Quotes about evidence
page 7

“In Darwin's time no serious attempt had been made to examine the manifestations of variability. A vast assemblage of miscellaneous facts could formerly be adduced as seemingly comparable illustrations of the phenomenon "Variation." Time has shown this mass of evidence to be capable of analysis. When first promulgated it produced the impression that variability was a phenomenon generally distributed amongst living things in such a way that the specific divisions must be arbitrary. When this variability is sorted out, and is seen to be in part a result of hybridisation, in part a consequence of the persistence of hybrids by parthenogenetic reproduction, a polymorphism due to the continued presence of individuals representing various combinations of Mendelian allelomorphs, partly also the transient effect of alteration in external circumstances, we see how cautious we must be in drawing inferences as to the indefiniteness of specific limits from a bare knowledge that intermediates exist.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Source: Problems In Genetics (1913), p. 15

Way, Knowledge, Time, Parting

“In the knowledge of nature," Aristotle writes, the test of principles "is the unimpeachable evidence of the senses as to the fact." He holds that "lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in the intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundation of their theories, principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Theories should be accredited, Aristotle insists, "only if what they affirm agrees with the facts."
Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Nature, Knowledge, Sense

“The question is then how can we decide what anybody in the ancient world said. We can't. We wish we could. It would be nice if we could. You would like to think that because you can go to the store and buy an edition of Plato that you are actually reading Plato, but the problem is that we just do not have the kind of evidence that we need in order to establish what ancient authors actually wrote.”

Bart D. Ehrman (1955) American academic

"The Textual Reliability of the New Testament: A Dialogue between Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace" (April 4–5, 2008), in The Reliability of the New Testament (2011) edited by Robert Stewart, p. 47

World, Question, Problem, Thinking

“When in public, Hillary smiles and acts graciously. As soon as the cameras are gone, her angry personality, nastiness, and imperiousness become evident … Hillary Clinton can make Richard Nixon look like Mahatma Gandhi.”

Ronald Kessler (1943) American journalist

Ronald Kessler, describing interviews with Secret Service agents serving Secretary Clinton, in First Family Detail (2015)

Smile, Personality

“Physiologic facts concerning the origin of species in nature were unknown in the time of Darwin... The experience of the breeders was quite inadequate to the use which Darwin made of it. It was neither scientific, nor critically accurate. Laws of variation were barely conjectured; the different types of variability were only imperfectly distinguished. The breeders' conception was fairly sufficient for practical purposes, but science needed a clear understanding of the factors in the general process of variation. Repeatedly Darwin tried to formulate these causes, but the evidence available did not meet his requirements.
Quetelet's law of variation had not yet been published. Mendel's claim of hereditary units for the explanation of certain laws of hybrids discovered by him, was not yet made. The clear distinction between spontaneous and sudden changes, as compared with the ever-present fluctuating variations, is only of late coming into recognition by agriculturists. Innumerable minor points which go to elucidate the breeders' experience, and with which we are now quite familiar, were unknown in Darwin's time. No wonder that he made mistakes, and laid stress on modes of descent, which have since been proved to be of minor importance or even of doubtful validity.”

Hugo De Vries (1848–1935) Dutch botanist

Species and Varieties: Their Origin by Mutation (1904), The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, p. 5-6

Law, Understanding, Nature, Science

“To comprehend evolutionary Theory, one must first understand that it’s only ever a matter of changing proportions –altering or enhancing existing features to build on what is already there. Developmental biology, genetics, and comparative morphology combine to confirm many of these taxonomic stages such that organs do not seem to have appeared abruptly or fully-formed as if out of nowhere, because there is an implied evolutionary origin evident in every case. Even the transition of fish-to-tetrapods, dinosaurs-to-birds, or apes-to-men are each are just a matter of incremental, superficial changes being slowly compiled atop successive tiers of fundamental similarities. These represent monophyletic clades which will forever encompass all the descendants of that clade. This is why birds are still dinosaurs, and humans are still apes, and both are still stegocephalian chordates.”

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

"11th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm277H3ot6Y, Youtube (June 26, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Men, Understanding, Bird, Fish

“Taken as a whole, the Cross Correspondences and the Willet scripts are among the most convincing evidence that at present exists for life after death. For anyone who is prepared to devote weeks to studying them, they prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Myers, Gurney, and Sidgwick went on communicating after death.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: After Life (1999), p. 136

Life, Death, Communication, Study

“But some of our moral behaviors, if not sentiments, almost certainly evolved. Evidence for that comes from finding parallels between the behavior of our own species and that of our relatives.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 171

Behavior

“Second, by this and other means we are driven to perceive, what is quite evident in itself, that instantaneous feelings flow together in a continuum of feeling, which has in a modified degree the peculiar vivacity of feeling and has gained generality. And in reference to such general ideas, or continua of feeling, the difficulties about resemblance and suggestion and reference to the external, cease to have any force.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Law of Mind (1892)

Feeling, Idea

“Cellular automata are discrete dynamical systems with simple construction but complex self-organizing behaviour. Evidence is presented that all one-dimensional cellular automata fall into four distinct universality classes. Characterizations of the structures generated in these classes are discussed. Three classes exhibit behaviour analogous to limit points, limit cycles and chaotic attractors. The fourth class is probably capable of universal computation, so that properties of its infinite time behaviour are undecidable.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

[10, 1–2, January 1984, 1–35, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, Universality and complexity in cellular automata, 10.1016/0167-2789(84)90245-8]

Universe, Time

“People spend unnecessarily high amounts of money on drugs or supplements that support immunity (for example, fashionable Japanese ginkgo – there is no evidence that it works), meanwhile they do more harm to themselves by their way of life, for example by inadequate diet.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Mazurek, Maria (7 July 2017): Cudowna armia, która broni naszego ciała http://plus.gazetakrakowska.pl/magazyn/a/cudowna-armia-ktora-broni-naszego-ciala,12271571. Gazeta Krakowska (in Polish), pp. 18–19.

Life, Money, People, Way

“One of our fan-coloring biographers, who paints small men as very great, inquired of me lately with real affection too, whether he might consider as authentic, the change of my religion much spoken of in some circles. Now this supposed that they knew what had been my religion before, taking for it the word of their priests, whom I certainly never made the confidants of my creed. My answer was "say nothing of my religion. It is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to John Adams (11 January 1817), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-12_Bk.pdf, pp. 48–49 1810s

Life, Men, God, World

“Prison officers do not have a 'duty of care' to protect prisoners who harm themselves while taking part in illegal behaviour. With regard to needles in prisons, provision of bleach could also be harmful. Bleach is by nature a corrosive agent and could cause serious injury if thrown into the eyes of a prison officer or fellow prisoner, There is evidence that even the highly caustic phenol used to sterilise dental instruments does not eliminate all HIV viruses - only autoclaving in super-heated steam is fully effective. If government provided bleach fails to sterilise prisoners’ illegal needles adequately, does the government become liable for breach of duty of care?”

Stewart Leggett (1944) Australian politician

HIV/AIDS - Hepatitis B Inquiry (Part II): Dissenting Statement by Mr Stewart Leggett MP (1997)

Nature, Parting

“The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century.”

Harold Innis (1894–1952) Canadian professor of political economy

Minerva's Owl p. 29.
The Bias of Communication (1951)

War, Communication

“It may hereafter be considered how far the excellent experiments of Count Rumford, which tend very greatly to weaken the evidence of the modern doctrine of heat, may be more or less favourable to one or the other system of light and colours.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

"Outlines of Experiments and Inquiries Respecting Sound and Light" (1800)

Light

“When organizations are unable to make new strategies — when people evade the work of choosing among different paths in the future — then you get vague mom-and-apple-pie goals everyone can agree on. Such goals are direct evidence of leadership’s insufficient will or political power to make or enforce hard choices.”

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

Source: Good Strategy Bad Strategy, 2011, p. 64

People, Moms, Future

“A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused by enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy. The evidence of worth may be read from the extent and character of attention and indignation. […] the U. S. media’s practical definitions of worth are political in the extreme and fit well the expectations of a propaganda model. While this differential treatment occurs on a large scale, the media, intellectuals, and public are able to remain unconscious of this fact and maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone. This is evidence of an extremely effective propaganda system. […] The worth of a victim Popieluszko [Polish priest] is valued at somewhere between 137 and 179 times that of a victim in the U. S. client states, or, looking at the matter in reverse, a priest murdered in Latin America is worth less than a hundredth of a priest murdered in Poland.”

Edward S. Herman book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Source: Manufacturing Consent, with Noam Chomsky, 1988, pp. 37, 39.

People, Time, Reading

“When a scientist writes about God, his colleagues assume he is either over the hill or going bonkers. In my case it should be understood from the start that I am an agnostic in religious matters. My views on this question are close to those of Darwin, who wrote, "My theology is a simple muddle. I cannot look at the Universe as the result of blind chance, yet I see no evidence of beneficent design in the details."”

Robert Jastrow (1925–2008) American astronomer

God and the Astronomers (1978), Ch. 1 : In the Beginning.

God, Question, Universe, Chance

“I've looked right through the Bible, start to finish, looking for the bit saying 'Jesus was the mind behind Ikea', then there's no evidence to suggest this at all.”

Russell Brand (1975) British comedian, actor, and author

6 Music Show

“The magnitude of the business of this road, its numerous and important connections, and. the large number of employés engaged in operating it, have led many, whose opinions are entitled to respect, to the conclusion, that a proper regard to details, which enter so largely into the elements of success in the management of all railroads, cannot possibly be attained by any plan that contemplates its organization as a whole; and in proof of this position, the experience of shorter roads is referred to, the business operations of which have been conducted much more economically.
Theoretically, other things being equal, a long road should be operated for a less cost per mile than a short one. This position is so clearly evident and so generally admitted, that its truth may be assumed without offering any arguments in support of it; and, notwithstanding the reverse, so far as practical results are considered, has generally been the case, we must look to other causes than the mere difference in length of roads for a solution of the difficulty.”

Daniel McCallum (1815–1878) Canadian engineer and early organizational theorist

Source: Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856), p. 33-34: First two paragraphs

Truth, Business, Support, Success

“As display is vulgar, so fondness for jewelry is evidence of an uncultivated mind.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 163

“In our constant struggle to believe we are likely to overlook the simple fact that a bit of healthy disbelief is sometimes as needful as faith to the welfare of our souls. I would go further and say that we would do well to cultivate a reverent skepticism. It will keep us out of a thousand bogs and quagmires where others who lack it sometimes find themselves. It is no sin to doubt some things, but it may be fatal to believe everything. Faith is at the root of all true worship, and without faith it is impossible to please God. Through unbelief Israel failed to inherit the promises. “By grace are ye saved through faith.” “The just shall live by faith.” Such verses as these come trooping to our memories, and we wince just a little at the suggestion that unbelief may also be a good and useful thing. … Faith never means gullibility. The man who believes everything is as far from God as the man who refuses to believe anything. Faith engages the person and promises of God and rests upon them with perfect assurance. Whatever has behind it the character and word of the living God is accepted by faith as the last and final truth from which there must never be any appeal. Faith never asks questions when it has been established that God has spoken. 'Yea, let God be true, but every man a liar' (Rom. 3:4). Thus faith honors God by counting Him righteous and accepts His testimony against the very evidence of its own senses. That is faith, and of such we can never have too much. Credulity, on the other hand, never honors God, for it shows as great a readiness to believe anybody as to believe God Himself. The credulous person will accept anything as long as it is unusual, and the more unusual it is the more ardently he will believe. Any testimony will be swallowed with a straight face if it only has about it some element of the eerie, the preternatural, the unearthly.”

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) American missionary

Source: The Root of the Righteous (1955), Chapter 34.

God, Truth, Faith, Soul

“p. 651Abstract. Investigations of the function of consciousness in human information processing have focused mainly on two questions: (1) where does consciousness enter into the information processing sequence and (2) how does conscious processing differ from preconscious and unconscious processing. Input analysis is thought to be initially "preconscious," "pre-attentive," fast, involuntary, and automatic. This is followed by "conscious," "focal-attentive" analysis which is relatively slow, voluntary, and flexible. It is thought that simple, familiar stimuli can be identified preconsciously, but conscious processing is needed to identify complex, novel stimuli. Conscious processing has also been thought to be necessary for choice, learning and memory, and the organization of complex, novel responses, particularly those requiring planning, reflection, or creativity. The present target article reviews evidence that consciousness performs none of these functions. Consciousness nearly always results from focal-attentive processing (as a form of output) but does not itself enter into this or any other form of human information processing. This suggests that the term "conscious process" needs re-examination. Consciousness appears to be necessary in a variety of tasks because they require focal-attentive processing; if consciousness is absent, focal-attentive processing is absent. Viewed from a first-person perspective, however, conscious states are causally effective. First-person accounts are complementary to third-person accounts. Although they can be translated into third-person accounts, they cannot be reduced to them.”

Max Velmans (1942) British psychologist

Is human information processing conscious?, 1991

Question, Learning, Appearance, Memory

“Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man’s well-being is not their goal.”

Ayn Rand book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

“As the lists multiply in number and the lists themselves grow longer, we should ask ourselves who the real victims are in the confusion sowed by Ms. Napoles and those who supposedly want to shed light on the Pork Barrel Scam. Those who have been unfairly dragged into this mess are not the real victims; these lists and affidavits are baseless and lack the kind of evidentiary support that can establish cases against many of those who have been named, myself included. The real victims here are our citizens. After learning the scale at which funds allocated to help them have been efficiently and systematically plundered, our people now seek redress. As it stands, there is an opportunity for our people to obtain justice as the Ombudsman already found probable cause which concluded to filing of the cases. Again, I assure the public that I have never allocated public money using the PDAF or budgetary incentives to any fictitious NGOs set up by Ms. (Janet) Napoles nor have I dealt with her to supposedly solicit or receive campaign funds. Such claim is a total falsity and runs counter to common sense because as early as October of 2009, I already withdrew any intention to run for the presidency and in 2010, I was not even a candidate for any elective position. And by Ms. Napoles’ own list, I am the only one who did not allocate any funds to her foundations from my PDAF releases. Let's keep our eye on the ball and remain vigilant to ensure the conviction of those who truly deserve to be punished for the misuse of public funds. Let us persuade our authorities to focus on evidence, testimonial or otherwise, that has probative value to avoid distractions.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2014, May 28). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10152473011595610/ 2014, Facebook

Money, People, Justice, Support

“The church-sponsored archaeologists were the only ones who had any kind of overview of the entire haul of relics, and they were under intense pressure to ignore any evidence that conflicted with Quaicheist scripture. That was why Rashmika wrote them so many letters, and why their infrequent replies were always so evasive. She wanted an argument; she wanted to question the entire accepted view of the scuttlers. They wanted her to go away.”

Alastair Reynolds book Absolution Gap

Source: Absolution Gap (2003), Chapter 11 (p. 166)

Question

“It is a melancholy reflection that our modes of population have been more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru. The evidence of this is the utter extirpation of nearly all the Indians in the most populous parts of the Union. A future historian may mark the causes of this destruction of the human race in sable colors. Although the present Government of the United States cannot with propriety be involved in the oppropbrium, yet it seems necessary however, in order to render their attention upon this subject strongly characteristic of their justice, that some powerful attempts should be made to tranquilize the frontiers, particularly those south of the Ohio.”

Henry Knox (1750–1806) Continental Army and US Army general, US Secretary of War

Report by then Secretary of War Henry Knox to the president http://www2.hawaii.edu/~rrath/hist281/IndianPolicyNewNation.html, 1790.

Justice, Color, Future, Parting

“Useful for physicians who wish to understand alcoholism and the recovery process, and to gain anecdotal evidence of this process, which is presented by using the words of recovering alcoholics…. Can be of great value to those many physicians faced with individual patients who are drinking too much.”

Arnold M. Ludwig

New York State Journal of Medicine, review of Understanding the Alcoholic's Mind.

Alcohol, Drink, Understanding

“If the Darwinian package were correct, then we would expect to see the simultaneous appearance in the archeological and fossil records of evidence for bipedality, technology and increased brain size. We don't.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

Appearance

“History is scraps of evidence joined by the glue of imagination.”

Subhash Kak (1947) Indian computer scientist

The Wishing Tree (2015)

Imagination, History

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Declaration of Sentiments

First Woman's Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, [July, 19-20, 1848]. Declaration of Sentiments.

Women, Men, Truth

“This age, which should adjudge happiness to be as valuable as soap or munitions, would never come so long as the workers accepted the testimony of paid spokesmen… to the effect that they were contented and happy, rather than the evidence of their own wincing nerves to the effect that they live in a polite version of hell.”

Sinclair Lewis book The Job

The Job (1917)

Age, Hell, Happiness

“The small triumph of "The Graduate" was to have domesticated alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what Benjamin is alienated from a middle-class comic strip and making it absurdly evident that he has nothing to communicate — which is just what makes him an acceptable hero for the large movie audience. If he said anything or had any ideas, the audience would probably hate him.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Hate, Communication, Idea

“All historical evidence seems to be that the party of chaos is suppressed by the party of order.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ Interview with Nick Land" https://syntheticzero.net/2017/06/19/the-only-thing-i-would-impose-is-fragmentation-an-interview-with-nick-land/ (2017)

“Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. One English critic took me to task for not saying that Genet was "afraid of intimacy" all his life because he'd been abandoned by his mother at the age of seven months. All the evidence needed to make such an interpretation is in my book, but I don't myself draw the vulgar conclusion. Since most literary biographies ignore the work except for potted plot summaries, they strip the biographee of everything redeeming and leave his or her subject to this spiteful revenge, this half-baked Freudian-Christian-bourgeois moralizing.”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

Self-interview, Dalkey Archive Press (1994).
Articles and Interviews

Life, People, Books, Age

“Gad, sir, Churchill is right. The Govt. has evidently made an irrevocable decision to be guided by circumstances with a firm hand.”

David Low (cartoonist) (1891–1963) British cartoonist

Colonel Blimp, quoted in David G. Chandler & Ian Beckett (eds.) The Oxford History of the British Army (Oxford: OUP, 2003) p. 312.

Decision

“The military forces of a free country may be considered under three general descriptions — 1. The militia. 2. the navy — and 3. the regular troops — and the whole ought ever to be, and understood to be, in strict subordination to the civil authority; and that regular troops, and select corps, ought not to be kept up without evident necessity. Stipulations in the constitution to this effect, are perhaps, too general to be of much service, except merely to impress on the minds of the people and soldiery, that the military ought ever to be subject to the civil authority, &c. But particular attention, and many more definite stipulations, are highly necessary to render the military safe, and yet useful in a free government; and in a federal republic, where the people meet in distinct assemblies, many stipulations are necessary to keep a part from transgressing, which would be unnecessary checks against the whole met in one legislature, in one entire government. — A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves, and render regular troops in a great measure unnecessary. The powers to form and arm the militia, to appoint their officers, and to command their services, are very important; nor ought they in a confederated republic to be lodged, solely, in any one member of the government. First, the constitution ought to secure a genuine and guard against a select militia, by providing that the militia shall always be kept well organized, armed, and disciplined, and include, according to the past and general usuage of the states, all men capable of bearing arms; and that all regulations tending to render this general militia useless and defenceless, by establishing select corps of militia, or distinct bodies of military men, not having permanent interests and attachments in the community to be avoided. I am persuaded, I need not multiply words to convince you of the value and solidity of this principle, as it respects general liberty, and the duration of a free and mild government: having this principle well fixed by the constitution, then the federal head may prescribe a general uniform plan, on which the respective states shall form and train the militia, appoint their officers and solely manage them, except when called into the service of the union, and when called into that service, they may be commanded and governed by the union. This arrangement combines energy and safety in it; it places the sword in the hands of the solid interest of the community, and not in the hands of men destitute of property, of principle, or of attachment to the society and government, who often form the select corps of peace or ordinary establishments: by it, the militia are the people, immediately under the management of the state governments, but on a uniform federal plan, and called into the service, command, and government of the union, when necessary for the common defence and general tranquility. But, say gentlemen, the general militia are for the most part employed at home in their private concerns, cannot well be called out, or be depended upon; that we must have a select militia; that is, as I understand it, particular corps or bodies of young men, and of men who have but little to do at home, particularly armed and disciplined in some measure, at the public expence, and always ready to take the field. These corps, not much unlike regular troops, will ever produce an inattention to the general militia; and the consequence has ever been, and always must be, that the substantial men, having families and property, will generally be without arms, without knowing the use of them, and defenceless; whereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them; nor does it follow from this, that all promiscuously must go into actual service on every occasion. The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle; and when we see many men disposed to practice upon it, whenever they can prevail, no wonder true republicans are for carefully guarding against it. As a farther check, it may be proper to add, that the militia of any state shall not remain in the service of the union, beyond a given period, without the express consent of the state legislature.”

Richard Henry Lee (1732–1794) American statesman

Additional Letters From The Federal Farmer, 169 (1788)

Men, People, Family, Peace

“My God! I have often regretted that I was born! I have often wished to fall back even into nothingness, rather than advance through so many falsehoods, so many sufferings, and so many successive losses, towards that loss of ourselves which we call death! Still, even in those moments of terrible faintheartedness, when despair overmasters reason, and when man forgets that life is a task imposed upon him to finish, I have always said to myself: "There are some things which I would regret not to have tasted — a mother's milk, a father's love, that relationship of heart and soul between brothers, household affections, joys, and even cares!" Our family is evidently our second self, more than self, existing before self, and surviving self with the better part of self. It is the image of the holy and loving unity of beings revealed by the small group of creatures who hold to one another, and made visible by feeling!”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French writer, poet, and politician

Book I, Note II, p. 19
Les confidences (1849)

Love, Life, Death, God

“If, then, faith so evidently surrounds us, why should it be so offensive? It is simply because faith is as essential to the spiritual realm as oxygen is to the natural realm. The professing atheist thinks that if he can get rid of any thought of faith he can get rid of Christianity. In trying to do so, he saws through the branch he is sitting on. His own faith in the erroneous information he has makes him think he is atheistic in his beliefs.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

Faith, Nature, Thinking

“Even if astrology had been a real science, I knew nothing about it. We find countless events in real history which would never have occurred if they had not been predicted. This is because we are the authors of our so-called destiny, and all the 'antecedent necessities' of the Stoics are chimerical; the argument which proves the power of destiny seems strong only because it is sophistical. Cicero laughed at it. Someone whom he had invited to dinner, who had promised to go, and who had not appeared, wrote to him that since he had not gone it was evident that he had not been iturus ('going to go'). Cicero answers him: Veni ergo cras, et veni etiamsi venturus non sis ('Then come tomorrow, and come even if you are not going to come'). At this date, when I am conscious that I rely entirely on my common sense, I owe this explanation to my reader, despite the axiom, Fata viam inveniunt ('Destiny finds the way'). If the fatalists are obliged by their own philosophy to consider the concatenation of all events necessary, a parte ante ('a priori'), what remains of man's moral freedom is nothing; and in that case he can neither earn merit nor incur guilt. I cannot in conscience admit that I am a machine.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

History of My Life (trans. Trask 1967), 1997 reprint, v. 7, chapter 8, p. 172
Referenced

Way, History, Sense, Freedom

“It's very simple and it has nothing to do with identifiable goals. It is to keep thinking about what architecture can be, in whatever form. That is an answer, isn't it? I think that S, M, L, XL has one beautiful ambiguity: it used the past to build a future and is very adamant about giving notice that this is not the end. That's how it felt to me, anyway. That is in itself evidence of a kind of discomfort with achievement measured in terms of identifiable entities, and an announcement that continuity of thinking in whatever form, around whatever subject, is the real ambition.”

Rem Koolhaas (1944) Dutch architect (b.1944)

Rem Koolhaas Interview with Jennifer Sigler in Index Magazine http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/rem_koolhaas.shtml, (2000)

Beauty, Thinking, Past, Future

“I don't agree with the notion that some are putting out there — including scientists — that somehow, there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what's happening in our climate. Our climate is always changing. And what they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research, and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that's directly and almost solely attributable to manmade activity.”

Marco Rubio (1971) U.S. Senator from state of Florida, United States; politician

This Week http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/week-transcript-defense-secretary-chuck-hagel-sen-marco/story?id=23667691, ABC News, , quoted in * 2014-05-11 Marco Rubio Says Scientists Are Wrong: 'Human Activity' Does Not Cause Climate Change David Crooks and Liars http://crooksandliars.com/2014/05/marco-rubio-says-scientists-are-wrong 2014-05-17 2010s, 2014

Change

“That Mussolini chose Gentile to author the philosophical portion of Fascism’s official doctrine provides evidence of the confidence Fascists entertained with respect to Gentile’s thought.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 94

Confidence

“There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present warming trend.”

Alexander Cockburn (1941–2012) Leftist journalist and writer

"Is Global Warming a Sin?" Counterpunch (28-30 April 2007).

World

“Whatever its imagined virtues, faith is the enemy of open and honest inquiry. Remaining open to the powers of conversation - to new evidence and better arguments - is not only essential for rationality. It is essential for love.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

2010s, Lying (2011)

Love, Faith, Imagination

“It has come to be a legend, and I believe with more foundation of fact than most legends, that Howard University was the outgrowth of the inspiration of a prayer meeting. I hope it is true, and I shall choose to believe it, for it makes of this scene and this occasion a new testimony that prayers are answered. Here has been established a great university, a sort of educational laboratory for the production of intellectual and spiritual leadership among a people whose history, if you will examine it as it deserves, is one of the striking evidences of a soundness of our civilization.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Progress of a People (1924)

People, Education, Hope, History

“Most human lives are forgotten after four generations. We build our splendid houses on the edge of the abyss then distract and dazzle ourselves with entertainers and sex while we slowly at first, then more rapidly, spin around the ever-thirsty plughole in the middle. My treasured possessions -- all the silly little mementoes and toys and special books I’ve carried with me for decades -- will wind up on flea market tables or rot on garbage heaps. Someone else will inhabit the rooms that were mine. Everything that was important to me will mean nothing to the countless generations that follow our own. In the grand sprawl of it all, I have no significance at all. I don’t believe a giant gaseous pensioner will reward or censure me when my body stops working and I don’t believe individual consciousness survives for long after brain death so I lack the consolations of religion. I wanted Annihilator to peek into that implacable moment where everything we are comes to an end so I had to follow the Black Brick Road all the way down and seriously consider the abject pointlessness of all human endeavours. I found these contemplations thrilling and I was drawn to research pure nihilism, which led me to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound and back to Ligotti. I have a fundamentally optimistic and positive view of human existence and the future and I think it’s important to face intelligent, well-argued challenges to that view on a regular basis. While I agree with Ligotti that the universe is, on the face of it, a blind emergent process, driven by chance over billions of years of trial and error to ultimately produce creatures capable of little more than flamboyant expressions of the agonizing awareness of their own imminent deaths, I don’t share his slightly huffy disappointment at this state of affairs. If the universe is intrinsically meaningless, if the mindless re-arrangement of atomic debris into temporarily arising then dissipating forms has no point, I can only ask, why do I see meaning everywhere, why can I find a point in everything? Why do other human beings like me seem to see meaning in everything too? If the sun is only an apocalyptic series of hydrogen fusion reactions, why does it look like an angel and inspire poetry? Why does the flesh and fur-covered bone and jelly of my cat’s face melt my heart? Is all that surging, roaring incandescent meaning inside me, or is it out there? “Meaning” to me is equivalent to “Magic.” The more significance we bring to things, even to the smallest and least important things, the more special, the more “magical” they seem to become. For all that materialistic science and existential philosophy tells us we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe, the evidence of my senses and the accounts of other human beings seem to indicate that, in fact, the whole universe and everything in it explodes second-to-second with beauty, horror, grandeur and significance when and wherever it comes into contact with consciousness. Therefore, it’s completely down to us to revel in our ability to make meaning, or not. Ligotti, like many extreme Buddhist philosophers, starts from the position that life is an agonizing, heartbreaking grave-bound veil of tears. This seems to be a somewhat hyperbolic view of human life; as far as I can see most of us round here muddle through ignoring death until it comes in close and life’s mostly all right with just enough significant episodes of sheer joy and connection and just enough sh-tty episodes of pain or fear. The notion that the whole span of our lives is no more than some dreadful rehearsal for hell may resonate with the deeply sensitive among us but by and large life is pretty okay generally for most of us. And for some, especially in the developed countries, “okay” equals luxurious. To focus on the moments of pain and fear we all experience and then to pretend they represent the totality of our conscious experience seems to me a little effete and indulgent. Most people don’t get to be born at all, ever. To see in that radiant impossibility only pointlessness, to see our experience as malignantly useless, as Ligotti does, seems to me a bit camp.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2014
http://www.blastr.com/2014-9-12/grant-morrisons-big-talk-getting-deep-writer-annihilator-multiversity
On life

Life, Death, Pain, People

“[The masses] … must turn their hopes toward a miracle. In the depths of their despair reason cannot be believed, truth must be false, and lies must be truth. "Higher bread prices," "lower bread prices," "unchanged bread prices" have all failed. The only hope lies in a kind of bread price which is none of these, which nobody has ever seen before, and which belies the evidence of one's reason.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 84

Truth, Hope, Falseness, Despair

“It is abundantly evident, both from history and from present experience, that the instinctive shock, or natural feeling of disgust, caused by the sight of the sufferings of men is not generically different from that which is caused by the sight of the sufferings of animals.”

William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838–1903) British politician

Source: A History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869), Chapter 2 (2nd edition, Vol. 1, London: Longmans, 1869, p. 294 https://books.google.it/books?id=hdUJs_S3ezwC&pg=PA294)

Men, Feeling, History, Nature

“evidence is the only good reason to believe anything”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

interview shown in AlJazeera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0jA6VsivBE&t=0h26m04s, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0jA6VsivBE&t=0h28m37s

“The scientific fact of clairvoyance, telepathy, soul-flight, psychometry, and prophecy are well established by incontrovertible evidence yet to mention them in certain circles is to ostracize yourself.”

Benjamin Fish Austin (1850–1933) Nineteenth-century Canadian educator/Methodist Minister/Spiritualist

Sermon (1899)

Soul

““I understand you now. But surely, if Lucifer is successful, we shall all be saved.”
The Wildgrave’s smile was bitter. “What logic provides you with that hope, von Bek? If God is merciful, He provides us with little evidence.””

Michael Moorcock book The War Hound and the World's Pain

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 6 (p. 79)

God, Smile, Hope, Understanding

“Someone who is determined to disbelieve something can manage to disregard an Everest of evidence for it.”

George Will (1941) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author

Column, March 14, 2014, "Democrats are making income inequality worse" http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-democrats-policies-make-income-inequality-worse/2014/03/14/97d5074e-aada-11e3-adbc-888c8010c799_story.html at washingtonpost.com 2010s

“The prosecution… wants to make sure the process by which the evidence was obtained is not truthfully presented, because, as often as not, that process will raise questions.”

Alan M. Dershowitz (1938) American lawyer, author

U.S. News & World Report (August 9, 1982)

Question

“Since the design of the movement is paramount, shape, for me, should have no significance of itself; it merely makes movement evident. Therefore, the simplest, most customary, most unobtrusive forms suffice.”

George Rickey (1907–2002) American artist

Amerika-Haus Berlin, ‎George Rickey (1979). George Rickey: Skulpturen, Material, Technik. Nr. 1. p. 37

“There are here two assumptions about 'evaluations ', which I will call assumption (1) and assumption (2). Assumption (1) is that some individual may, without logical error, base his beliefs about matters of value entirely on premises which no one else would recognise as giving any evidence at all. Assumption (2) is that, given the kind of statement which other people regard as evidence for an evaluative conclusion, he may refuse to draw the conclusion because this does not count as evidence for him.”

Philippa Foot (1920–2010) British philosopher

"Moral Beliefs"

People, Error, Drawing

“Put the money into schools. Rational ones that train young minds to think, to demand that persons in authority show the evidence for the ideas they push. Do that, and we won’t need to provide a world for the Sacred Brethren who, given the opportunity, would run everyone else off the planet.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 2 (p. 13)

Money, World, School, Idea

“The improved performances at Commonwealth Games, London Olympics and world tournaments by chess, billiards, snooker badminton and tennis players are evidence of the improved progress that we have made.”

Anil Kumble (1970) Former Indian cricketer

India became a sporting nation in the last decade: Kumble

World, Game

“I used to be a lot more critical of Israel, and I used to believe there was a fairly simple two-state solution, because I used to believe the Arabs were acting in good faith. I still want to believe that, but the evidence tells me I'd be a fool to believe it, because I've seen that every concession Israel makes is met with more demands and more excuses not to negotiate. They could have had peace ten times over if they wanted it, but they don't want peace, they want victory, and they won't be happy until Israel is wiped from the map. A member of Fatah central committee said as much on television recently, but as he said, they keep that to themselves, and tell the rest of the world a different story.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"The great Palestinian lie" (6 October 2011) http://youtube.com/watch?v=j1N1zhUm84w, responding to a statement http://www.memri.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/3130.htm by Abbas Zaki. 2011

World, Peace, Faith, Fools

“The belief that torture is always wrong is a prejudice inherited from an obsolete philosophy. We need to shed the belief that human rights are violated when a terrorist is tortured. As Rawls and others have shown, basic freedoms must form a coherent whole. Self-evidently, there can be no right to attack basic human rights. Therefore, once the proper legal procedures are in place, torturing terrorists cannot violate their rights. In fact, in a truly liberal society, terrorists have an inalienable right to be tortured.This is what demonstrates the moral superiority of liberal societies over others, past and present. Other societies have degraded terrorists by subjecting them to lawless and unaccountable power. In the new world that is taking shape, terrorists, although they themselves degrade human rights by practising terrorism, will be afforded the full dignity of due legal process, even while being tortured.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

A Modest Proposal (2003)

World, Freedom, Past

“'What do you mean by "a man like me"?' he [Philip Trent] demanded with a sort of fierceness. 'Do you take me for a man without any normal instincts? I don't say you impress people as a simple, transparent sort of character — what Mr Calvin Bunner calls a case of openwork; I don't say a stranger might not think you capable of wickedness, if there was good evidence for it: but I say that a man who, after seeing you and being in your atmosphere, could associate you with the kind of abomination I imagined is a fool — the kind of fool who is afraid to trust his senses.'”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley book Trent's Last Case

Source: Trent's Last Case (1912), Chapter XIII: "Eruption"

People, Fools, Imagination, Thinking

“The universality of card-playing in the reign of this monarch is evident from a prohibitory statute being necessary to prevent apprentices from using cards except in the Christmas holidays, and then only in their masters' houses…But this moderation, I apprehend, was by no means general, for several contemporary writers are exceedingly severe in their reflections upon the usage of cards, which they rank with dice, and consider both as destructive to morality and good order.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 327
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Cards

Universe, Holiday, Christmas, Housing

“The truth seems to be, that like many other geniuses, this Man of Mosses takes great delight in hoodwinking the world, — at least, with respect to himself. Personally, I doubt not, that he rather prefers to be generally esteemed but a so-so sort of author; being willing to reserve the thorough and acute appreciation of what he is, to that party most qualified to judge — that is, to himself. Besides, at the bottom of their natures, men like Hawthorne, in many things, deem the plaudits of the public such strong presumptive evidence of mediocrity in the object of them, that it would in some degree render them doubtful of their own powers, did they hear much and vociferous braying concerning them in the public”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850)

Men, Truth, World, Nature

“The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

[Sam Harris, 2 January 2006, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/science-must-destroy-reli_b_13153.html, "Science Must Destroy Religion", The Huffington Post, 2006-10-16]
2000s

Religion, Passion, Science

“There's no evidence whatsoever that Darwin had anything useful to say or anything to say period about how life began or how the universe began or how gravity began or how physics began or fluid motion or how thermodynamics began. He had nothing to say about that whatsoever.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

On his points of making Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYL9uuqgwpw

Life, Universe

“Having written all that, I must admit that there is some soul searching going on in the economics profession. As obvious as the financial crisis seems after the fact, few economists saw it coming (with some notable exceptions). Virtually none anticipated how severe it might be. In the fall of 2005, several prominent economists wrote in a prestigious journal, “As of the end of 2004, our analysis reveals little evidence of a housing bubble.”
Wrong. Actually the article was worse than wrong, because it was written explicitly to refute the signs of a bubble that had become obvious to many laypeople—which is kind of like the fire department showing up at a house with smoke wafting from the roof and declaring, “No, that’s not a fire,” only to have flames start leaping from the attic twenty minutes later. There was a bubble. And it can be explained best by incorporating psychology into economics, namely the tendency of individuals to believe that whatever is happening now is what’s most likely to happen in the future.”

Charles Wheelan (1966) American politician

Introduction
Naked Economics (rev. and updated ed., 2010)

Soul, Search, Future, Housing

“May I be perfectly candid? I also am still a Unionist in this sense. If I were certified of twenty years of unbroken power in this country, I am still most clearly of opinion that the solution of the Irish question which would be best for England and best for Ireland would be the prosecution during that period of the policy which, in our opinion at least, had attained so large a measure of success in the year 1906. In saying this I make it quite plain that I am conscious that there are many of my colleagues—there must be many of my colleagues—who would not take that view. You must make the reservation that you are given that power and that you are given that power for the requisite period. The late Lord Salisbury spoke of "twenty years of resolute government." The Unionist Party, in the period to the close of which I refer, had been given some ten years, and it was only given those ten years by what many members of this House would describe as the accident of the issue, with its repercussion on the Election, of the war in South Africa. That accident and that Election gave the Unionist Party some ten years of office. Is it not evident, in trying to descry what lies in front of us through the mists of the future, that no man living can claim that twenty years, or anything like twenty years, lie in front of any Party that believes in the maintenance of the relations between Ireland and this country on the lines that have existed since the passing of the Act of Union?”

F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (1872–1930) British politician

Speech in the House of Lords http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1920/nov/23/government-of-ireland-bill on the Government of Ireland Bill (23 November 1920).

War, Lie, Question, Sense

“A lawyer has no business with the justice or injustice of the cause which he undertakes, unless his client asks his opinion, and then he is bound to give it honestly. The justice or injustice of the cause is to be decided by the judge. Consider, sir; what is the purpose of courts of justice? It is, that every man may have his cause fairly tried, by men appointed to try causes. A lawyer is not to tell what he knows to be a lie: he is not to produce what he knows to be a false deed; but he is not to usurp the province of the jury and of the judge, and determine what shall be the effect of evidence — what shall be the result of legal argument.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

August 15, 1773
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)

Men, Lie, Justice, Business

“Regardless of the extent to which the media promote "politically correct," but scientifically wrong, resolutions from professional societies such as the American Anthropological Association, facts remain facts and require appropriate scientific, not political or ideological, explanation. None of this should be construed as meaning that environmental factors play no part in individual and group differences. But with each passing year and each new study, the evidence for the genetic contribution to these differences becomes more firmly established than ever.”

J. Philippe Rushton (1943–2012) Canadian psychology professor

Mankind Quarterly, Winter98, Vol. 39 Issue 2, p231

Study, Parting

“The ambiguity of progress becomes evident. Without doubt, it offers new possibilities for good, but it also opens up appalling possibilities for evil — possibilities that formerly did not exist. We have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth (cf. Eph 3:16; 2 Cor 4:16), then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

In Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20071130_spe-salvi_en.html (30 November 2007) 2007

World, Way, Evil

“He stayed in no one place very long, but he usually managed to absorb something of the atmosphere of each town, village or rubber estate he visited, and he always made quick contact with the local residents. These residents were invariably Europeans - planters, colonial officials, businessmen, or just men living in exile to escape from trouble or sadness at home - and there is little evidence that Maugham gained, or wished to gain, any direct knowledge of the lives and customs of the native peoples of the East. This must be disappointing to present-day Malay and Indian and Chinese and Eurasian readers of his stories, but we have to remember that (apart from the fact that Maugham had no time to learn Malay or Chinese or Tamil) the Western attitude to the Far East was very different in Maugham's time from what it is today.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Introduction to Maugham's Malaysian Stories (1969)
People, Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham

Men, People, Sadness, Disappointment

“The only generally agreed upon definition of mathematics is "Mathematics is what mathematicians do." […]
In the face of this difficulty [of defining "computer science"] many people, including myself at times, feel that we should ignore the discussion and get on with doing it. But as George Forsythe points out so well in a recent article*, it does matter what people in Washington D. C. think computer science is. According to him, they tend to feel that it is a part of applied mathematics and therefore turn to the mathematicians for advice in the granting of funds. And it is not greatly different elsewhere; in both industry and the universities you can often still see traces of where computing first started, whether in electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, or even business. Evidently the picture which people have of a subject can significantly affect its subsequent development. Therefore, although we cannot hope to settle the question definitively, we need frequently to examine and to air our views on what our subject is and should become.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Hamming cites Forsythe, G.E., "What to do until the computer scientist comes", Am. Math. Monthly 75 (5), May 1968, p. 454-461.
One Man's View of Computer Science (1969)

People, Hope, Feeling, Mathematics

“Before they are slain these poor brutes are maltreated in ways almost beyond enumeration. Visit shipping pens, stocktrains, stockyards and packinghouses, if you want evidence of the sufferings of the poor beasts of the field. And these very sufferings are through the law of sympathetic mental vibrations transferred to the flesh of those who eat the bodies of these animals. The undefined fears, the terrors of the nightmare, and the many disturbances in stomach and bowels that man endures may be in a measure traced to these unsuspected sources.”

Charles Fillmore (1854–1948) American mystic

As to Meat Eating, Unity Magazine, October 1903. Quoted in Will Tuttle, [//books.google.it/books?id=H_clxwd27CgC&pg=PT0 The World Peace Diet] (2005), ch. 8.

Fear, Law, Way, Suffering

“Perhaps there was too much of religion in one sense; the word is English, smacks too much of things external such as creeds, rites, an external piety; there is no one Indian equivalent. But if we give rather to religion the sense of the following of the spiritual impulse in its fullness and define spirituality as the attempt to know and live in the highest self, the divine, the all-embracing unity and to raise life in all its parts to the divinest possible values, then it is evident that there was not too much of religion, but rather too little of it — and in what there was, a too one-sided and therefore an insufficiently ample tendency. The right remedy is, not to belittle still farther the agelong ideal of India, but to return to its old amplitude and give it a still wider scope, to make in very truth all the life of the nation a religion in this high spiritual sense. This is the direction in which the philosophy, poetry, art of the West is, still more or less obscurely, but with an increasing light, beginning to turn, and even some faint glints of the truth are beginning now to fall across political and sociological ideals.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

The Renaissance in India (1918)

Life, Truth, Religion, Art

“Many liberals have changed their views in response to new evidence. It’s an interesting experience; conservatives should try it some time.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

[Paul Krugman, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/opinion/paul-krugman-liberals-and-wages.html, Liberals and Wages, New York Times, 17 July 2015, 17 July 2015]
The New York Times Columns

Change, Time

“He quickly lowered his eyes to his knees again, to conceal the pain in them, to conceal his broken faith in the innate goodness of men, the profound despair of realization that reason might not after all triumph over ignorance.
“Perhaps,” he murmured aloud, “To believe in the inevitable triumph of rationality might, in itself, be no more than another expression of those same superstitions which we deplore in the ignorant. It is apparently an occupational disease, perhaps a fatal one, for the scientist to be too sanguine about eventual rule by reason. There is so little evidence…””

Mark Clifton book They'd Rather Be Right

Source: They'd Rather Be Right (1954), p. 16.

Men, Pain, Disease, Faith

“When you claim that the universe started in this particular way you are making a very profound statement. If I make a statement saying that the sun started in a certain way, I would immediately be asked for proof that the sun started in that way. I will have to go around gathering evidence of w:Solar systems}Solar systems forming, stars forming. I will have to produce evidence saying that this is how new solar systems are being formed, so the sun must have been formed in the same manner. That is a reasonably credible assumption.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

Jayant Narlikar's Cosmology

Way, Star, Universe, Sun

“I cannot refrain… from expressing my surprise that, according to the report in The Times there should be so much complaint about the difficulty of understanding the new theory. It is evident that Einstein's little book "About the Special and the General Theory of Relativity in Plain Terms," did not find its way into England during wartime. Any one reading it will, in my opinion, come to the conclusion that the basic ideas of the theory are really clear and simple; it is only to be regretted that it was impossible to avoid clothing them in pretty involved mathematical terms, but we must not worry about that. …
The Newtonian theory remains in its full value as the first great step, without which one cannot imagine the development of astronomy and without which the second step, that has now been made, would hardly have been possible. It remains, moreover, as the first, and in most cases, sufficient, approximation. It is true that, according to Einstein's theory, because it leaves us entirely free as to the way in which we wish to represent the phenomena, we can imagine an idea of the solar system in which the planets follow paths of peculiar form and the rays of light shine along sharply bent lines—think of a twisted and distorted planetarium—but in every case where we apply it to concrete questions we shall so arrange it that the planets describe almost exact ellipses and the rays of light almost straight lines.
It is not necessary to give up entirely even the ether. …according to the Einstein theory, gravitation itself does not spread instantaneously, but with a velocity that at the first estimate may be compared with that of light. …In my opinion it is not impossible that in the future this road, indeed abandoned at present, will once more be followed with good results, if only because it can lead to the thinking out of new experimental tests. Einstein's theory need not keep us from so doing; only the ideas about the ether must accord with it.”

Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) Dutch physicist

Theory of Relativity: A Concise Statement (1920)

Books, Way, Imagination, Mathematics

“There is some good evidence man contributes to global warming. But I say, so what? We can deal with that. It's not a catastrophe. And cold is far worse for hurting people than warmth.”

John Stossel (1947) American consumer reporter, investigative journalist, author and libertarian columnist

[Fox & Friends, John Stossel, 2014-12-11, Fox News, Television], quoted in Fox segment on ‘ridiculous’ climate change devolves into talk of humans living with dinosaurs, Raw Story, David Edwards, 2014-12-11, 2014-12-15 http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/fox-segment-on-ridiculous-climate-change-devolves-into-talk-of-humans-living-with-dinosaurs/,

People, Hurt

“The musical comedies of the month are She’s a Good Fellow and The Lady in Red, both of which owe their book and lyrics to Anne Caldwell—evidently a native of New York, judged by the casualness with which she rhymes “teacher” and “reach a.””

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 2: 1919, p. 82

Books, Music, Teachers

“The link between Communism and traditional Christianity is so close that when Communists lose their faith, they usually and naturally flop over into Roman Catholicism. Whittaker Chambers was only the best known of the Marxists who, when disillusioned, reverted to an earlier form of his ruling superstition. Would-be atheists who do not become converted to the Marxist cult often retain in their minds the Christian residue that makes them susceptible to drivel about "all mankind," "One World," and the "humanitarian" sentimentality of do-gooders and similar pests--all of which find no confirmation in the facts of nature and the real world. There are even self-styled atheists who evidently think that the god in whom they do not believe stopped the biological evolution of anthropoids a hundred thousand years ago to make all talking species equal in some mysterious way that transcends the obvious and great difference between extant races in intelligence, character, and instincts, perhaps because the non-existing god equipped the several species with exactly equal souls.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"The Bear in the Bush", Liberty Bell (September 1990)
1990s

God, World, Faith, Way

“The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (1985) ed. Sterling McMurrin

History, Reading

“Since the belief in transmission of acquired adaptations arose from preconception rather than from evidence, it is worth observing that, rightly considered, the probability should surely be the other way. For the adaptations relate to every variety of exigency. To supply themselves with food, to find it, to seize and digest it, to protect themselves from predatory enemies whether by offence or defence, to counter-balance the changes of temperature, or pressure, to provide for mechanical strains, to obtain immunity from poison and from invading organisms, to bring the sexual elements into contact, to ensure the distribution of the type; all these and many more are accomplished by organisms in a thousand most diverse and alternative methods. Those are the things that are hard to imagine as produced by any concatenation of natural events; but the suggestions that organisms had had from the beginning innate in them a power of modifying themselves, their organs and their instincts so as to meet these multifarious requirements does not materially differ from the more overt appeals to supernatural intervention. The conception, originally introduced by Hering and independently by S. Butler, that adaptation is a consequence or product of accumulated memory was of late revived by Semon and has been received with some approval, especially by F. Darwin. I see nothing fantastic in the notion that memory may be unconsciously preserved with the same continuity that the protoplasmic basis of life possesses. That idea, though purely speculative and, as yet, incapable of proof or disproof contains nothing which our experience of matter or of life at all refutes. On the contrary, we probably do well to retain the suggestion as a clue that may some day be of service. But if adaptation is to be the product of these accumulated experiences, they must in some way be translated into terms of physiological and structural change, a process frankly inconceivable.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Source: Problems In Genetics (1913), p. 190

Life, Food, Way, Imagination

“O faithless brother what has happened that in vain you joined hands to violate my honour, and to stain your own hand with my blood. You gathered round yourself a band of persons addicted to vice … you excited this gang of villains to hate me … I appointed you to act for me. I ordered my friends to obey you … you are now out to destroy me. I was your guest you abused me. You swore at me in my face. That which you yourself deserved you ascribed to me. You inspired your servants with rancorous hatred of me. Even you taught your own barber your own falsehoods. He gave false evidence against the truth. You set in motion this great sedition …. Outwardly you pretended to be my friend. You attended my feast. You ate my meal of trust. Inwardly you manifested your falsehood until Shawal 23 [Presumably March 11, 1866] when I was keeping a fast you withheld bread and water from me. … By deceit you intercepted my epistles. Some of them which were to your advantage you paraded before the inhabitants of the city [i. e. Edirne]. At present am in straitened circumstances and you are in affluence. And yet you pretend the contrary.”

Subh-i-Azal (1831–1912) Persian religious leader

Quoted in Mirza Mustafa Katib's Response to Zayn al-Muqarrabin on page 46
Open Letter to Bahá'u'lláh

Hate, Truth, Water, Personality

“The work of Renoir, after that of Cézanne whose great influence had been manifested among artists, save us from whatever drying effect there is in pure abstraction. The rules that one might deduce in considering the work of these two masters appear to be more difficult to discover in the work of Renoir, who hides his efforts better. Whereas the continuous tension of the mind of Cézanne, his lack of self-confidence, prevent him from giving himself to us entirely even though he shows the evidence of his corrections, from which are easily (too easily) deduced rules that have a mathematical precision.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

critical quote on Cubism
In a short text of Matisse, 1918, written for the catalogue of 'Den Franske Utstilling', 1918, Copenhagen; as quoted in Matisse on Art, Jack Flam, University of California Press 1995 p. 272, note 2
1910 - 1920

Quotes, Confidence, Mathematics, Effort

“The Prosecution holds me responsible for the concentration camps, for the destruction of Jewish life, for Einsatzgruppen and other things. All of this is neither in accord with the evidence nor with the truth. The accusers as well as the accused are exposed to the dangers of a summary proceeding. It is correct that I had to take over the Reich Security Main Office. There was no guilt in that in itself. Such offices exist in governments of other nations too. However, the task and activity assigned to me in 1943 consisted almost exclusively in the reorganization of the German political and military intelligence service, though not as Heydrich's successor. Almost a year after his death I had to accept this post under orders and as an officer at a time when suspicion fell on Admiral Canaris of having collaborated with the enemy for years. In a short time I ascertained the treason of Canaris and his accomplices to the most frightful extent.”

Ernst Kaltenbrunner (1903–1946) Austrian-born senior official of Nazi Germany executed for war crimes

8/31/46. Quoted in "Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal" - Nuremberg, Germany - 1947

Life, Death, Truth, Intelligence

“As American foreign policy has moved toward the open use of military power to dominate other states, the employment of Orwellian language has become more frequent. Words with emotionally satisfying (or repellant) qualities are increasingly employed to describe their precise opposites. Nowhere is this more in evidence than the claim by President Johnson and Secretary Rusk that the goal of American policy in Southeast Asia is the preservation of “independent” states.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: America's Vietnam Policy, with Richard B. Du Boff, 1966, p. 89.

“But there are many unsophisticated Christians out there … who take the Bible very seriously indeed as a literal and accurate record of history and hence as evidence supporting the religious beliefs. Do these people never open the book that they believe is the literal truth? Why don't they notice the glaring contradictions?”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 120

People, Truth, Books, History

“The basic hypothesis is that, while the total supply of entrepreneurs varies among societies, the productive contribution of the society's entrepreneurial activities varies much more because of their allocation between productive activities such as innovation and largely unproductive activities such as rent seeking or organized crime. This allocation is heavily influenced by the relative payoffs society offers to such activities. This implies that policy can influence the allocation of entrepreneurship more effectively than it can influence its supply. Historical evidence from ancient Rome, early China, and the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe is used to investigate the hypotheses.”

William J. Baumol (1922–2017) American economist

Source: "Entrepreneurship: Productive, unproductive, and destructive," 1996, p. 3

Age

“I considered that the painter's personality should be kept out of things, and therefore pictures should be anonymous. It was I who decided that pictures should not be signed, and for a time Picasso did the same. I thought that from the moment someone else could do the same as myself, there was no difference between the pictures and they should not be signed. Afterwards I realized it was not so and began to sign my pictures again. Picasso had begun again anyhow. I realized that one cannot reveal oneself without mannerism, without some evident trace of one's personality. But all the same one should not go too far in that direction..”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1946 - 1963, In conversation with Dora Vallier' (1954), p. 265

Time, Personality

“Ten thousand people a day die of starvation, according to a United Nations survey. Thousands more die from disease daily: we have earth-quakes, floods. droughts and pestilence. These are only a few of the evidences which show us that something is drastically wrong with our relationship with our creator. All of humanity’s problems stem from rebellion to The Word of God. Since mans rejection of God we have lived in this fallen state, where our weather patterns are chaotic, animals devour each other, our crops are diseased, and multitudes are suffering and dying from sickness and disease. These are stark reminders that what The Word of God says is true.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Cults, Sects and Questions (c. 1979)

God, People, Disease, Problem

“The standard Christian conscience does not permit the believer to look upon the self and find beauty, goodness, natural kindness, strength. Self-knowledge is tainted with self-hatred. The rules of the game of the Christian conscience are such that, when I look within, I must take the blame for all evil, all hardness of the heart that I find, but give God all the credit for any evidence of love. … It is not surprising that the practice of meditation … has remained under a cloud in the West, and that we have, consequently, created a culture of extroverts.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 162

Love, God, Beauty, Game

“Islamic literary sources provide far more extensive evidence of temple destruction by the Muslim invaders of India in medieval times. They also cover a larger area, from Sinkiang and Transoxiana in the North to Tamil Nadu in the South, and from the Seistan province of present-day Iran in the West to Assam in the East. As we wade through this evidence, we can visualise how this vast area, which was for long the cradle of Hindu culture, came to be literally littered with the ruins of temples and monasteries belonging to all schools of Sanãtana Dharma-Bauddha, Jaina, Šaiva, Šãkta, VaishNava and the rest. Archaeological explorations and excavations in modern times have proved unmistakably that most of the mosques, mazãrs, ziãrats and dargãhs which were built in this area in medieval times, stood on the sites of and were made from the materials of deliberately demolished Hindu monuments.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

School, Time

“By Science is understood a Knowledge acquired by, or founded on clear and self evident Principles, whence it follows that the Mathematicks may truly be stiled such.”

Jacques Ozanam (1640–1718) French mathematician

Source: A Mathematical Dictionary: Or; A Compendious Explication of All Mathematical Terms, 1702, p. 1, The Introduction

Knowledge, Science

“Like Nietzsche, he rails at romanticism, but it is evident that what they both mean by the word is the clichés of second-hand romance. Historic romanticism is in fact the ground-work of their philosophy.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

Source: Bernard Shaw in Twilight (1943), IV

“The image that creates this thinking gives rise to a feeling of evidence and a conviction that it is not based on reason. This kind of thinking explains the reaction we so often note among our contemporaries: when someone asks them to give the reason for their opinions, they answer: "It’s evident." This thinking, which creates prejudices and stereotypes, is the domain of the unquestionable. Obviously you cannot dispute with an image, and you cannot challenge the hero of a film. But this extends to the mental images produced by the film: there is no criticism or debate possible, because these involve differing methods of thought. What produces immediate assent cannot bear the discussion process. The conviction acquired in this way can only be attacked on its own ground: by other images.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 213
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

Way, Feeling, Thinking

“NOTHING IS TRUE. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.
A decade on and the rest of the page remains blank for we still cannot find a single datum that remains true under all possible circumstances, nor evidence of the impossibility of anything under all possible circumstances.
But by all means have a go….”

Peter J. Carroll (1953) British occultist

Source: PsyberMagick (1995), p. 83

“I thought that the evidence against your claims about me would shame you into changing your behavior. But, five years since you started misrepresenting my role in the founding of Wikipedia, you’re still at it.”

Larry Sanger (1968) American former professor, co-founder of Wikipedia, founder of Citizendium and other projects

"An open letter to Jimmy Wales" Citizendium.org (8 April 2009) http://blog.citizendium.org/2009/04/08/an-open-letter-to-jimmy-wales-copy/.

Behavior, Change

“Nothing is more perishable than worn-out apparel, yet, thanks to documentary evidence, to the custom of burying people of high rank in their robes, and to the practice of wrapping up relics of saints in pieces of precious stuffs, we are enabled to form a veiy good idea of what these stuffs were like and where they came from. In the first instance they appear to have come from Byzantium, and from the East generally; but the manufacture afterwards extended to Sicily, and received great impetus at the Norman conquest of that island; Roger I. even transplanting Greek workmen from the towns sacked by his army, and settling them in Sicily. Of course many of the workers would be Mohammedans, and the old patterns, perhaps with the addition of sundry animals, would still continue in use; hence the frequency of Arabic inscriptions in the borders, the Cufic character being one of the most ornamental ever used. In the Hotel de Clu^ny at Paris are preserved the remains of the vestments of a bishop of Bayonne, found when his sepulchre was opened in 1853, the date of the entombment being the twelfth century. Some of these remains are cloth of gold, but the most remarkable is a very deep border ornamented with blue Cufic letters on a gold ground; the letters are fimbriated with white, and from them issue delicate red scrolls, which end in Arabic sort of flowers: this tissue probably is pure Eastern work. On the contrary, the coronation robes of the German emperors, although of an Eastern pattern, bear inscriptions which tell us very clearly where they were manufactured: thus the Cufic characters on the cope inform us that it was made in the city of Palermo in the year 1133, while the tunic has the date of 1181, but then the inscription is in the Latin language. The practice of putting Cufic inscriptions on precious stuffs was not confined to the Eastern and Sicilian manufactures; in process of time other Italian cities took up the art, and, either because it was the fashion, or because they wished to pass off" their own work as Sicilian or Eastern manufacture, imitations of Arabic characters are continually met with, both on the few examples that have come down to us of the stuffs themselves, or on painted statues or sculptured effigies. These are the inscriptions which used to be the despair of antiquaries, who vainly searched out their meaning until it was discovered that they had no meaning at all, and that they were mere ornaments. Sometimes the inscriptions appear to be imitations of the Greek, and sometimes even of the Hebrew. The celebrated ciborium of Limoges work in the Louvre, known as the work of Magister G. Alpais, bears an ornament around its rim which a French antiquary has discovered to be nothing more than the upper part of a Cufic word repeated and made into a decoration.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Quote was introduced with the phrase: In the lecture on the weaver's art, we are reminded of the superiority of Indian muslins and Chinese and Persian carpets, and the gorgeous costumes of the middle ages are contrasted with our own dark ungraceful garments. The Cufic inscriptions that have so perplexed antiquaries, were introduced with the rich Eastern stuffs so much sought after by the wealthy class, and though, as Mr. Burges observes Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 85; Cited in: " Belles Lettres http://books.google.com/books?id=0EegAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA143" in: The Westminster Review, Vol. 84-85. Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1865. p. 143

People, Art, Search, Flowers

“The attitude of Aristotelian physics toward lawfulness takes a new direction. So long as lawfulness remained limited to such processes as occurred repeatedly in the same way, it is evident, not only that the young physics still lacked the courage to extend the principle to all physical phenomena, but also that the concept of lawfulness still had a fundamentally historic, a temporally particular, significance. Stress was laid not upon the “general validity” which modem physics understands by lawfulness, but upon the events in the historically given world which displayed the required stability. The highest degree of lawfulness, beyond mere frequency, was characterized by the idea of the always eternal.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, The conflict between Aristotelian and Galileian modes of thought in contemporary psychology, 1931, p. 147.

World, Law, Way, Idea

Quotes about evidence page 7

Quotes about evidence
page 7