Facts And Quotes

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.
- Mark Twain

It has something to do with the facts and the law and who the judges are. So I think lawyers sometimes exaggerate their role in winning and losing. Lawyers do have a role, and a major role, but they're not the only players in this game.
- Floyd Abrams

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
- John Adams

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.
- Ronald Reagan

I don't need validation, recognition or praise. What I need are facts and the facts are that one of my books gets sold, somewhere in the world, every second.
- Lee Child

Ironically, tendency to ignore inconvenient facts and unwelcome evidence is actually President Reagan's true legacy, as I noted in 'The Nation' back in 2000, before the current right-wing mania for President Reagan gained its full force.
- Eric Alterman

Capricious and unfaithful, the king wished to be called Louis the Just and Louis the Chaste. Posterity will find a difficulty in understanding this character, which history explains only by facts and never by reason.
- Alexandre Dumas

The most difficult thing in any negotiation, almost, is making sure that you strip it of the emotion and deal with the facts. And there was a considerable challenge to that here and understandably so.
- Howard H Baker Jr

An appetite for knowledge is apt to rush one off one's feet, like any other appetite if not curbed. I often stand in the in the centre of the Library here and think despairingly how impossible it is ever to become possessed of all the wealth of facts and ideas contained in the books surrounding me on every hand.
- W N P Barbellion

After all, much of the fondness avid readers, and certainly collectors, have for their books is related to the books' physical bodies. As much as they are vessels for stories (and poetry, reference information, etc.), books are historical artifacts and repositories for memories-we like to recall who gave books to us, where we were when we read them, how old we were, and so on.
- Allison Hoover Bartlett

A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn't going to be very
useful in the real world, that's for sure.
- Haruki Murakami

I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up.
- Erma Bombeck

In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy.
- Andrew Coyle Bradley

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to allexcept the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty.
- John F Kennedy

Dick Durbin's a worthy opponent on any debate. He's very intelligent, quick. Knows his facts and puts them forward well.
- Sam Brownback

Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves.
- Jerome Bruner

Sooner or later, all conspiracy theories, no matter how outlandish, must eventually rest a certain set of facts. And facts can be checked.
- Vincent Bugliosi

Science is knowledge arranged and classified according to truth, facts, and the general laws of nature.
- Luther Burbank

Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?
- William Hazlitt

This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it...
- Italo Calvino

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.
- Joseph Campbell

There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?
- Joseph Campbell

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
- William James

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
- William James

I am confident that when the facts and policies have been examined, when the record of performances have been reviewed, Barack Obama and Joe Biden will once again be elected to lead our beloved country to a better future.
- Jimmy Carter

I am sorry to upset my colleagues by saying we wasted four years in opposition, but if you do get so badly defeated as a party you do have to face up to some painful facts and you do have to change.
- Kenneth Clarke

I make up my opinions from facts and reasoning, and not to suit any body but myself. If people don't like my opinions, it makes little difference as I don't solicit their opinions or votes.
- William Tecumseh Sherman

It is intellectually dishonest to look backwards with all the facts and judge the decisions that were made with almost none of the facts, or the facts that existed hidden in the normal cloud of endless speculation of what might happen.
- Norm Coleman

What are the facts? Again and again and again what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!
- Robert A Heinlein

My head was always bubbling over with facts and it seems to me this had little to do with my paying close attention in school and more to do with my voracious and omnivorous reading habits.
- Eric Allin Cornell

Personally, I don't deal much in theory. I have to deal with the facts. And on the basis of facts, I don't see much difference in the behavior of men and women.
- Michael Crichton

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction so we are told.
- Virginia Woolf

Entertaining these opinions of the course to be pursued, I beg of gentlemen to look at the question, as I have done, in a calm review of facts and of principles.
- Caleb Cushing

Science ask facts and religion ask faith, humans are confused between life and death.
- Santosh Kalwar

A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question. Charles Darwin
- Charles Darwin

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.
- Charles Darwin

I had also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely that whenever published fact, a new observation of thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.
- Charles Darwin

Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable facts? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvelous is indeed an aspect of the real?
- Robertson Davies

There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.
- John Dewey

he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge.
- Charles Dickens

It's great that people get together and collaborate, talk about the facts and the analysis, all in the interest of having a great financial system.
- Jamie Dimon

I worked hard at memorizing lists of facts and figures, and carried with me a book of facts.
- Charles Van Doren

You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the law courts. Passions are facts and not dogmas.
- Alexander Herzen

We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.
- Henry Miller

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
- William Faulkner

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
- Gustave Flaubert

If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.
- Erich Fromm

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country's scared.
- Barack Obama

I will try to cram these paragraphs full of facts and give them a weight and shape no greater than that of a cloud of blue butterflies.
- Brendan Gill

There is a class, moreover, by whom all these scientific theories, and more are held as ascertained facts, and as the basis of philosophical inferences which strike at the root of theistic beliefs.
- Asa Gray

The 'EU in a Nutshell' is a miscellany of facts and anecdotes about the system which rules us. It's a book you can delve into in pursuit of a particular fact, or crack open for entertainment at virtually any page.
- Daniel Hannan

My mother insured that a life of petty facts and dutiful farming was kept at bay by her passionate intensity, which nurtured the essential dreaminess of his nature
- Josephine Hart

It's a coffee place. You can't just automatically classify anything that isn't a steak house as vegetarian.
Yes, I can. This is America. You said Americans assert heir own opinions as if they were facts and dismiss inconvenient fast as mere opinions.
- Kevin Hearne

Aw, no. You're taking us to that vegetarian place,
aren't you?
It's a coffee place. You can't just automatically classify anything that isn't a steak house as vegetarian.
Yes, I can. This is America. You said Americans assert their own opinions as if they were facts and dismiss inconvenient facts as mere opinions.
- Kevin Hearne

We talked about the Internet and Wikipedia and how facts and history are being collectively created online.
- Joichi Ito

Memorization is not as vital a discipline as fulfilling curiosity with research and reasoning.....Internet and Google literacy should be taught to help students vet facts and judge reliability.
- Jeff Jarvis

I began the study of medicine, impelled by a desire for knowledge of facts and of man. The resolution to do disciplined work tied me to both laboratory and clinic for a long time to come.
- Karl Jaspers

It's a fact I want to own a factory that makes up facts and figures, and I figure to make a fortune selling to politicians.
- Jarod Kintz

What I would ask the Democrat Party is to put your plan on the table, because most people agree with the facts, and the facts are that Social Security is running out of money.
- Jack Kingston

Some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up and touch everything. If you never let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you.
- E L Konigsburg

we must perpetually try to distinguish, however closely they get entwined by the subtle nature of the facts and by the secret importunity of our passions, those attitudes in a writer which we can honestly and confidently condemn as real evils, and those qualities in his writing which simply annoy and offend us as men of taste.
- C S Lewis

So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean.
- Frank Luntz

Faith is indeed intellectual; it involves an apprehension of certain things as facts; and vain is the modern effort to divorce faith from knowledge. But although faith is intellectual, it is not only intellectual. You cannot have faith without having knowledge; but you will not have faith if you have only knowledge.
- John Gresham Machen

Once we thought, journalists and readers alike, that if we put together enough "facts" and gave them a fast stir, we would come up with something that, at least by the standards of short-order cooks, could be called the truth.
- Melvin Maddocks

Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.
- Malcolm X

Give me the facts and I will determine my own truths.
- Tanjlisa Marie

When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion.
- Phyllis Mcginley

I have zero respect for knowledge, that's what computers are for. Imagination is the kicker because imagination can extrapolate, create and solve, Knowledge is just facts and shit. Mostly irrelevant.
Kego O'Grady in The Navigator By Steve Merrick
- Steve Merrick

Quite frankly, I'm a member of the investigative committee, one of the senior members of the panel. I don't take our investigative facts and information from a magazine or some article.
- John Mica

Our political leaders must be honest and forthcoming with data that will allow citizens to use facts and figures to judge for themselves what state Social Security is in.
- Grace Napolitano

Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes.
- Jawaharlal Nehru

Parker sat for a long time on the ground in the alley behind the pool hall, examining his soul. He saw it as a spider web of facts and lies that was not at all important to him but which appeared to be necessary in spite of his opinion.
- Flannery O Connor

The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That's the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!
- George S Patton

For those under the age of 45 it seemed that world events had finally contrived a meaningful test of their capacity for conscientious political thought. Many of my acquaintances, I realized, had passed the last decade or two in a state of intellectual and psychic yearning for such a moment or, if they hadn't, were able to quickly assemble an expert arguer's arsenal of thrusts and statistics and ripostes and gambits and examples and salient facts and rhetorical maneuvers.
- Joseph O Neill

Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled---to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
- Mary Oliver

Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error.
- Robert Owen

The academic bias against subjectivity not only forces our students to write poorly ("It is believed...," instead of, "I believe..."), it deforms their thinking about themselves and their world. In a single stroke, we delude our students into believing that bad prose turns opinions into facts and we alienate them from their own inner lives.
- Parker J Palmer

Our best teachers do more than impart facts and figures - they inspire and encourage students and instill a true desire to learn. That's a fine art in itself.
- Sonny Perdue

Teachers don't just teach; they can be vital personalities who help young people to mature, to understand the world, and to understand themselves. A good education consists of much more than useful facts and marketable skills.
- Charles Platt

Like my father, Donor White could hold in his head the incompatible demands of rationality and irrationality, of facts and love.
- David Plotz

When I was there, something clicked in my head; I found myself interviewing people, searching out facts and figures. Later on I became much more self-conscious of what I was doing.
- Joe Sacco

My note was a strange mixture of facts and observations, carefully noted and itemised, with irrepressible meditations on what such problems might 'mean', in regard to who and what and where this poor man was - whether, indeed, one could speak of an 'existence', given so absolute a privation of memory or continuity.
- Oliver Sacks

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
- George Santayana

Every woman needs to know the facts. And the fact is, when it comes to breast cancer, every woman is at risk.
- Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.
- Jeanette Winterson

Evolution provides a scientific foundation for the core values shared by most Christians and conservatives, and by acceptingand embracingthe theory of evolution, Christians and conservatives strengthen their religion, their politics, and science itself. The conflict between science and religion is senseless. It is based on fears and misunderstandings rather than on facts and moral wisdom. (138)
- Michael Shermer

The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation.
- Adam Smith

You've got to face facts and the fact is life is a joke, a fucking bad joke, or, no, a bad fucking joke. There's no point taking it seriously because whatever happens, and I mean whatever the fuck, the punch line is the same: you go out horizontally. You see the point? No fucking point.
- Jeet Thayil

What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
- Gore Vidal

One must be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force of
definition translate tendencies into habits.
- Fay Weldon

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction so we are told.
- Virginia Euwer Wolff

Pessimism only describes an attitude, and not facts, and hence is entirely subjective.
- Francis Parker Yockey

I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct.
- Marguerite Yourcenar