“I’d learned a long time ago that you can’t prove a negative. You can prove that you did something, but it’s the devil to prove you didn’t do something.”
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Laurell K. Hamilton 261
Novelist 1963Related quotes
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming. I always use what remains of my dreams of the night before. Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can’t be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process.
On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision (2010), p. 149
Sgt. Bartosek, in "Šlépeje" ["Footprints"] (1929) as translated by Norma Comrada, in Toward the Radical Center: A Karel Čapek Reader (1990), edited by Peter Kussi, p. 236
Context: Look, justice has to be as unquestioned as the multiplication tables. I don’t know if you could prove that every theft is wrong; but I can prove to you that every theft is against the law, because I can arrest you every time. If you scattered pearls in the street, then a policeman could give you a ticket for littering. But if you started performing miracles, we couldn’t stop you, unless we called it a public nuisance or unlawful public assembly. There must be some kind of breach of order for us to intervene.
“To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.”
As quoted in The Anchor Book of French Quotations with English Translations (1963) by Norbert Gutermam
Pensées Philosophiques (1746)
Ode interview (2009)