“Circumstantial evidence, Markham, is the utt‘rest tommyrot imag‘nable. Its theory is not unlike that of our present-day democracy. The democratic theory is that if you accumulate enough ignorance at the polls, you produce intelligence; and the theory of circumst‘ntial evidence is that if you accumulate a sufficient number of weak links, you produce a strong chain.”

— S. S. Van Dine , book The Benson Murder Case

Source: The Benson Murder Case (1926), Ch. 22

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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S. S. Van Dine 12

American journalist 1888–1939

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

continuity (38) “Not For Sale But Can Be Had On Application”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“You can ask the question about these ancient topics, such as perfect numbers and amicable numbers… and ask, are these good problems… I'd like to give a small amount of evidence… that they are… [S]tudying them helped us develop all of elementary number theory and from elementary number theory we developed the rest of number theory, and also you can argue that from elementary number theory came algebra..”

Carl Pomerance (1944) American mathematician

"Paul Erdős and the Rise of Statistical Thinking in Elementary Number Theory" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cU0g9dI1S8&t=9m40s (July, 2013) Erdős Centennial Conference, Budapest.

“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

November 11, 1854
Referring to an 1849 dairyman's strike, during which there was suspicion of milk being watered down
Journals (1838-1859)
Variant: Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

“A theory, is a body of knowledge, that is supportive of, and explanative of facts. Scientific laws are included within a theory, facts are included within a theory, that's why you have the theory of evolution, the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity. There is no concept in creationism, which meets any of the qualifications of a scientific theory, none. You have no facts, you have no laws, you have no evidence, you have no explanative power. All you have, is whatever science can't explain, you pretend you can.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Reason Rally Ra Rant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isrST6wOUJA (March 28, 2012)

“There can be no question that Darwin had nothing like sufficient evidence to establish his theory of evolution.. . . His general theory, that all life on earth had originated and evolved by a gradual successive accumulation of fortuitous mutations, is still, as it was in Darwin’s time, a highly speculative hypothesis entirely without direct factual support and very far from that self-evident axiom some of its more aggressive advocates would have us believe.. . . One might have expected that a theory of such cardinal importance, a theory that literally changed the world, would have been something more than metaphysics, something more than a myth.”

Michael Denton book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

Source: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986), p. 69, 77, 358

“Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

to Edwin L. James of the New York Times (1928)
1920s

“Public administration is a process or a theory, not merely an accumulation of detailed facts. It is Verwaltungslehre.”

Marshall E. Dimock (1903–1991) American writer

The object of administrative study should be to discover, first, what government can properly and successfully do, and secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost both of money and of energy.
Source: "The Study of Administration." 1937, p. 29

“Mainstream economics scholarship produces theory without facts ("pure theory") and facts without theory”

Michel Chossudovsky (1946) Canadian economist

"applied economics"
Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 2, Global Falsehoods, p. 27

“The process of theory construction in organizational studies is portrayed as imagination disciplined by evolutionary processes analogous to artificial selection. The quality of theory produced is predicted to vary as a function of the accuracy and detail present in the problem statement that triggers theory building, the number of and independence among the conjectures that attempt to solve the problem, and the number and diversity of selection criteria used to test the conjectures.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1980s-1990s, "Theory construction as disciplined imagination," 1989, p. 516

“On the unfalsifiable theory of global warming:"Evidence that contradicts the global warming theory, climate kooks enlist as evidence for the correctness of their theory; every permutation in weather patterns—warm or cold—is said to be a consequence of that warming or proof of it.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Reincarnation of the Reds," http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=108 WorldNetDaily.com, December 29, 2006, The Colorado Springs Gazette, January 17, 2007, and The Orange County Register, "The Reds Have Become Greens," January 19, 2007.
2000s, 2007

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