would by an angry bull; it is not for a man of sense to dispute the road with such an animal.

Jefferson, Thomas

A sure way to stop a red-hot argument is to lay a few cold facts on it.

Unknown

An ounce of facts is worth a ton of arguments.

Unknown

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of facts.

Henry Brooks Adams

"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." "The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World." "This curious world we inhabitÖis more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used."

Henry David Thoreau

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

A hero is someone who rebels or seems to rebel against the facts of existence and seems to conquer them. Obviously that can only work at moments. It can't be a lasting thing. That's not saying that people shouldn't keep trying to rebel against the facts of existence. Someday, who knows, we might conquer death, disease and war.

Jim Morrison

There are many methods for predicting the future. For example, you can read horoscopes, tea leaves, tarot cards, or crystal balls. Collectively, these methods are known as "nutty methods." Or you can put well-researched facts into sophisticated computer models, more commonly referred to as "a complete waste of time.

Scott Adams

Facts are to the mind what food is to the body

Edmund Burke

Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.

E. B. White

Every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions. But no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.

Bernard M. Baruch

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

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

Never give up. And never, under any circumstances, face the facts.

Ruth Gordon

What has religion to do with facts? Nothing

Robert Green Ingersoll

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

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