Facts - Quotes

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective. - Edward Teller

A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease. - William Bliss Carman

A man never gets anywhere if facts and his ledgers don't square. - William Faulker

A wise and honest man looks to broad facts, and forms his judgment from them; a rogue endeavours to lead your attention off the true scent, away to details, that he may puzzle and confound you with minutiae always difficult to detect, and sometimes impossible to deny, but which, nevertheless, are nothing more than stakes laid in your path to trip you up, that he may plunder you at his convenience. If, therefore, the broad facts appear suspicious, doubt, but if details be brought to aid them, be sure, that you are in the high road to be deceived. - Charles William Day

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another. - Umberto Eco

Any fact facing us is not as important as our attitude toward it, for that determines our success or failure. The way you think about a fact may defeat you before you ever do anything about it. You are overcome by the fact because you think you are. - Norman Vincent Peale

Any fact is better established by two or three good testimonies than by a thousand arguments. - Marie Dressler

Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked. - Doris Lessing

Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. - Charles Dickens

Facts are lonely things. - Don Delillo

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

Facts are stupid until brought into connection with some general law. - Louis Agassiz

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley

Facts may speak for themselves. - George Washington

Facts, therefore, have merely a potential and, as it were, subsequent value, and the only advantage of possessing them is the possibility of drawing conclusions from them; in other words, of rising to the idea, the principle, the law which governs them. Our knowledge is composed not of facts, but of the relations which facts and ideas bear to themselves and to each other; and real knowledge consists not in an acquaintance with facts, which only makes a pedant, but in the use of facts, which makes a philosopher. - Henry Thomas Buckle

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. - Mark Twain

It is not the number of facts he knows, but how much of a fact he is himself, that proves the man. - Christian Nestell Bovee

It is wiser and better always to face facts, never to ignore them. Interrogate them; ask them what they mean, and what they have to teach. - Reuen Thomas

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. - Thomas Henry Huxley

Sometimes, legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. - Salman Rushdie

Sometimes, fact mixed with fiction so thoroughly that, though no lies were told, it was hard to remember what was strictly true. - Stephenie Meyer

The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion. - Arnold H. Glasow

The totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

There are no facts, only interpretations. - Friedrich Nietzsche

There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact. - Arthur Conan Doyle

To no circumstance is the wide diffusion of error in the world more owing than to our habit of adopting conclusions from insufficiently established data. An indispensable preliminary, then, in every investigation, is to get at facts. Until these are arrived at, every opinion, theory, or system, however ingeniously framed, must necessarily rest upon an uncertain basis. - Christian Nestell Bovee

We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it. - George Eliot

We should keep so close to facts that we never have to remember the second time what we said the first time. - F. Marion Smith

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. - Robert A. Heinlein

When facts speak, the wise man listens. - Stephen King

You can never get all the facts from just one newspaper, and unless you have all the facts, you cannot make proper judgements about what is going on. - Harry Truman