Quotes about fact (7437 quotes, page 15)

“I don't get this at all. It's like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

People

“We're more concerned about our own "victory" over sin than we are about the fact that our sins grieve God's heart.”

Jerry Bridges (1929–2016) American writer

Source: The Pursuit of Holiness

God , Victory , Heart

“Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

Source: Power & Light

Change , Hurt

“A computer chatted to itself in alarm as it noticed an airlock open and close itself for no apparent reason.
This was because Reason was in fact out to lunch.”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“That's what you get for telling the truth. Someone calls you a liar. Most people will accept a likely lie to an unlikely truth. In fact, they prefer it.”

Laurell K. Hamilton (1963) Novelist

People , Truth , Lie

“As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it.”

Elizabeth Kostova book The Historian

A Note to the Reader
Source: The Historian (2005)
Context: As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claw.

History , Learning

“The truth is more important than the facts.”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

Wise , Truth

“It's all connected. When you save any part of the world, you've saved the whole world. In fact, that's the only way it can be done.”

Robin Hobb (1952) American fiction writer (pseudonym)

Source: Golden Fool

World , Way , Parting

“The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.”

Carl Sagan book Broca's Brain

Broca's Brain (1979), p. 64 http://books.google.com/books?id=90DuAAAAMAAJ
Source: Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
Context: The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Leadership , Funny

“The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms”

Bruno Latour (1947) French sociologist, philosopher and anthropologist

Source: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

World

“Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.”

Dorothy Dunnett (1923–2001) British writer

Imagination

“He wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old techniques didn’t work anymore. In fact, they’d never worked. How do you stop loving someone? It was one of the world’s more brutal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked.”

Ann Brashares (1967) American children's writer

Love , World

“Congratulations. The fact that you're reading this means you've taken one giant step closer to surviving until your next birthday.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

Birthday , Reading

“Most murders are committed by someone who is known to the victim. In fact, you are most likely to be murdered by a member of your own family on Christmas day.”

Mark Haddon (1962) English writer and illustrator

Source: The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time

Family , Christmas

“Absorbing the fact that sometimes, people do cut you slack and forgive you and want you anyway.

Sometimes they do. And when they do, even if it's not a happy ending, it is delicious”

E. Lockhart (1967) American writer of novels as E. Lockhart (mainly for teenage girls) and of picture books under real name Emily J…

Source: The Treasure Map of Boys: Noel, Jackson, Finn, Hutch, Gideon—and me, Ruby Oliver

People , Forgiveness , Happiness

“Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads or you shall learn nothing.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, Reply to Charles Kingsley (1860)
Context: Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.
Context: Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

Nature , Learning

“People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are. I mean, do you actually realize how much adult conversation is spent on this fuckin business? Facts treated like they were opinions just for the simple purpose of talking about it longer? Some people might think that's interesting, bub, but I'll tell you. It's romanticizing a goddamn rock by calling it a mountain range to me. People waste a helluva lot of time they could be putting to useful purposes. This is a game. See it and forget about it.”

Richard Ford The Sportswriter

Source: The Sportswriter (1986), p. 104

People , Stupidity , Mountain , Game

“I was in analysis. I was suicidal. As a matter of fact, I would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian and if you kill yourself they make you pay for the sessions you miss.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Standup Comic (1999)
Source: Annie Hall: Screenplay

Suicide

“Love potions? For Will Herondale? T’aint my way to turn down payment, but any man who looks like you has got no need of love potions, and that’s a fact.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Love , Way

“We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Frankfurt Book Fair speech (2003)
Context: We are told we must choose — the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new? It seems to me that one should always be seeking to talk oneself out of these stark oppositions.

Life

“The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty.

As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It's obvious, it stares you in the fact. Therebe a God and heknow anything about us.”

John Fowles book The Collector

Source: The Collector

God , Housing

“The sum of a million facts is not the truth.”

William Manchester (1922–2004) (April 1, 1922 – June 1, 2004) American author, journalist and historian

Truth

“and getting dressed we talk about what else there might be to do, but being together solves most of it, in fact, solves all of it”

Charles Bukowski book Mockingbird Wish Me Luck

Source: Mockingbird Wish Me Luck

“Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse.”

Jane Smiley (1949) American novelist

Source: A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck

Life , Learning , Reading , Horse

“They spent days, nights, weeks, and years talking, never accepting the fact that, good or bad, an idea only exists when someone tries to put it into practice.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Veronika Decides to Die

Idea , Night

“I don't wait for inspiration. I'm not, in fact, quite sure what inspiration is, but I'm sure that if it is going to turn up, my having started work is the precondition of its arrival.”

Quentin Blake (1932) English cartoonist, illustrator and children's writer

Source: Words and Pictures

Waiting

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”

George Eliot book Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Source: Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Ch, 4 (1879); comparable to. James Russell Lowell 1871: Blessed are they who have nothing to say, and who cannot be persuaded to say it. https://books.google.de/books?id=YRmn-_vXZ58C&pg=PA102&dq=persuaded

“Game over," you say, and I don't know which I take more exception to-- the fact that you say its over, or the fact that you say it's a game.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

Game

“I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

Memory

“It was almost enough to make me turn vegetarian, except for the pesky fact that I loved cheeseburgers.”

Rick Riordan book The Demigod Diaries

Source: The Demigod Diaries

Love

“Just because you didn't speak the facts out loud didn't erase their existence. Silence was just a quieter way to lie.”

Jodi Picoult book The Tenth Circle

Source: The Tenth Circle

Lie , Way , Silence

“I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Love , People , Truth

“I readily admit that the law which requires presumption or custom to be carried back for a period of nearly 700 years, is a bad and mischievous law, and one which is discreditable to us as a civilised and enlightened people, but such is the law; and while it so continues, I consider myself, in administering it, as bound to administer it as I find it; nor do I feel myself warranted in undermining or frittering it away by subtle fictions or artificial presumptions inconsistent with truth and fact.”

Sir Alexander Cockburn, 12th Baronet (1802–1880) Lord Chief Justice

Bryant v. Foot (1867), 15 W. R. 425; S. C. L. R. 2 Q. B. Ca. 179.

People , Truth , Law , Feeling

“Painting, in fact, is nothing else much than a tree, a man, or any other object, reflected in the water. The distinction between sculpture and painting, is as great as between the shadow and the substance.”

Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) Florentine sculptor and goldsmith

La Pittura non è altro, che o albero o uomo o altra cosa, che si specchi in un fonte. La differenza, che è dalla Scultura alla Pittura è tanta, quanto è dalla ombra e la cosa, che fa l'ombra.
Letter to Benedetto Varchi, January 28, 1546, cited from G. P. Carpani (ed.) Vita di Benvenuto Cellini (Milano: Nicolo Bettoni, 1821) vol. 3, p. 185; translation from Thomas Nugent (trans.) The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, a Florentine Artist (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1828) vol. 2, p. 265.

Tree , Water , Painting

“The Chinese system must be classified as a syllabic system of writing. More specifically, it belongs to the subcategory that I have labeled meaning-plus-sound syllabic systems or morphosyllabic systems. I use the term morphosyllabic in two senses. The first applies to the Chinese characters taken as individual units. Individual characters are morphosyllabic in the sense that they represent at once a single syllable and a single morpheme (except for the 11 percent or so of meaningless characters that represent sound only). In this usage the term is intended to replace the more widely used expressions logographic, word-syllabic, and morphemic, all of which are applied to individual characters taken as a unit. The second sense of the term refers to the structure of Chinese characters and is intended to draw attention to the fact that, in most cases, a character is composed of two elements, a phonetic grapheme which suggests the syllabic pronunciation of the full character, and a semantic element which hints at its meaning.”

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) American linguist

Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989, pp. 115-116) http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/index.html
Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989)

Sense , Drawing

“A million and a half of people spread over the Atlantic seaboard might be thought no great number; but it was a new thing in the world. …which had in fact been carefully noted by Benjamin Franklin in a pamphlet on The Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.—that within three-quarters of a century the population of the continental colonies had doubled every twenty-five years, whereas the population of Old England during a hundred years past had not doubled once and now stood at only some six and a half millions. …With these facts in mind, one might indeed say that a people with so much vitality and expansive power was abundantly able to pay taxes; but perhaps it was also a fair inference, if any one was disposed to press the matter, that unless it was so minded, such a people was already, or assuredly soon would be, equally able not to pay them.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The Eve of the Revolution (1918)

People , World , Past , Country

“When an active individual of sound common sense perceives the sordid state of the world, desire to change it becomes the guiding principle by which he organizes given facts and shapes them into a theory. The methods and categories as well as the transformation of the theory can be understood only in connection with his taking of sides. This, in turn, discloses both his sound common sense and the character of the world. Right thinking depends as much on right willing as right willing on right thinking.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 162.

World , Thinking , Sense , Change

“Do not let your zeal for the cause of democracy deceive you as to the fact of the opaque ignorance in which the great bulk of the people of England are wrapt. If you write for the masses politically, and write soundly and honestly, they will not be able at present to appreciate you, and consequently will not support you…There is no remedy for all this but improved education. Such as the tail and the body are, such will be the character of the head. Nature does not produce such monsters as an ignorant or vicious community, and virtuous and wise leaders. In Scotland you are better off because you are better educated. The great body of the English peasants are not a jot advanced in intellect since the days of their Saxon ancestors. I hope you will join us in a cry for schoolmasters as a first step to Radicalism.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to W. Tait (17 August 1838), quoted in John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), p. 127.
1830s

People , Education , Hope , Democracy

“The House of Lords, in rejecting the Budget which provides for the national expenditure of the year, are refusing, for the first time since the great Rebellion, aids and supplies to the Crown, and by that fact and by their intrusion upon finance they commit an act of violence against the British Constitution. There is no precedent of any kind for the rejection of a Budget Bill by the House of Lords in all the long annals of the British Parliament, or, before that, in the still more venerable annals of the English Parliament. The custom of centuries forbids their intrusion upon finance.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 25
Early career years (1898–1929)

Time , Housing

“Empiricism and positivism share the common view that scientific knowledge should in some way be derived from the facts arrived at by observation.”

Alan Chalmers book What Is This Thing Called Science?

Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 1, Science as knowledge derived form the facts of experience, p. 3.

Way , Knowledge

“In these facts we discover the cause of the popular discontent and outbreaks which have so frequently threatened the stability of the British throne and the peace of the English people. As early as 1770 Lord Chatham said, 'By the end of this century, either the Parliament must be reformed from within, or it will be reformed with a vengeance from without.' The disastrous failure of Republicanism in France delayed the fulfillment of his prophecy; but when, in 1832, the people were on the verge of revolt, the government was reluctantly compelled to pass the celebrated Reform Bill, which has taken its place in English history beside Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights. It equalized the basis of representation, and extended the suffrage to the middle class; and though the property qualification practically excluded the workingman, a great step upward had been taken, a concession had been made which must be followed by others. The struggle is again going on. Its omens are not doubtful. The great storm through which American liberty has just passed gave a temporary triumph to the enemies of popular right in England. But our recent glorious triumph is the signal of disaster to tyranny, and victory for the people. The liberal party in England are jubilant, and will never rest until the ballot, that 'silent vindicator of liberty', is in the hand of the workingman, and the temple of English liberty rests on the broad foundation of popular suffrage. Let us learn from this, that suffrage and safety, like liberty and union, are one and inseparable.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

People , Peace , History , Failure

“The most pertinent fact about the new state of things after Constantine and Augustine is not that Christians were no longer persecuted and began to be privileged, nor that emperors built churches and presided over ecumenical deliberations about the Trinity; what matters is that the two visible realities, church and world, were fused. There is no longer anything to call "world"; state, economy, art, rhetoric, superstition, and war have all been baptized.”

Constantinianism Policies

John Howard Yoder, "The Otherness of the Church" (1961) in A Reader in Ecclesiology (2012), p. 200

War , World , Art , Reality

“Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible. But I told the grand jury today and I say to you now that at no time did I ask anyone to lie, to hide or destroy evidence or to take any other unlawful action.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

Televised address on August 17, 1998 CNN transcript http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/08/17/speech/transcript.html
1990s

Lie , Failure , Time , Parting

“You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

“The facts, indeed, connected with this gloomy department of statistics show that the most valuable period of human life—that in which a man is producing more than he is consuming—is that which provides the greatest number of victims.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) (1802–1871) Scottish publisher and writer

Source: Sanitary Economy (1850), p. 18

Life

“Flog me if you wish,” she said, though her trembling hands belied her brave words. “It will not change the fact that you were wrong, and I was right!”

David D. Levine (1961) science fiction writer

Source: Arabella and the Battle of Venus (2017), Chapter 7, “Calculating a New Course” (p. 95)

Change

“When there is a discrepancy between an individual's actual social identity and his virtual one, it is possible for this fact to be known to us before we normals contact him, or to be quite evident when he presents himself before us.”

Erving Goffman book Stigma

Source: 1950s-1960s, Stigma, 1963, p. 56

“The penalty for apostasy is death. We would do well to linger over this fact for a moment, because it is the black pearl of intolerance that no liberal exegesis will ever fully digest….. As a source of objective morality, the Bible is one of the worst books we have. It might be the very worst, in fact—if we didn’t also happen to have the Qur’an.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris - http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=sharris_26_3 The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos - The Council for Secular Humanism https://wikiislam.net/wiki/Quotations_on_Islam_from_Notable_Non-Muslims
2010s

Death , Books , Penalty

“Insurance companies nowadays apply the principle of so-called 'selection by insurance'; this means that they take into consideration the fact that persons who enter early into insurance contracts are on the average of a different type and have a different distribution of death ages from persons from persons admitted to the insurance at a more advanced age.”

Richard von Mises (1883–1953) Austrian physicist and mathematician

First Lecture, The Definition of Probability, p. 18
Probability, Statistics And Truth - Second Revised English Edition - (1957)

Death , Age , Personality

“Unlike the liberty of the early republic, the modern version permits — in fact even requires — concentrated power.”

Michael J. Sandel (1953) American political philosopher

The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self, 1984

“My parents kept things real. I had no idea they were famous. In fact, it didn’t hit me until one day when I was riding in the car with my father in Ann Arbor, Michigan—I was maybe 8 and could barely see above the dashboard—and we stopped at a crosswalk. Suddenly we were surrounded by people who recognized my dad and were really thrilled to see him. I remember looking at this man I thought I knew so well and thinking, “Who are you?””

Mark Harmon (1951) actor from the United States

TV Insider interview (2017)

People , Cars , Idea , Thinking

“It was long ago in my life as a simple reporter that I decided that facts must never get in the way of truth.”

James Cameron (journalist) (1911–1985) British journalist

The Encarta Book of Quotations (2000), p. 173 http://books.google.com/books?id=Af84fBmzmVYC&q=%22It+was+long+ago+in+my+life+as+a+simple+reporter+that+I+decided+that+facts+must+never+get+in+the+way+of+truth%22&pg=PA173#v=onepage
Attributed

Life , Truth , Way

“In the twilight of late enlightenment, the insight gains shape that our "praxis," which we always held to be the most legitimate child of reason, in fact, represents the central myth of modernity.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 539

“If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid.”

Herman Melville book The Encantadas

Sketch Eighth
The Encantadas (1854)

Men , Books , Dreams , Hurt

“Conflicts do not arise out of the blue. They occur as a result of causes and conditions, many of which are within the antagonists’ control. This is where leadership is important. Terrorism cannot be overcome by the use of force because it does not address the underlying problems. In fact the use of force may not only fail to solve the problems, it may exacerbate them, and frequently leaves destruction and suffering in its wake.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

:Dalai Lama in his “Commemoration of the First Anniversary of September 11, 2001

Problem , Suffering

“One reason nearly half my books are for children is the glorious fact that the minds of children are still open to the living word; in the child, nightside and sunside are not yet separated; fantasy contains truths which cannot be stated in terms of proof.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)

Children , Truth , Books

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

Jonathan Haidt (1963) American psychologist

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)

Fate , People , World , Fight

“I never exert pressure on my children: I encourage the children, Katija and Rahima, to pursue their dreams. Rahima is embarrassed by autograph-seekers and doesn't want me to visit her school. In fact, I have never attended a single PTA meeting or gone to pick up the report cards of my children.”

A. R. Rahman (1966) Indian singer and composer

A R Rahman: In tune with life

Children , School , Dreams

“ There is […] no necessary connection between the symbol and that which is symbolized. Just as men can wear yachting costumes without ever having been near a yacht, so they can make the noise "I'm hungry" without being hungry. Furthermore, just as social rank can be symbolized by feathers in the hair, by tattooing on the breast, by gold ornaments on the watch chain, or by a thousand different devices according to the culture we live in, so the fact of being hungry can be symbolized by a thousand different noises according to the culture we live in: "J'ai faim," or "Es hungert mich," or "Ho appetito," or "Hara ga hetta," and so on.”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), Language as Symbolism, p. 27

Men , Tattoo

“Culture has been distinguished from the other elements of action by the fact that it is intrinsically transmissible from one action system to another from personality to personality by learning and from social system to social system by diffusion. This is because culture is constituted by "ways of orienting and acting," these ways being "embodied in" meaningful symbols.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Source: Toward a general theory of action (1951), p. 159

Way , Learning , Personality

“Only a book written by the God who knows the end from the beginning could predict the future with one hundred percent accuracy. The God of the Bible (unlike all other “gods”) is not limited by time, space, or matter. He created all of those on Day One and is “above” and “outside of” and “not limited by” His creation in any way. We are the ones who are limited by time, space, and matter, not God. The fact that He knows the future does not mean that He controls the future and we are robots acting out a pre-programmed set of instructions. He has complete knowledge, yet we have complete control at all times. He could step in and control everything, but then we would be robots and not humans. It is called Free Will. That’s a gift God gave to mankind.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), pp. 6-7

God , Books , Way , Knowledge

““This is the first award I received…In fact, I consider this priceless. This was presented to me by Sri. Godavarma Bhattan Thampuran of Kodungallur (Cranganore) Palace years ago. I was only 22 then. Those were days when Kodungallur used to witness the best assembly of scholars in Sanskrit and the sasthras. Present on that day were several highly learned men and women. The stage was in front of Sringapuram temple. I presented Bhagavad Dooth Prabhantham Koothu. My interpretation of one of the slokas was a little more elaborate than and different from the custom-worn treatment. The audience liked it. In appreciation, Bhattan Thampuran removed this ring from his finger and put it on mine. The spontaneous gesture in recognition of my art naturally is the most precious to me ”
-Guru Māni Mādhava Chākyār, about his prized possession- the golden ring from the great scholar H. H Bhattan Thampuran”

Mani Madhava Chakyar (1899–1990) Indian actor

Awards
Source: K. A. Chandrahasan, In pursuit of excellence (Performing Arts), "The Hindu", Sunday March 26, 1989

Women , Men , Art , Nature

“The plain fact is that many of the reputations which today occupy the poetic limelight are such as would crumble immediately if poetry such as Empson's, with its passion, logic, and formal beauty, were to become widely known.”

William Empson (1906–1984) English literary critic and poet

John Wain "Ambiguous Gifts", in The Penguin New Writing no. 40 (1950); cited from John Lehmann and Roy Fuller (eds.) The Penguin New Writing 1940-1950: An Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) p. 492.
Criticism

Beauty , Passion

“I have come across men of letters who have written history without taking part in public affairs, and politicians who have concerned themselves with producing events without thinking about them. I have observed that the first are always inclined to find general causes whereas the second, living in the midst of disconnected daily facts, are prone to imagine that everything is attributable to particular incidents, and that the wires they pull are the same as those that move the world. It is to be presumed that both are equally deceived.”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 80 http://books.google.com/books?id=3gtoAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA80&dq=%22come+across+men+of+letters+who+have+written+history+without+taking+part+in+public+affairs%22
1850s and later

Men , World , Imagination , History

“God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

As quoted in Nature Vol. 149 (Jan-Jun) 1942 p. 291, and A Philosophy for Our Time (1954) by Bernard Mannes Baruch, p. 13
1890s

God

“I know that I disagree with many other UML experts, but there is no magic about UML. If you can generate code from a model, then it is programming language. And UML is not a well-designed programming language.
The most important reason is that it lacks a well-defined point of view, partly by intent and partly because of the tyranny of the OMG standardization process that tries to provide everything to everybody. It doesn't have a well-defined underlying set of assumptions about memory, storage, concurrency, or almost anything else. How can you program in such a language?
The fact is that UML and other modelling language are not meant to be executable. The point of models is that they are imprecise and ambiguous. This drove many theoreticians crazy so they tried to make UML "precise", but models are imprecise for a reason: we leave out things that have a small effect so we can concentrate on the things that have big or global effects. That's how it works in physics models: you model the big effect (such as the gravitation from the sun) and then you treat the smaller effects as perturbation to the basic model (such as the effects of the planets on each other). If you tried to solve the entire set of equations directly in full detail, you couldn't do anything.”

James Rumbaugh (1947) Computer scientist, software engineer

James Rumbaugh in Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden eds. (2009) Masterminds of Programming. p. 339; cited in " Quote by James Rumbaugh http://www.ptidej.net/course/cse3009/winter13/resources/james" on ptidej.net. Last updated 2013-04-09 by guehene; Rumbaugh is responding to the question: "What do you think of using UML to generate implementation code?"

Memory , Sun

“Knowing what you can not do is more important than knowing what you can do. In fact, that's good taste.”

Lucille Ball (1911–1989) American actress and businesswoman

Quoted in Eleanor Harris, The Real Story of Lucille Ball, ch. 1 (1954)

“We are conscious of the fact that the timely passage of the budget is the key to fuel not only the entire government machinery but also our capability and capacity as a nation especially in this challenging time.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Samar News http://www.samarnews.com/news_clips24/news508.htm
2013

Time

“Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.”

Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) American teacher and writer

Source: The Roman Way (1932), Ch. 1

Nature

“I think sometimes we can disagree with the facts … But our intention is never to lie to you.”

Sean Spicer (1971) American political strategist and former White House Press Secretary and Communications Director for President…

Sean Spicer says the White House will be honest, but can disagree with the facts http://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/press-secretary-sean-spicer-says-the-white-house-will-be-honest/news-story/f229fdf7dcc781ec6438cc51031e266f (January 24, 2017)

Lie , Thinking

“When I behold the scientific and so-called philosophers full of selfish feelings, and of a tenency to war against circumstances and Providence, I say to myself: They are not true priests, they are but half prophets — it not absolutely false ones. They have read the great page simply with the physical eye, and with none of the spirit within. The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole… That God is one, and that all the works and the feelings He has called into existence are ONE; this is a truth (a biblical and scriptural truth too) not in my opinion developed to the apprehension of most people in its really deep and unfanthomable meaning. There is too much tendency to making separate and independent bundles of both the physical and the moral facts of the universe. Whereas, all and everything is naturally related and interconnected. A volume could I write you on this subject.”

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) English mathematician, considered the first computer programmer

In a letter to Andrew Crosse, as quoted in Eugen Kölbing's Englische Studien, Volume 19 https://archive.org/stream/englischestudien19leipuoft#page/158/mode/1up (1894), Leipzig; O.R. Reisland, "Byron's Daughter", p. 158.

God , War , People , Truth

“Like Christianity, Buddhism explained suffering. In forms that established themselves in China, Buddhism offered the same sort of comfort to bereaved survivors and victims of violence or of disease as Christian faith did in the Roman world. Buddhism of course originated in India, where disease incidence was probably always very high as compared with civilizations based in cooler climates; Christianity, too, took shape in the urban environments of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria where the incidence of infectious disease was certainly very high as compared to conditions in cooler and less crowded places. From their inception, therefore, both faiths had to deal with sudden death by disease as one of the conspicuous facts of human life. Consequently, it is not altogether surprising that both religions taught that death was a release from pain, and a blessed avenue of entry upon a delightful afterlife where loved ones would be reunited, and earthly injustices and pains amply compensated for.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.3.

Love , Life , Death , Pain

“Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole.”

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975) geneticist and evolutionary biologist

"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" (1973)

Light , Science

“The decline of Indian Buddhism was centrally due to the fact that it never offered the Indian laity a complete religion. Early Buddhism knew no ceremonies for birth and death, marriage, illness, and other critical turns of private life… Only for the community of monks did Buddhism provide a complete and well-defined way of life. …But Brahmins were needed for all the ordinary crises in life, ready with their rites and sacred formulas to ward off danger or minimize the damage. This elemental fact assured the survival of Brahminism in India.”

William H. McNeill book The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community

The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963)

Life , Death , Marriage , Religion

“A few years ago I had to answer some searching questions to a Customs official about a book which I had with me, printed in Latin, and which the official suspected to be Russian; it was a jestbook, as a matter of fact, and I was so foolish as to say so, forgetting that a Latin joke is as strange to the modern imagination as a unicorn or an amphisbaena.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Books , Imagination , Search , Question

“…thousands of little children occupy sleeping quarters with parents and boarders whose every act is visible to all. Morality indeed! Society is much like the ostrich with its head in the sand. It will not look at facts and face the responsibility of its own stupidity.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

"Morality and Birth Control", February-March, 1918, pp. 11,14.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

Children , Stupidity , Parent , Sleep

“It is a true, incorruptible purism... It is a religion that cannot be argued about. It has its saints, its disciples and its heretics. Modern life with its speed and tumult, dynamic and full of contrasts, beats furiously against this light, luminous, delicate structure, which emerges coldly from the chaos. Do not touch it, it is an accomplished fact. It had to be, it is there to stay.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

quote, 1945
Quote, 1945 of Fernand Leger, in Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 33
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1940's

Life , Religion , Quotes , Light

“The circumstances of the camping trip are multiply special: many features distinguish it from the circumstances of life in a modern society. One may therefore not infer, from the fact that camping trips of the sort that I have described are feasible and desirable, that society-wide socialism is equally feasible and equally desirable. There are too many major differences between the contexts for that inference to carry any conviction. What we urgently need to know is precisely what are the differences that matter, and how can socialists address them? Because of its contrasts with life in the large, the camping trip model serves well as a reference point for purported demonstrations that socialism across society is not feasible and/or desirable, since it seems eminently feasible and desirable on the trip.”

Gerald Cohen (1941–2009) Canadian philosopher

I. The Camping Trip
Why Not Socialism? (2009)

Life

“The idea of natural order, in effect, masks the state’s role. … Robert Hale … demonstrated the extent to which the distribution of income and wealth is the product of legal rules we choose to impose. Hale trained our attention on the foundational rules of property and contract law, showing how free, voluntary, compensated exchange is in fact a product of the legal coercion that the government establishes through its role in defining property rights.”

Bernard Harcourt (1963) American academic

Source: The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), p. 32

Law , Idea , Nature , Training

“As the mental endowment of a man varies with the organisation of his accumulated experiences, the better endowed he is, the more readily will he be able to remember his whole past, everything that he has ever thought or heard, seen or done, perceived or felt, the more completely in fact will he be able to reproduce his whole life. Universal remembrance of all its experiences, therefore, is the surest, most general, and most easily proved mark of a genius.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), pp. 114-115.

Life , Universe , Past

“I do not regard the late Carl Sagan as any kind of authority. On the contrary, as this book will show, I regard him in many ways as a dubious publicity seeker and careerist, more concerned to maintain his reputation as the brilliant and sceptical representative of hard-headed science than to look squarely and honestly at the facts. In short, a bit of a crook.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Alien Dawn (1998), pp. xix-xx

Books , Way , Science

“The term organization, and the principles that govern it, are inherent in every form of concerted human effort, even where there are no more than two people involved. For example take two men who combine their efforts to lift and move a stone that is too heavy to be moved by one. In the fact of this combination of effort we have the reality of human organization for a given purpose. Likewise in the procedure necessary to this end we find the fundamental principles of organization. To begin with, the two lifters must lift in unison. Without this combination of effort the result would be futile. Here we have co-ordination, the first principle of organization. Likewise one of these two must give the signal "heave ho!" or its equivalent, to the other, thus illustrating the principle of leadership or command. Again the other may have a suggestion to make to the leader in the matter of procedure, which involves the vital staff principle of advice or counsel. And so on. Thus in every form of concerted effort principles of organization are as essential and inevitable as organization itself.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: "The principles of organization", 1937, p. 90

Men , People , Reality , Effort

“Turning finally to the question raised, to be precise, it appears that [Hillary] Clinton received a slight majority of the vote. The apparent decisive victory [of Donald Trump] has to do with curious features of American politics: among other factors, the Electoral College residue of the founding of the country as an alliance of separate states; the winner-take-all system in each state; the arrangement of congressional districts (sometimes by gerrymandering) to provide greater weight to rural votes (in past elections, and probably this one too, Democrats have had a comfortable margin of victory in the popular vote for the House, but hold a minority of seats); the very high rate of abstention (usually close to half in presidential elections, this one included). Of some significance for the future is the fact that in the age 18-25 range, Clinton won handily, and Sanders had an even higher level of support. How much this matters depends on what kind of future humanity will face.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

First published in Truthout http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/38360-trump-in-the-white-house-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky on 14 November 2016. Then published in the book Optimism over Despair in 2017, pages 121-122 (ISBN 9780241981979).
Quotes 2010s, 2016

Age , Question , Support , Decision

“[Why do animals] undergo in the course of their growth a series of complicated changes, during which they acquire organs which have no function, and which, after remaining visible for a short time, disappear without leaving a trace... The explanation of such facts is obvious. The stage when the tadpole breathes by gills is a repetition of the stage when the ancestors of the frog had not advanced in the scale of development beyond a fish.”

Francis Maitland Balfour (1851–1882) British biologist

Comparative Embryology, p. 702. (1880)

Fish , Change , Time , Animals

“The Theory of Evolution, like the Theory of Gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened. Accepting our kinship with all life on earth is not only solid science, in my view, it's also a soaring spiritual experience. (From the second Cosmos: ASO episode, Some of the Things That Molecules Do.)”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014)

Life , Science

“No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
1900s, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

“The accepted cultivated speech of the contemporary language that Pāṇini describes in his Aṣṭādhyāyī must have coexisted with more vernacular varieties of speech in which there were features belonging to the Middle Indo-Aryan division of the language group. Several facts support this view.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Prof. George Cardona in:"Indo-Aryan languages".

Support

“During the last few years it has become apparent that the concept of "machine" must be very greatly extended if it is to include the most modern developments. Especially is this true if we are studying the brain and attempting to identify the type of mechanism that is responsible for the brain’s outstanding powers of thought and action. It has become apparent that when we used to doubt whether the brain could be a machine, our doubts were due chieﬂy to the fact that by ‘‘machine’’ we understood some mechanism of very simple type. Familiar with the bicycle and the typewriter, we were in great danger of taking them as the type of all machines. The last decade, however, has corrected this error. It has taught us how restricted our outlook used to be; for it developed mechanisms that far transcended the utmost that had been thought possible, and taught us that ‘‘mechanism’’ was still far from exhausted in its possibilities. Today we know only that the possibilities extend beyond our farthest vision.”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

W. Ross Ashby (1951), "Statistical Machinery". In: Thales Vol 7. p.1 as cited in: Peter M. Asaro (2008) " From Mechanisms of Adaptation to Intelligence Ampliﬁers: The Philosophy of W. Ross Ashby http://cybersophe.org/writing/Asaro%20Ashby.pdf"

Error , Study

“The proposition has… been laid down in the most general terms, "All evils are negations." Thus for man death is evil; death is his non-existence. Illness, poverty, and ignorance are evils for man; all these are privations of properties…. The destruction of other things is likewise nothing but the absence of their form. After these propositions, it must be admitted as a fact that it cannot be said of God that He directly creates evil, or He has the direct intention to produce evil; this is impossible. His works are all perfectly good. He only produces existence, and all existence is good; whilst evils are of a negative character, and cannot be acted upon.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.10

Death , God , Evil

“It is a fact that nine-tenths of the HUMAN RACE never have and never will think for themselves, about anything. Whether it's music or Reaganomics, say, almost everybody prefers to sit and wait till somebody who seems to have some kind of authority even if it's seldom too clear just where they got it to come along and inform them one and all what their position on the matter should be. Then they all agree that this is gospel, and gang up to persecute whatever minority might happen to disagree. This is the history of the human race, certainly the history of music.”

Lester Bangs (1948–1982) American music critic and journalist

"Untitled Notes" (1981), p. 374
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1988)

Music , History , Thinking , Waiting

“The right honorable gentlemen is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.”

Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816) Irish-British politician, playwright and writer

Sheridaniana, Speech in Reply to Mr. Dundas.

Imagination , Memory

“The main defect of idealism in philosophy and history is that it attempts to analyze the properties of societies by inference from the content of the dominant systems of ideas in those societies. But this neglects altogether the fact that there is not a unilateral relationship between values and power: the dominant class is able to disseminate ideas which are the legitimations of its position of dominance. Thus the ideas of freedom and equality which come to the fore in bourgeois society cannot be taken at their “face value,” as directly summing up social reality; on the contrary, the legal freedoms which exist in bourgeois society actually serve to legitimize the reality of contractual obligations in which propertyless wage-labor is heavily disadvantaged as compared to the owners of capital. … While ideologies obviously show continuity over time, neither this continuity. nor any changes which occur, can be explained purely in terms of their internal content. Ideas do not evolve on their own account; they do so as elements of the consciousness of men living in society.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

(describing Marx’s view), pp. 41-42.
Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971)

Men , History , Idea , Reality

“Exobiology - a curious development in view of the fact that this "science" has yet to demonstrate that its subject matter exists!”

George Gaylord Simpson (1902–1984) American paleontologist

Simpson in: Elie Alexis Shneour (1966) Extraterrestrial Life: An Anthology and Bibliography. p. 269

Science

“I use the term "Communist Jews" in exactly the same sense that I would say "Italian gangsters." Most Italians are not gangsters, but everybody knows that the Mafia is mostly Italians. Well, my experience is that communism is as Jewish as the Mafia is Italian. It's a fact that almost all of the convicted spies for communism have been atheist Jews like the Rosenbergs. And international communism was invented by the Jew Karl Marx and has since been led mostly by Jews — Trotsky.”

George Lincoln Rockwell (1918–1967) American politician, founder of the American Nazi Party

Interview with Alex Haley

Communication , Sense

“A passion for the infinite is daily presented as a sign of moral distinction, when in fact it can only occur in disturbed minds which accord the status of a norm to the very disturbance from which they are suffering.”

Émile Durkheim book Suicide

Suicide (1897)

Suffering , Passion

“The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies — easily checkable, blatant lies — and I’m not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men — 15 of them are Saudis — and five minutes later the whole country thinks they’re from Iraq — how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O. J. Simpson jurors.”

Fran Lebowitz (1950) author and public speaker from the United States

Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (August/September 2005).

Men , Education , Faith , Thinking

“The great error of traditional proofs of the existence of god is that they try to take a symbolic truth for a literal truth, a truth of fact, and then try to prove that it is a fact.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p. 149.

God , Truth , Error

“Only an unashamed dogmatist would dare to assert that the issue has finally been resolved now, in favor of the view that, outside logic or mathematics, the method of modern science is the only method to employ in seeking knowledge. The dogmatist who made this assertion would have to be more than ashamed. He would have to blind himself to the fact that his own assertion was not established by the experimental method, nor made as an indisputable conclusion of mathematical reasoning or of purely logical analysis.”

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

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Mathematics , Knowledge , Science

“Mr. Peres, you are older than I am. And your voice is genuinely loud. I know that it is because you are, in fact, in a psychology of feeling guilty, thus you better know that I will not sound that loud. And when killing is the case, you know how to kill very well. I know how you killed the children on the beaches, I know how you shot them. Two ex-PMs of your country once told me important things. You have had such prime ministers who said, "When I enter Palestine on a tank, I feel happy — in a different way." You have had PMs who said to me "I feel happy when I am on a tank while entering Palestine." And you give me those numbers. I would release their names, in case some of you might be curious of. I also condemn those who acclaim this cruelty, because I think it is a crime against humanity as well.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (1954) 12th President of Turkey from 2014

As quoted during a discussion panel at 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in "Turkish PM storms off in Gaza row" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/davos/7859417.stm, BBC (January 29, 2009)

Children , Way , Feeling , Thinking

“FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly, the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life. Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.”

Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) American philosopher

Source: Modularity of Mind (1983), p. 1

Life , Learning

Quotes about fact page 15

Quotes about fact
page 15