quotations about 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
"A Sketch"
Strong understanding ever keeps very close of facts, and leaves not the lead of one except under pilotage of another and to seek for more, that it may put many facts together till their relation one to another makes a circumference of knowledge.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
Facts may be colored by the personalities of the people who present them.
REGINALD ROSE
Twelve Angry Men
There are numerous layers to truth, and the simple and superficial statement of facts cannot satisfy the writer.
GAO XINGJIAN
"Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth", Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium
As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Tallulah", Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection
Facts are how we organize and interpret our surroundings. No one learns something new and then holds it entirely independent of what they already know. We incorporate it into the little edifice of personal knowledge that we have been creating in our minds our entire lives. In fact, we even have a phrase for the state of affairs that occurs when we fail to do this: cognitive dissonance.
SAMUEL ARBESMAN
The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
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
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
The more power a person has, the more his or her opinions can be pawned off as facts.
LEE THAYER
How Executives Fail
Facts have a cruel way of substituting themselves for fancies. There is nothing more remorseless, just as there is nothing more helpful, than truth.
WILLIAM C. REDFIELD
address at Case School, Cleveland, Ohio, May 27, 1915
Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
THOMAS SOWELL
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
The fatal futility of Fact.
JAMES JOYCE
Prefaces
Sometimes fact-checking can feel unnatural because it goes against the way the brain is hardwired. Our brains are wired to scan for the threats in our environment and all the problems we need to fix. In psychology this is called the negativity bias. But in most cases this disposition doesn't serve us well. Instead, training the brain to look for facts that fuel a hopeful and optimistic picture of reality can help motivate us. Again, I am not talking about ignoring reality. I'm talking about moving our focus from paralyzing facts to activating ones to create an optimistic, empowered mindset.
MICHELLE GIELAN
Broadcasting Happiness: The Science of Igniting and Sustaining Positive Change
Facts are lonely things.
DON DELILLO
Libra
Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.
CHARLES DICKENS
Hard Times
I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
The Story of the Malakand Field Force
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
Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
HENRI POINCARE
Science and Hypothesis