Facts - Quotes
Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.
The more civilized we become, the more relatively ignorant must each individual be of the facts on which the working of his civilization depends.
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts.
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don`t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything - new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It`s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science.
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.
Thinking must never submit itself, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, if not to facts themselves, because, for it, to submit would be to cease to be.
I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.