quotations about facts
The most palpable facts, are exactly the contrary to what we should expect.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
Both forms of consciousness, the one that bows before the facts and the other that mistakes itself for an overlord or creator of facts, are like the shattered halves of the truth that was not fulfilled in the world and the failure of which also affects thought. The truth cannot be patched together from its pieces.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
A Scandal in Bohemia
Miscellaneous facts are like shy and strange visitors at the opening of a ball; soon the music of thought and reason is heard--the disorderly assemblage changes, as if by magic, into little systems that spin around in the mazy whirlings of symmetry, beauty and grace.
J. MAHONEY
"Cramming", The Colorado School Journal, 1892
People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.
SHELBY FOOTE
"Shelby Foote Profile", Academy of Achievement
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
The fatal futility of Fact.
JAMES JOYCE
Prefaces
The first job of the historian and of the journalist is to find facts. Not the only job, perhaps not the most important, but the first. Facts are the cobblestones from which we build roads of analysis, mosaic tiles that we fit together to compose pictures of past and present. There will be disagreement about where the road leads and what reality or truth is revealed by the mosaic picture. The facts themselves must be checked against all the available evidence. But some are round and hard--and the most powerful leaders in the world can trip over them. So can writers, dissidents and saints.
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
preface, Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name
You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
attributed, How Writers Write
Fiction is fact distilled into truth.
EDWARD ALBEE
New York Times, September 18, 1966
Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.
G.K. CHESTERTON
"On the Classics,", Selected Essays
Assumptions are dangerous things. I like facts a lot better.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Winner
Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Sense of Beauty
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts ... they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill.
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
"Huntsman, what quarry?"
I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears opposed to a long train of deductions it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
A Study in Scarlet
If you believe only in facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Lord of Shadows
Scientists have discovered a powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life, a sobering new study reports. The research, conducted by the University of Minnesota, identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge.
ANDY BOROWITZ
"Scientists: Earth Endangered by New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humans", The New Yorker, May 12, 2015
Facts sometimes don't spread as far as they should. Therein lies the curious situation of hidden knowledge.
SAMUEL ARBESMAN
The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
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