“Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.”
Source: 1980s–1990s, A Conflict of Visions (1987), Ch. 1 : The Role of Vision
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Thomas Sowell 101
American economist, social theorist, political philosopher … 1930Related quotes

as quoted by John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1996)
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
I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
"Evolution as Fact and Theory", pp. 254–55 (originally appeared in Discover Magazine, May 1981)
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

"applied economics"
Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 2, Global Falsehoods, p. 27
Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 4, Deriving theories from facts: induction, p. 41.

Die Quantentheorie ist so ein wunderbares Beispiel dafür, daß man einen Sachverhalt in völliger Klarheit verstanden haben kann und gleichzeitig doch weiß, daß man nur in Bildern und Gleichnissen von ihm reden kann.
Der Teil und das Ganze. Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik (1969); also in "Kein Chaos, aus dem nicht wieder Ordnung würde", Die Zeit No. 34 (22 August 1969) http://www.zeit.de/1969/34/kein-chaos-aus-dem-nicht-wieder-ordnung-wuerde/komplettansicht; as translated in Physics and Beyond : Encounters and Conversation (1971)
“Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.”
Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in: Association of American Colleges (1955) Liberal education. Vol. 41, p. 430
1950s

Ch. 1 : Experience as evidence http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/laing.htm
The Politics of Experience (1967)
Context: Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".
We can see other people's behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person's experience, but only with his behaviour.
The other person's behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the other's behaviour to the other's experience of my behaviour. Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is inter-experience.