Quotes about fact
page 31

“To challenge and to cope with this paradoxical state of things, we need a paradoxical way of thinking; since the world drifts into delirium, we must adopt a delirious point of view. We must no longer assume any principle of truth, of causality, or any discursive norm. Instead, we must grant both the poetic singularity of events and the radical uncertainty of events. It is not easy. We usually think that holding to the protocols of experimentation and verification is the most difficult thing. But in fact the most difficult thing is to renounce the truth and the possibility of verification, to remain as long as possible on the enigmatic, ambivalent, and reversible side of thought.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

The Vital Illusion (2000) "The Murder of the Real". Wellek Library Lectures given May 1999 at the University of California, Irvine
New millennium

Truth, World, Way, Thinking

“It is significant that nothing resembling Platonism arose in China. Classical Chinese script is not ideographic, as used to be thought; but because of what A. C. Graham terms its 'combination of graphic wealth with phonetic poverty' it did not encourage the kind of abstract thinking that produced Plato's philosophy. Plato was what historians of philosophy call a realist - he believed that abstract terms designated spiritual or intellectual entities. In contrast, throughout its long history, Chinese thought has been nominalist - it has understood that even the most abstract terms are only labels, names for the diversity of things in the world. As a result, Chinese thinkers have rarely mistaken ideas for facts. Plato's legacy to European thought was a trio of capital letters - the Good, the Beautiful and the True. Wars have been fought and tyrannies established, cultures have been ravaged and peoples exterminated in the service of these abstractions. Europe owes much of its murderous history to errors of thinking engendered by the alphabet.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Deception: Plato and the alphabet (p. 57-8)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

War, People, World, Beauty

“Because of the information discussed on page nine, experts now suspect that there may in fact be one survivor of the fire, but the survivor's whereabouts are unknown.”

Daniel Handler book The Hostile Hospital

The Snicket File, page 13
The Hostile Hospital (2001)

“The question of whether a computer is playing chess, or doing long division, or translating Chinese, is like the question of whether robots can murder or airplanes can fly -- or people; after all, the "flight" of the Olympic long jump champion is only an order of magnitude short of that of the chicken champion (so I'm told). These are questions of decision, not fact; decision as to whether to adopt a certain metaphoric extension of common usage.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Powers and Prospects, 1996 https://chomsky.info/prospects01/. Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999

People, Question, Decision, Flying

“In philosophical anthropology, … where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

Source: Between Man and Man (1965), p. 147

Way, Nature, Science, Parting

“The truth is, Homo sapiens sapiens is pretty much the same the world over, regardless of skin color or technological development. Racists and provincial types have problems with this fact, but it is a fact. All mortals have the same potential, and only chance determines who’s playing a spinet or who’s clubbing dinner to death with a big rock. And, you know what? Mortals adapt to the environment in which they’re placed. Switch babies between savages and technologicals, and nobody notices! I know, because I’ve seen it done. I’ve seen the son of a club-carrying cave dweller fuming because his accounting software wasn’t quite adequate for his needs. All humans have the same brain package.”

Kage Baker book Sky Coyote

Source: Sky Coyote (1999), Chapter 11 (p. 72)

Death, Truth, World, Color

“The fact that the term fake news is now in the regular vocabulary of the American people is evidence enough Americans know the news is fake.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

"Hot Mic - Rejecting Fake News" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NShYFk9VCYs (25 July 2017) 2010s

People

“I think that it must in every case depend upon the nature of the transaction, whether the fact not disclosed is such, that it is impliedly represented not to exist; and that must generally be a question of fact proper for a jury.”

Colin Blackburn, Baron Blackburn (1813–1896) British judge

Lee v. Jones (1864), 17 C. B. (N. S.) 506.

Question, Nature, Thinking, Dependency

“If they leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature; if they think scientific research by itself yields final answers to social problems; if they think scientists are the only honest, patient, and careful workers in the world; if they think that Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, and Faraday were unimaginative plodders like their own instructors; if they think theories spring from facts and that scientific authority at any time is infallible; if they think that the ability to write down symbols and read manometers is fair grounds for superiority and pride, and if they think that science steadily and automatically makes for a better world — then they have wasted their time in the science lecture room; they live in an Ivory Laboratory more isolated than the poet's tower, and they are a plain menace to the society they belong to. They are a menace whether they believe all this by virtue of being engaged in scientific work themselves or of being disqualified from it by felt or fancied incapacity.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

On students, in Teacher in America (1945)

World, Spring, Nature, Problem

“Looking at this immensely swollen face in front of him the doctor gently consoled the patient, "Comrade, don't worry and you will recover." As a matter of fact, he was thinking quite the opposite, "You will die. I can be of no more help."”

Ba Jin (1904–2005) Chinese novelist

A Battle For Life (July 1958)

Thinking, Help

“I don't know what to write Feneon about the theory of 'passages'. I will write him what seems to me to be the truth of the matter, that I am at this moment looking for some substitute for the dot [which was the 'heart of [w:Neo-Impressionism|Neo-Impressionist]] painting]; so far I have not found what I want, the actual execution does not seem to me to be rapid enough and does not follow sensation with enough inevitability, but it would be best not to speak of this. The fact is I would be hard put to express my meaning clearly, although I am completely aware of what I lack.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Camille Pissarro, in a letter, Paris, 20 February 1889, to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 134-135
Rewald: 'This data was doubtless for an article in preparation. While the question of the 'passage', which was going to separate Camille Pissarro from pointillism and thus from Divisionism, was then the main preoccupation of the artist, Pissarro was still unable to express himself with precision on it.'
1880's

Truth, Heart, Painting

“Let us award a just, a brilliant homage to those rare men whom nature has endowed with the precious privilege of arranging a thousand isolated facts, of making seductive theories spring from them; but let us not forget to state, that the scythe of the reaper had cut the stalks before one had thought of uniting them into sheaves!”

François Arago (1786–1853) French mathematician, physicist, astronomer and politician

Joseph Fourier, p. 409.
Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men (1859)

Men, Spring, Nature, Forgetting

“…women aren't interested in the romance of dreams; they are interested in the reality of facts, they don't care what facts, let alone whether they are true or not if they just dovetail with all the other facts without leaving a saw-tooth edge.”

William Faulkner book The Town

Gavin Stevens paraphrasing Eula Varner Snopes in Ch. 15
The Town (1957)

Women, Dreams, Reality

“Let us imagine that the aboriginal-original human specimen was one of two brother apes, A and B; they were alike in every respect; both were animal space-binders; but something strange happened to B; he became the first time-binder, a human. … He had thus a new faculty, he belonged to a new dimension; but, of course, he did not realize it; and because he had this new capacity he was able to analyze his brother "A"; he observed "A is my brother; he is an animal; but he is my brother; therefore, I AM AN ANIMAL." This fatal first conclusion, reached by false analogy, by neglecting a fact, has been the chief source of human woe for half a million years and it still survives. … He [then] said to himself, "If I am an animal there is also in me something higher, a spark of some thing supernatural."”

Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) Polish scientist and philosopher

Source: Manhood of Humanity (1921), p. 67. Chapter: What is Man?

Imagination, Time, Animals, Falseness

“C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Message to gmane.comp.version-control.git mailing list, 2007-09-06, Torvalds, Linus, 2007-09-22 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57918, 2000s, 2007

“I think,” Chad grunted, “that if he [Shalmaneser, the computer] really is intelligent nobody will recognise the fact. Because we aren’t.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Intelligence, Thinking

“Back in the late 1950s, on the sleeve of the Beyond the Fringe record album, Jonathan Miller made a dark joke about his worst fear: being tortured for information that he did not possess. The assumption behind the joke was that if he had something to reveal, the agony would stop. He was looking back to a world of polite British fiction, not to a world of brute European fact. In the Nazi and Soviet cellars and camps, people were regularly tortured for information they did not possess: i. e. they were tortured just for the hell of it.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Terry Gilliam', p. 279
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

People, World, Fear, Hell

“When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior. But the significance of the verb to be must be rightly understood here; it is in bad faith to give it a static value when it really has the dynamic Hegelian sense of "to have become." Yes, women on the whole are today inferior to men; that is, their situation affords them fewer possibilities. The question is: should that state of affairs continue?
Many men hope that it will continue; not all have given up the battle.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

Introduction : Woman as Other
The Second Sex (1949)

Women, Men, Faith, Hope

“Part of the unknown reality, then, is hidden beneath language and the enforced pattern of accustomed words-so, for an exercise, look about your environment. Make up new, different 'words' for the objects that you see about you. Pick up any object, for example. Hold it for a few seconds, feel its texture, look at its color, and spontaneously give it a new name by uttering the sounds that come into your mind. See how the sounds bring out certain aspects of the object that you may not have noticed before. The new word will fit as much as the old one did. It may, in fact, fit better. Do this with many objects, following the same procedure. You can instead say the name of any object backwards. In such ways you break up to some extent the automatic patterning of familiar phrases, so that you can perceive the individuality that is within each object.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 726, p. 460
The “Unknown” Reality: Volume Two, (1979)

Color, Way, Feeling, Exercises

“So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trials, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact.”

Erving Goffman (1922–1982) Sociologist, writer, academic

Erving Goffman (1981, p. 1); As cited in: Trevino (2003,, p. 34).
1970s-1980s

Exercises

“We tend today to exaggerate the effectiveness of persuasion as a means of inculcating opinion and shaping behavior. …Actually the fabulous effects ascribed to propaganda have no greater foundation in fact than the fall of the walls of Jericho ascribed to the blast of Joshua's trumpets.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 83
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice

Behavior

“Frank Harris has no feelings. It is the secret of his success. Just as the fact that he thinks other people have none either is the secret of the failure that lies in wait for him somewhere on the way of Life.”

Frank Harris (1856–1931) Irish journalist and rogue

Oscar Wilde, letter to More Adey, May 12, 1897, quoted in Hugh Kingsmill Frank Harris (1932) p. 102.
Criticism

Life, People, Secret, Way

“There is another and higher leadership, that of the intellect, by which the methods and thoughts of one man may affect the whole civilized world. Industrial leaders who have most prominently attracted our attention in the past are those who have, by their inventions or their direction of activities, accumulated large fortunes; but none of these are as great as the man who by the force of his intellect leads people throughout the civilized world to benefit themselves and others. Such a man was the late Frederick Winslow Taylor who, in his determination to eliminate error and to base our industrial relations on fact, set an example which will have an effect all over the world”

Henry Gantt (1861–1919) American engineer

Source: Industrial leadership, 1916, p. 27. Highlighted section quoted in: A. Johansson (1986) "The Labour Movement and the Emergence of Taylorism". in: Economic and Industrial Democracy November 1986 vol. 7 no. 4 pp.449-485.

People, World, Error, Past

“As dogs, cats, horses, and probably all the higher animals, even birds, as is stated on good authority, have vivid dreams, and this is shewn by their movements and voice, we must admit that they possess some power of imagination. … Few persons any longer dispute that animals possess some power of reasoning. Animals may constantly be seen to pause, deliberate, and resolve. It is a significant fact, that the more the habits of any particular animal are studied by a naturalist, the more he attributes to reason and the less to unlearnt instincts.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter II: "Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals", page 46 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=59&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Dogs, Dreams, Imagination, Cats

“You would think that we’d know the Earth’s ‘climate sensitivity’ by now, but it has been surprisingly difficult to determine. How atmospheric processes like clouds and precipitation systems respond to warming is critical, as they are either amplifying the warming, or reducing it. This website currently concentrates on the response of clouds to warming, an issue which I am now convinced the scientific community has totally misinterpreted when they have measured natural, year-to-year fluctuations in the climate system. As a result of that confusion, they have the mistaken belief that climate sensitivity is high, when in fact the satellite evidence suggests climate sensitivity is low.”

Roy Spencer (1955) American meteorologist

Global Warming: Natural or Manmade? http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-natural-or-manmade/

Communication, Nature, Thinking

“Today we preach that science is not science unless it is quantitative. We substitute correlations for causal studies, and physical equations for organic reasoning. Measurements and equations are supposed to sharpen thinking, but, in my observation, they more often tend to make the thinking noncausal and fuzzy. They tend to become the object of scientific manipulation instead of auxiliary tests of crucial inferences.
Many - perhaps most - of the great issues of science are qualitative, not quantitative, even in physics and chemistry. Equations and measurements are useful when and only when they are related to proof; but proof or disproof comes first and is in fact strongest when it is absolutely convincing without any quantitative measurement.
Or to say it another way, you can catch phenomena in a logical box or in a mathematical box. The logical box is coarse but strong. The mathematical box is fine-grained but flimsy. The mathematical box is a beautiful way of wrapping up a problem, but it will not hold the phenomena unless they have been caught in a logical box to begin with.”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

John R. Platt (1964) " Science, Strong Inference -- Proper Scientific Method (The New Baconians) http://256.com/gray/docs/strong_inference.html. In: Science Magazine 16 October 1964, Volume 146, Number 3642. Cited in: Gerald Weinberg (1975) Introduction to General Systems Thinking. p. 1, and in multiple other sources.

Beauty, Way, Mathematics, Problem

“Any suggestion that a segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive and it is wrong. Recent comments by Senator Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country. He has apologized and rightly so. Every day our nation was segregated was a day that America was unfaithful to our founding ideals, and the founding ideals of our nation, and in fact the founding ideals of the political party I represent, was and remains today the equal dignity and equal rights of every American.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Regarding comments made by Trent Lott (12 December 2002), as quoted in "Lott's Remarks on Segregation 'Wrong and Offensive'" https://web.archive.org/web/20150921020713/http://www.irishtimes.com/news/lott-remarks-on-segregation-wrong-and-offensive-1.1107399 (13 December 2002), The Irish Times 2000s, 2002

Unfaithfulness, Past, Country

“A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.”

Tom Stoppard Night and Day

Wagner, Act I
Night and Day (1978)

Thinking, Parting

“It is a sad fact that on this earth at this late date there are still two worlds, "the privileged world" and "the forgotten world". The privileged world consists of the affluent, developed nations, comprising twenty-five to thirty percent of the world population, in which most of the people live in a luxury never before experienced by man outside the Garden of Eden. The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace.”

Norman Borlaug (1914–2009) American biologist

From his 1970 Nobel Lecture

Hunger, People, World, Sadness

“Playing for the country is an honour. The ultimate honour, in fact. If you want to look at it as pressure, you will find it very difficult to cope with the expectations of a billion people. I look at it as an opportunity, as being among the few who have been given this opportunity to make the country proud.”

Sania Mirza (1986) Indian tennis player

Source: Boria Majumdar I'll play with anyone for my country: Sania Mirza http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/london-olympics-2012/news/Ill-play-with-anyone-for-my-country-Sania-Mirza/articleshow/14740066.cms?referral=PM, The Times of India, 8 July 2012

People, Country

“There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere - no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen.”

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)

Truth

“Punk: This is completely ridiculous on multiple, multiple levels. I mean there's so many things going through my head right now. This doesn't belong to you [holds Slammy award and looks at Ric Flair]. You haven't even been here in the past calender year. And the fact that anybody even voted for John Cena to be Superstar of the Year is absolutely atrocious. This is possibly the worst year of John Cena's life. He got beat by a guy that I'm gonna decimate at the Royal Rumble, I beat him at Summerslam…he lost last night, he's the first superstar to cash in his Money in the Bank contract and lose, he's a loser like everybody in Phildelphia, and he's a loser like you”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

points to Flair
December 17, 2012 (2012 Slammy Awards)
WWE Raw

Life, Money, Guy, Past

“Another important point which you so very accurately sensed concerns the idea that the glass in actual fact is not meant to be looked at (with 'aesthetic' eyes). It should be accompanied by a 'literary' text, as amorphous as possible, which never took shape. And the two elements, glass for the eyes, text for the ears and understanding, should complement each other and above all prevent one or the other from taking on an aesthetic-plastic or literary form. All in all, I am hugely indebted to you for having stripped bare my Bride stripped bare”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

the complete title is: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), c. 1915 – 1923
Quote from a letter to fr:Jean Suquet (art historian), New York 25 December 1949; as quoted in The Duchamp Book, ed. Gavin Parkinson, Tate Publishing, London 2008 p. 163
1921 - 1950

Idea, Understanding, Sense

“We are at a juncture today that really is more of a threshold, even more of a watershed, than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in 1941. We are currently in a war, but it is not a war on terrorism. In fact, that has been a great confusion, and the sooner we drop that term, the better. This would be like President Franklin Roosevelt saying in World War II, 'We are engaged in a war against kamikazes and blitzkrieg.' Like them, terrorism is a method, a tool, a weapon that has been used against us. And part of the reason we suffered such a horrific attack is that we were not prepared.”

John Lehman (1942) American banker and government official

At the 130th Annual Meeting of the U.S. Naval Institute and Annapolis Naval History Symposium on 31 March 2004. http://www.usni.org/seminars/annualmeeting/04/annualmeeting04Lehman.htm, http://www.johnflehman.com/pdf/proceedings_MAR2004.pdf (PFD)

War, World, Suffering, Parting

“The fact was that he suffered from an incurable malady which, it seemed, attacked only Homo sapiens among all the intelligent races of the universe. That disease was religious mania.
Throughout the earlier part of its history, the human race had brought forth an endless succession of prophets, seers, messiahs, and evangelists who convinced themselves and their followers that to them alone were the secrets of the universe revealed. Some of them succeeded in establishing religions which survived for many generations and influenced billions of men; others were forgotten even before their deaths.
The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, not the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as they contemplated the stupendous universe in which they found themselves. What it did weaken, and finally obliterate, were the countless religions, each of which claimed with unbelievable arrogance, that it was the sole repository of the truth and that its millions of rivals and predecessors were all mistaken.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The City and the Stars

Source: The City and the Stars (1956), Chapter 13 (p. 99)

Death, Men, Truth, Secret

“Optimism, then, is a fact within my own heart. But as I look out upon life, my heart meets no contradiction. The outward world justifies my inward universe of good.”

Helen Keller book Optimism

Optimism (1903)

Life, World, Optimism, Universe

“Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions and phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own. And thus, the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 1: Childhood and Early Education (pp. 21-22)

Pain, People, Youth, Education

“What is at issue here is not: What are the facts? but rather: How are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another? Some historians will insist that history cannot become a science until it finds the technical terminology adequate to the correct characterization of its objects of study, in the way that physics did in the calculus and chemistry did in the periodic tables. Such is the recommendation of Marxists, Positivists, Cliometricians, and so on. Others will continue to insist that the integrity of historiography depends on its use of ordinary language, its avoidance of jargon. These latter suppose that ordinary language is a safeguard against ideological deformations of the ‘facts.’ What they fail to recognize is that ordinary language itself has its own forms of terminological determinism, represented by the figures of speech without which discourse itself is impossible.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

Way, History, Study, Science

“I ask to be able to participate directly in all the social decisions that may affect my existence, or the general course of the world in which I live. I do not accept the fact that my lot is decided, day after day, by people whose projects are hostile to me or simply unknown to me, and for whom we, that is I and everyone else, are only numbers in a general plan or pawns on a chessboard, and that, ultimately, my life and death are in the hands of people whom I know to be, necessarily, blind.”

Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) Greek-French philosopher

Je désire pouvoir, avec tous les autres, savoir ce qui se passe dans la société, contrôler l’étendue et la qualité de l’information qui m’est donnée. Je demande de pouvoir participer directement à toutes les décisions sociales qui peuvent affecter mon existence, ou le cours général du monde où je vis. Je n’accepte pas que mon sort soit décidé, jour après jour, par des gens dont les projets me sont hostiles ou simplement inconnus, et pour qui nous sommes, moi et tous les autres, que des chiffres, dans un plan ou des pions sur un échiquier et qu’à la limite, ma vie et ma mort soient entre les mains de gens dont je sais qu’ils sont nécessairement aveugles.
Source: The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975), p. 92.

Life, Death, Hostility, People

“The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to an idealised past.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

People, World, Past, Future

“My experience of the original Edison phonograph goes back to the period when it was first introduced into this country. In fact, I have good reason to believe that I was among the very first persons in London to make a vocal record, though I never received a copy of it, and if I did it got lost long ago. It must have been in 1881 or 1882, and the place where the deed was done was on the first floor of a shop in Hatton Garden, where I had been invited to listen to the wonderful new invention. To begin with, I heard pieces both in song and speech produced by the friction of a needle against a revolving cylinder, or spool, fixed in what looked like a musical box. It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, though there was little of the scratching which later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording for that primitive machine was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay both opinions were correct.”

Herman Klein (1856–1934) British musical critic journalist and singing teacher

The Gramophone magazine, December 1933

Music, Singing, Time, Personality

“It’s just like when the Allies were victorious over Nazi Germany in World War II, when we occupied the country, we left a lot of Nazis in place because they were the ones who made the trains run on time and the bureaucracy function properly, etc. And it was distasteful, but you needed them. And in fact, our experience in Iraq kind of demonstrates the wisdom of that, because in Iraq we replaced the Baathist bureaucrats and the result was chaos. Not to compare Wall Street to Iraq or Nazi Germany, but the point is you need people who know what they’re doing.”

Mark Haines (1946–2011) American journalist and television show presenter

Wisdom, War, People, World

“There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

As quoted in Values of the Wise : Humanity's Highest Aspirations (2004) by Jason Merchey, p. 31
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications

Hope

“If you understood the facts they needed no embroidery: all the wonder was already there, the more spellbinding because it was true.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Blind Lake

Source: Blind Lake (2003), Chapter 7 (p. 69)

“There is no study more difficult than that of physic: it exceeds, as a science, the comprehension of the human mind: and those who blunder onwards, without attempting to understand what they see, are often very nearly on a level with those, who depend too much on imperfect generalisations, applied to facts, which can scarcely be subjected to any well marked analogy. Hence it may happen, that talents and labour may become useless for want of a proper direction… To assist in furnishing the student with a sufficient direction… is the principal object of this work.”

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

Source: An Introduction to Medical Literature, Including a System of Practical Nosology (1823), p. 2

Understanding, Study, Science, Dependency

“For all human beings, love is a constant preoccupation—a never-ending central theme. Indeed, the ultimate motivation behind interactions among people is often the desire to experience some form of love. The fact that love is so important has major implications for leadership. In particular, the degree to which leaders acknowledge the value of love in their own lives and in the lives of others can determine the success or failure of their undertakings. Far from being irrelevant or impractical, the intention to express love is fundamental for effective leadership. This is so because in the final analysis, a leader’s motivation is communicated to others in countless subtle ways. Leaders whose actions are perceived as self-serving often create disharmony, resentment, and disloyalty. On the other hand, those who base their behavior upon a genuine empathy and concern for others can gain loyalty and support that make the attainment of even difficult goals possible.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Leadership For An Age of Higher Consciousness, Volume 1: Administration from a Metaphysical Perspective (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: The Phenomenon of Love

Love, People, Way, Behavior

“Creationists and evolutionists, Christians and non-Christians, all have the same evidence—the same facts. Think about it: we all have the same earth, the same fossil layers, the same animals and plants, the same stars—the facts are all the same. The difference is in the way we all interpret the facts. And why do we interpret facts differently? Because we start with different presuppositions; these are things that are assumed to be true without being able to prove them. These then become the basis for other conclusions. All reasoning is based on presuppositions (also called axioms). This becomes especially relevant when dealing with past events.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

" What’s the best "proof" of creation? http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/wow/best-proof-of-creation", Answers in Genesis (March 18, 2010)

Way, Star, Thinking, Past

“One gets as much information as a witness of activity from a fleeting glance [in the photo], like a quick look, sometimes in motion, as one does staring at the subject. Because even if you remain stationary your mind wanders, and it's that kind of activity that I would like to get into the photograph – a confirmation of the fact that everything is moving.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1980's, I don't necessarily desire a perfect photography,' 1981

Photo

“I said to him [Hugh Dowding], "Well, as you eat meat, as you are a peer and have a seat in the House of Lords, could you do something about getting it humanely killed?" He said, "Well, isn't it?" I said, "I'm asking you." Well, we had a very, very happy marriage, and he never went anywhere without telling me where he was going. He'd nearly always say, "Look, can't you get out of what you are doing and come too?" And on three occasions he didn't tell me where he was going, he had just gone. He came back very depressed and didn't seem to want to talk about whatever it was. I wondered what was worrying him. When Sunday came, his usual salted beef was served, a dish that he liked very much. And he stood up to carve it, then he sat down, and he said, "What is it you're eating?" "Oh," I said, "well, as you know, it's a vegetarian dish." He said, "Would you have enough for me to have some? And don't ever get meat in this house for me again!" And he became a vegetarian then and there, and was one for about seventeen years till his death. … Well, if you're going to speak in the House of Lords, you've jolly well got to know your facts. Yes, he'd been to three slaughterhouses and was appalled.”

Muriel Dowding, Baroness Dowding (1908–1993) British noble

Source: Interview by Rynn Berry, pp. 137-38

Death, Marriage, Happiness, Housing

“Undershaft: You have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn't fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it wont scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. Whats the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

World, Religion, Loss

“In point of fact, the meteor was something like 30 km when it exploded. It was over north Waterloo and I was north of St Agatha. Two spherical clouds, and two explosions. Unfortunately, I was dealing with a goat that was trying to eat an oil truck's fuel line, goats having this optimistic 'Well, maybe it has become edible since they last time I tried this' worldview, and I missed seeing the explosions.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[cbp39u$gbq$1@panix1.panix.com, 2004]
2000s

Time

“If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

The earliest published attribution of this quote to Einstein found on Google Books is the 1991 book The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis by Raj Jain (p. 507), but no source to Einstein's original writings is given and the quote itself is older; for example New Guard: Volume 5, Issue 3 from 1961 says on p. 312 http://books.google.com/books?id=5BbZAAAAMAAJ&q=%22fit+the+theory%22#search_anchor "Someone once said that if the facts do not fit the theory, then the facts must be changed", while Product engineering: Volume 29, Issues 9-12 from 1958 gives the slight variant on p. 9 "There is an age-old adage, 'If the facts don't fit the theory, change the theory.' But too often it's easier to keep the theory and change the facts." These quotes are themselves probably variants of an even earlier saying which used the phrasing "so much the worse for the facts", many examples of which can be seen in this search http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=facts+fit+%22so+much+the+worse+for+the+facts%22&tbs=,cdr:1,cd_max:Dec%2031_2%201950&num=10; for example, the 1851 American Whig Review, Volumes 13-14 says on p. 488 http://books.google.com/books?id=910CAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA488#v=onepage&q&f=false "However, Mr. Newhall may possibly have been of that casuist's opinion, who, when told that the facts of the matter did not bear out his hypothesis, said 'So much the worse for the facts.'" The German idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte circa 1800 did say "If theory conflicts with the facts, so much the worse for the facts." The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs in his "Tactics and Ethics" (1923) echoed the same quotation. Misattributed

Change

““This task, in fact, requires a new type of politics. The left and right have been as bad as each other. The left has allowed its distrust of markets and endless faith in government to obscure the importance of civil society. The right has been so focused on replacing the state with markets that it has forgotten how to cultivate a trusting society.””

Mark Latham (1961) Australian politician

Unsourced

Faith

“My experience with first-time directors is that they’re all extremely prepared, because I guess they’re worried. They spend weeks preparing everything, and they have to get used to the fact that once you get there, everything goes wrong and you have to make everything up.”

Matthew Broderick (1962) American film, stage and voice actor

"Matthew Broderick on John Hughes, the Never-Finished Margaret, and His New Film Wonderful World" by Kyle Buchanan, in Movieline (7 January 2010) http://www.matthewbroderick.net/interview/movieline100107.html

Time

“I have to go away, but with regrets and with the firm intention to come back soon. I consider most sound I am an individual Gorky – and it is my individual feeling which counts for the most. Why? I do not know nor do I wish to know. I accept it as a fact, which does not need explanation.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: 1930 - 1941, from 'Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 170: Gorky's quote in a letter to his future wife Agnes Magruder (Mougouch), 31 Mai 1941

Feeling

“I have three objections to my honourable Friend’s wider proposal that exchange control powers be used to require the fixing of exchange by merchants on entering into both export and import contracts. The first is that I think it excessively paternalistic to require a merchant to protect himself against a risk he is prepared to take. Secondly, I think it wrong to impose a condition which is likely to cause one group of merchants a loss, for the purpose of providing the other group with protection at no cost to them. Thirdly, I do not think it is in fact practicable to enforce such a system. I am sorry to be so negative, but I am sure that the solution to my honourable Friend’s problem should not depend on compulsion but on the provision of voluntary protection on insurance principles.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

March 27, 1968, page 208.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Problem, Thinking, Loss, Dependency

“Poor Joshua! Victim of repeated attacks by an irresponsible, bullying, cowardly, and intemperate father, and abandoned by respondents who placed him in a dangerous predicament and who knew or learned what was going on, and yet did essentially nothing except, as the Court revealingly observes, ante, at 193, "dutifully recorded these incidents in [their] files." It is a sad commentary upon American life, and constitutional principles - so full of late of patriotic fervor and proud proclamations about "liberty and justice for all" - that this child, Joshua DeShaney, now is assigned to live out the remainder of his life profoundly retarded. Joshua and his mother, as petitioners here, deserve - but now are denied by this Court - the opportunity to have the facts of their case considered in the light of the constitutional protection that 42 U. S. C. 1983 is meant to provide."”

Harry Blackmun (1908–1999) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissent in DeShaney v. Winnebago County, 489 U.S. 189 (1989)

Life, Sadness, Justice, Light

“What I love about this team is the fact that you can feel the energy and trust - even after the defeat against Sweden. That's the really special thing about this group. Even when we were a player down and a goal behind in extra time, you sensed that something was going to happen. The team kept fighting. You can't teach that. It's a feeling - and we play with that feeling.”

Hope Solo (1981) American association football player

As quoted in "Brazil-USA Quotes: USA goalkeeper and Player of the Match Hope Solo" http://www.fifa.com/womensworldcup/matches/round=255995/match=300144440/quotes.html, fifa.com (July 10, 2011) 2010s

Love, Feeling, Sense, Time

“Matthew's response: To me the conception of this law of Nature came intuitively as a self-evident fact, almost without an effort of concentrated thought. Mr Darwin here seems to have more merit in the discovery than I have had; to me it did not appear a discovery. He seems to have worked it out by inductive reason, slowly and with due caution to have made his way synthetically from fact to fact onwards; while with me it was by a general glance at the scheme of Nature that I estimated this select production of species as an a priori recognisable fact – an axiom requiring only to be pointed out to be admitted by unprejudiced minds of sufficient grasp.”

Patrick Matthew (1790–1874) British scientist

Gardeners' Chronicle

Law, Way, Nature, Effort

“Passing through the utility section [Ivy] considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee anyway and stepped into the Farm.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Hard Rain"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

Coffee, Thinking

“Gradually disbelief became respectable. It acquired a moral character. By the mere fact that it was an integral part of the consciousness of a class—of the bourgeoisie—it became bourgeois. From an individual phenomenon, or a phenomenon confined to certain isolated groups, it became an expression of collective life.”

Bernard Groethuysen (1880–1946) French literary historian, translator and writer

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 24

Life, Parting

“In fact, it is only through the New Testament that we can learn just what Christian faith is. … Open your Bible at any page you like, there is nothing about solving religious problems. Bible testifies that God exists and that he revealed himself through Jesus Christ. It shows too that the man who lives without God is not living right.”

Wilhelm Busch (pastor) (1897–1966) German pastor and writer

Is there any certainty in religious matters? 2.The Bible gives us wonderful certainties. p. 166
Jesus Our Destiny

God, Faith, Problem, Learning

“… we’re not all the same. A common liberal refrain … is that differences between individuals are statistically more significant than those between cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. I don’t see why the fact of inter-individual differences would nullify inter-group variance. That’s liberal logic for you.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“The Kindness of (Caucasian) Strangers” http://barelyablog.com/the-kindness-of-caucasian-stangers, Barely A Blog, January 31, 2014. 2010s, 2014

“The more I reflect on it, the more I must admire how completely nature had taught him; how completely he was devoted to his work, to the task of his life, and content to let all pass by unheeded that had not relation to this. It is a singular fact, for example, that though a man of such openness and clearness, he had never, I believe, read three pages of Burns's poems. Not even when all about him became noisy and enthusiastic, I the loudest, on that matter, did he feel it worth while to renew his investigation of it, or once turn his face towards it. The poetry he liked (he did not call it poetry) was truth, and the wisdom of reality. Burns, indeed, could have done nothing for him. As high a greatness hung over his world as over that of Burns — the ever-present greatness of the Infinite itself. Neither was he, like Burns, called to rebel against the world, but to labor patiently at his task there, uniting the possible with the necessary to bring out the real, wherein also lay an ideal.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Life, Wisdom, Truth, World

“The beast is always doomed. It’s better to face the fact honestly and not pretty it up with a lot of lies about blowing off steam and reducing tensions and getting rid of this and that, acting out anxieties, moment of truth. Piddle. There’s an ancient word, I don’t know what language it is. Bazazz. All those arguments are a lot of bazazz. Unless you’re wiping out vermin or hunting for meat to eat, the man who kills animals does so because he likes to kill. And people who like to watch do so because they like to see things being killed.”

Avram Davidson (1923–1993) novelist

Source: Rogue Dragon (1965), Chapter XI (p. 137)

People, Truth, Animals

“Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals.”

Václav Havel book The Power of the Powerless

Living in Truth (1986), The Power of the Powerless

People, Lie, Way, Failure

“In 1982, the main problems were getting something out in front of the public and then figuring out how to sell it. Today, it is much easier to solve the mechanical problems of self-publishing and to reach an audience, but the fact that it’s easier creates another problem: how can you be heard above all the noise? The mass of information that is available today, through film, television, books, magazines, newspapers, and the Internet is really intimidating.”

John R. Erickson (1942) American author

John R. Erickson on the discipline of writing, the world of publishing, and (of course) dogs http://www.lonestarliterary.com/john-r.-erickson-061415.html (June 14, 2015)

Books, Problem

“Lincoln maintains there that the Declaration of Independence asserts that the negro is equal to the white man, and that under Divine law, and if he believes so it was rational for him to advocate negro citizenship, which, when allowed, puts the negro on an equality under the law. I say to you in all frankness, gentlemen, that in my opinion a negro is not a citizen, cannot be, and ought not to be, under the Constitution of the United States. I will not even qualify my opinion to meet the declaration of one of the Judges of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, “that a negro descended from African parents, who was imported into this country as a slave is not a citizen, and cannot be.” I say that this Government was established on the white basis. It was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and never should be administered by any except white men. I declare that a negro ought not to be a citizen, whether his parents were imported into this country as slaves or not, or whether or not he was born here. It does not depend upon the place a negro’s parents were born, or whether they were slaves or not, but upon the fact that he is a negro, belonging to a race incapable of self-government, and for that reason ought not to be on an equality with white men.”

Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861) American politician

Fourth Lincoln-Douglass Debate http://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate4.htm (September 1858) 1850s

Men, Law, Parent, Dependency

“The fact is that I like thrillers and action movies. But what really fulfills me is getting out of my comfort zone, taking chances.”

Halle Berry (1966) American actress

Terry Lawson (April 8, 2007) "Reporter, Temp, Online Seductress - Berry Revels In Film's Layered Role", Detroit Free Press, p. 1F.

Chance

“And why do soldiers wear uniforms? It certainly is not to protect the soldier. As a matter of fact, a soldier’s uniform is actually a big flashing neon arrow pointing to some kid that says to the enemy, SHOOT ME!”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

SANCTUARY (part 1) https://web.archive.org/web/20050521031500/http://ejectejecteject.com/archives/000125.html (18 May 2005) 2000s

“What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all".”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain (1940)

God, People, Universe, Time

“It is a notorious fact that many prominent Hindus who had offended the religious susceptibilities of the Muslims either by their writings or by their part in the Shudhi movement have been murdered by some fanatic Musalmans…. This is, of course, a very short list and could be easily expanded. But whether the number of prominent Hindus killed by fanatic Muslims is large or small matters little. What matters is the attitude of those who count towards these murderers. The murderers paid the penalty of law where law is enforced. The leading Moslems, however, never condemned theses criminals. On the contrary, they were hailed as religious martyrs and agitation was carried on for clemency being shown to them. As an illustration of this attitude, one may refer to Mr. Barkat Ali, a Barrister of Lahore, who argued the appeal of Abdul Qayum. He went to the length of saying that Qayum was not guilty of murder of Nathuramal because his act was justifiable by the law of the Koran. This attitude of the Moslems is quite understandable. What is not understandable is the attitude of Mr. Gandhi.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Source: Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946), p. 157

Law, Penalty, Understanding, Parting

“I myself was not born a little Conservative. I was brought up as a Liberal, and afterwards as a Liberal Unionist. The fact that I am here, accepted by you Conservatives as your Leader, is to my mind a demonstration of the catholicity of the Conservative Party, of that readiness to cover the widest possible field which has made it this great force in the country and has justified the saying of Disraeli that the Conservative Party was nothing if it was not a National Party.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Caxton Hall, London (31 May 1937) upon his election as Conservative leader, quoted in The Times (1 June 1937), p. 18.
Prime Minister

Country

“What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 291

“Inner experience, unable to have principles either in dogma (a moral attitude), or in science (knowledge can be neither its goal nor its origin), or in a search of enriching states (an experimental, aesthetic attitude), it cannot have any other concern nor other goal than itself. Opening myself to inner experience, I have placed in it all value and authority. Henceforth I can have no other value, no other authority (in the realm of mind). Value and authority imply the discipline of a method, the existence of a community.
I call experience a voyage to the end of the possible of man. Anyone may choose not to embark on this voyage, but if he does embark on it, this supposes the negation of the authorities, the existing values which limit the possible. By virtue of the fact that it is negation of other values, other authorities, experience, having a positive existence, becomes itself positively value and authority.
Inner experience has always had objectives other than itself in which one invested value and authority. … If God, knowledge, and suppression of pain were to cease to be in my eyes convincing objectives, … would inner experience from that moment seem empty to me, henceforth impossible without justification? …
I received the answer [from Blanchot]: experience itself is authority.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. 7

God, Pain, Search, Communication

“He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.”

Sinclair Lewis book It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here (1935)

Lovers, Madness

“There are only a certain number of people who are begging. These are the same people and the assumption that begging is increasing is in fact wrong because it is the same people who keep moving about.”

Asenaca Caucau Fijian politician

citation needed
Miscellaneous quotes

People

“The advent of Atombomb into a world of varying moral standards and uncertain international friendships has made everyone aware for the first time of the awful fact that, if the world ever lost its spiritual and moral equilibrium, it was now possible completely to eliminate life itself.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

During his scholarly lecture tours as a philosopher, in Ghana, quoted in "Jayachamaraja Wodeyar – A Princely scholar".

Life, Friendship, World, Time

Rajiv Malhotra book The Battle for Sanskrit

The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)

People, Education, Study, Freedom

“We thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren’t, when we never have. We’ve just been moving along with time. We said, there’s another second gone, there’s another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Source: City (1952), Chapter 7, “Aesop” (p. 207)

Time

“Although the formulations of science now offer the most advanced knowledge of nature, men continue to use obsolete forms of thought long discarded by scientific theory. In so far as these obsolete forms are superfluous for science, the fact that they persist violated the principle of the economy of thought, that characteristic trait of the bourgeois temper.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 133.

Men, Nature, Knowledge, Science

“It's often said of Jesus that he could have saved himself, but he chose not to. And if you read the Gospels it's clear that he could have talked himself out of that crucifixion quite easily, but he was just too stubborn. The Romans didn't really want to kill him at all, but in the end they went along with it because he was being such a prick about it. The truth is he couldn't wait to get up on that cross. In fact, I think Christianity only exists because Jesus Christ just happened to be a masochist. I think he took one look at the hammer and nails and he couldn't believe his luck. He thought, "Well, in three days I'll be in Heaven, but until then I'm going to enjoy myself."”

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

"Happy Easter" (5 April 2007) https://youtube.com/watch?v=RCPwdfQyxe4 2007

Truth, Thinking, Waiting, Reading

“The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts…Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"The Secular Scripture" and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991, p. 164
"Quotes"

People, Art

“Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)

People, Truth, Understanding

“Land, n. A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that some have the right to prevent others from living; for the right to own implies the right exclusively to occupy; and in fact laws of trespass are enacted wherever property in land is recognized. It follows that if the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B and C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Law, Parting

“I called Planned Parenthood and begged them to give me their best argument and all they could come up with that it is really just a clump of cells and if you get it early enough it doesn’t even look like a baby. Well, we’re all clumps of cells and the unborn does not look like a baby the same way the baby does not look like a teenager, a teenager does not look like a senior citizen. That unborn baby looks exactly the way human beings are supposed to look at that stage of development. It doesn’t suddenly become a human being at a certain point in time. I’ve also asked leading scientists across our country to please show me some shred of evidence that the unborn is not a human being. I didn’t want to be pro-life, but this is not a woman’s rights issue but a human rights issue. If I see someone abusing a child I am going to stand up against that, and that’s how I feel about abortion. Women are not given all the facts, they’re told it is a harmless procedure and now it has turned into such a political football.”

Kathy Ireland (1963) American model and businesswoman

Supermodel Kathy Ireland Lashes Out Against Pro Choice https://www.foxnews.com/story/2009/04/27/supermodel-kathy-ireland-lashes-out-against-pro-choice.html (April 27, 2009)

Life, Women, Way, Feeling

“I know for a fact that Chinese are taking over strategic sectors in Africa. Their ownership is mounting up and [is] even almost worse than white domination.”

Julius Malema (1981) South African political activist

#MalemaOnTouchHD https://twitter.com/hashtag/MalemaOnTouchHD?src=hash (1 March 2018)

“A plan of large size can be made a reality either by an intensely capitalistic method of development or by a genuinely socialistic approach. The Capitalistic way is ruled out by the fact that the political conditions are wholly incompatible with it, and a pursuit of this method may lead to a political breakdown.”

Gulzarilal Nanda (1898–1998) Prime Minister of India

Source: Gulzarilal Nanda: A Life in the Service of the People, p.32.

Way, Reality

“The concern of the artist is with the discrepancy between physical fact and psychological effect.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Quote from: 'Albers Paints a Picture' Elaine de Kooning, Art News 49, November 1950, p. 40; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 67

“The fact that the president was willing to reveal classified information for political gain and put the interests of his political party ahead of America's security shows that he can no longer be trusted to keep America safe.”

Howard Dean (1948) American political activist

Libby: Bush himself authorized leak on Iraq http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12187153/ (April 6, 2006)

“Is not the reason of the confidence of the positive, critical, experimental scientists, and of the reverent attitude of the crowd towards their doctrines, still the same? At first it seems strange how the theory of evolution (which, like the redemption in theology, serves the majority as a popular expression of the whole new creed) can justify people in their injustice, and it seems as if the scientific theory dealt only with facts and did nothing but observe facts. But that only seems so. It seemed just the same in the case of theological doctrine: theology, it seemed, was only occupied with dogmas and had no relation to people's lives, and it seemed the same with regard to philosophy, which appeared to be occupied solely with transcendental reasonings. But that only seemed so. It was just the same with the Hegelian doctrine on a large scale and with the particular case of the Malthusian teaching.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What then must we do? (1886)

People, Confidence, Appearance

“Wallis was in sympathy with Greek mathematics and astronomy, editing parts of the works of Archimedes, Eutocius, Ptolemy, and Aristarchus; but at the same time he recognized the fact that the analytic method was to replace the synthetic, as when he defined a conic as a curve of the second degree instead of as a section of a cone, and treated it by the aid of coordinates.”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

History of Mathematics (1923) Vol.1

Mathematics, Time, Parting

“The Passions and the Interests does not have the policy urgency that a contribution to public decisions may enjoy (as Hirschman's The Strategy of Economic Development eminently does), nor the compulsive immediacy that the exigencies of practical reason generate (as Exit, Voice, and Loyalty superbly portrayed). What then is so special about this book? […] The answer lies not only in the recognition that Hirschman makes us see the ideological foundations of capitalism in a fresh way, but also in the remarkable fact that this freshness is derived from ideas that are more than two-hundred-years old. The basic hypothesis— the articulation and development of which Hirschman investigates—makes the case for capitalism rest on the belief that "it would activate some benign human proclivities at the expense of some malignant ones."”

Amartya Sen (1933) Indian economist

1990s, Foreword to The Passions and the Interests (1996)

Books, Way, Idea, Decision

“It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. Not ever, in the long history of the world. We are now on the edge of the abyss. Can we, for the first time in history, turn back? It is up to you.”

Taylor Caldwell (1900–1985) Novelist

"Honoria" (1957); republished in The New American, Vol. 19, No. 20, (6 October 2003)
1950s

World, History, Time

“No, no, lot of things are going on folks, lot of things. I think she's actually getting pumped up, if you want to know the truth, she's getting pumped up, you understand? In fact we're going to be talking about that in a few minutes. She's getting pumped up for Wednesday night. Let's see. You know, I don't know, maybe, we're like athletes, right? Hey, look, I beat seventeen senators, governors, I beat all these people, we're like athletes. Hillary beat Bernie, although it looks like Bernie got a little bit of a bad deal based on Wikileaks, right? If you look at Wikileaks. But we're like athletes, right? So athletes, they're making them more and more, but athletes, they make them take a drug test, right? I think we should take a drug test prior to the debate, I do. I think we should, why don't we do that? We should take a drug test, prior, because I don't know what's going on with her. But at the beginning of her last debate, she was all pumped up at the beginning, and at the end it was like, "Uh, take me down."”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

She could barely reach her car. So I think we should take a drug test, I'm, er, anyway I'm willing to do it. At a rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, about his rival Hillary Clinton's performance during the presidential debates https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mE7YkeasOA (15 October 2016) 2010s, 2016, October

People, Truth, Cars, Understanding

“But I am just stating facts: capitalism is a wonderful creature - just don't abuse its principles and unwritten laws.”

Robert Kuok (1923) Malaysian businessman

Cap 14 "Malaysian Crossroads"

Law

“Having seen the replay, I think Steve Bucknor was right. I like Bucknor, in fact, he might be my only friend.”

Ben Dirs journalist

Cricket The Ashes Second Test, day two as it happened, 2006-12-02, 2007-05-26, BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/england/6201018.stm,

Thinking

“There is no evidence that a majority of Israelis want a two-state formula. In fact, if we add up votes won by all parties implicitly or explicitly opposed to the two-state formula, we will have a whopping 75 per cent of Israelis. Thus what Netanyahu mastered enough courage to say aloud is what most Israelis think in silence. The picture is hardly different on the Palestinian side. To start with, the Palestinians are divided in at least three camps. In one camp we have Fatah and its allies who have never formally committed to a two-state formula but have dropped hints that they might accept such a solution as a first step toward liberating the rest of historic Palestine, that is to say, what is now Israel, later. The second camp is dominated by Hamas, which is committed to the destruction of Israel in no uncertain terms. However, Hamas does not want a Palestinian state either. As the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas is a pan-Islamist group dedicated to fighting for the creation of a global caliphate. In the third camp, there are more radical Palestinian groups, including the Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine, now the favored protégé of the Islamic Republic in Tehran. The IJLP leadership has repeatedly declared its support for a one-state formula sponsored by Iranian “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Who wants a two-state solution, anyway? http://nypost.com/2015/03/20/who-wants-a-two-state-solution-anyway/, New York Post (March 20, 2015). New York Post

Courage, Support, Thinking, Silence

“Earlier this year we went skiing and I was in a shop, paying a bill and there was a woman standing there whom I knew slightly. I was waiting for my bill and she was buying something, a tea strainer. Quite suddenly she said to me, 'Where was your Father killed?'. I was very surprised and blurted out 'Oh Anzio'. Now this is a woman of about my age, so she's 40-ish. She said, 'My Father was killed in the war'. Apparently somebody lent her a copy of 'The Final Cut' and she had listened to the whole thing and she had found it very moving. In fact she said it had moved her to tears. She told me this, standing in the shop, with some effort I suspect, and I remember thinking: That's enough really. It doesn't matter if the Americans don't buy it.”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

Karl Dallas Interview, 1984
Music

War, Age, Thinking, Tear

“The plastic expression of space is inconceivable without light. Light and space complete one another. In architecture light represents an element of plastic expression – in fact, the most important one. An organic relationship between 'space' and 'material' is possible only with the aid of light. The highest achievements in architecture can be accomplished only if light also is treated as plastic form.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote in van Doesburg's article: 'Space – time and colour' in 'De Stijl', Aubette Issue, series xv, 87-9, 1928, pp. 26–27
1926 – 1931

Light

Quotes about fact page 31

Quotes about fact
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