Quotes About Facts And Evidence

#1. 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

#2. Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

John Adams

#3. The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is - second only to American political campaigns - the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.

Larry Laudan

#4. Intuition is the wisdom formed by feeling and instinct - a gift of knowing without reasoning ... Belief is ignited by hope and supported by facts and evidence - it builds alignment and creates confidence. Belief is what sets energy in motion and creates the success that breeds more success.

Angela Ahrendts

#5. It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around ... It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.

Barbara Tuchman

#6. People have a right to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. Evidence must be located, not created, and opinions not backed by evidence cannot be given much weight.

James W. Loewen

#7. The beauty of new media is that no evidence is necessary. The brave blog-troopers have stormed the cockpit of news, and wrestled the joystick of authority away from the seasoned pilots of the press who would land our country at the Facts International Airport.

Stephen Colbert

#8. The motives of the writer form as important an ingredient in the analysis or his history, as the facts he records. Probability is a powerful and troublesome test; and it is by this troublesome standard that a large portion of historical evidence is sifted.

Homer

#9. At this point, any scientist, doctor, journalist, or policy maker who denies or minimizes the importance of a whole food, plant-based diet for individual and societal well-being simply isn't looking clearly at the facts. There's just too much good evidence to ignore anymore.

T. Colin Campbell

#10. When all the facts are in, swift and clear decision is another mark of a true leader. A visionary may see, but a leader must decide. An impulsive person may be quick to declare a preference; but a leader must weigh evidence and make his decision on sound premises.

J. Oswald Sanders

#11. There are some people in politics and in the press who can't be confused by the facts. They just will not live in an evidence-based world. And that's regrettable.

Hillary Clinton

#12. The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.

Nick Hanauer

#13. A historian cannot pick and choose his facts; he must deal with all the evidence.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#14. The importance of the facts testified, and their relations to the affairs of the soul, and the life to come, can make no difference in the principles or the mode of weighing the evidence.

Simon Greenleaf

#15. I don't believe in a golden mean; I don't believe you find policy wisdom between two polar points. I don't dismiss that possibility, but I look at the platform that's so ideologically based, that's so dismissive of facts, of evidence, of science, and it's frankly hard to take seriously.

Thomas E. Mann

#16. It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else's opinion.

Thomas Sowell

#17. From the very fact the universe is on the whole orderly, in a manner comprehensible to our intellect, is evidence that we and it were fashioned by a common intelligence.

Philip Johnson

#18. And all of the scientific data, statistical facts and empirical evidence can't compete with the indefinable heart's desire. For if in the end, she loves you, and she chooses you ... none of the rest of this will matter.

Ruth Clampett

#19. We must speak truth to power and confront ignorance with facts.

DaShanne Stokes

#20. Of course UFOs are real-and they are interplanetary ... The cumulative evidence for the existence of UFOs is quite overwhelming and I accept the fact of their existence.

Hugh Dowding, 1st Baron Dowding

#21. Defenseless peasant societies in Laos and Cambodia were savagely bombed in "secret" - the "secrecy" resulting from the refusal of the mass media to make public facts for which they had ample evidence.

Noam Chomsky

#22. Our Jewishness is not a creed, it is ourself, our totality. Indeed, it may be fairly said that the surest evidence of your lack of seriousness in religion is the fact that your religions are not national, that you are not compromised and dedicated, en masse, to the faith.

Maurice Samuel

#23. We have reached a situation where a theory has been accepted as fact by some, and possible contrary evidence is shunted aside. [This is] mythology rather than science.

Robert Shapiro

#24. Facts and intuition are false opposites.
Leaders should listen to their intuition and instincts and allow others to do the same because they are sub-conscious, fast ways of processing, aggregating and then accessing evidence to reach a swift conclusion.
Trust your gut.

Phil Dourado

#25. After all the evidence is in
after you've run all the facts by everything you know
and you're still lost, you have to do some things on faith.

Christopher Moore

#26. The denial of Christ has less to do with facts and more to do with the bent of what a person is prejudiced to conclude.

Ravi Zacharias

#27. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#28. Proceeding further, to inquire whether the facts related by the Four Evangelists are proved by competent and satisfactory evidence, we are led, first, to consider on which side lies the burden of establishing the credibility of the witnesses.

Simon Greenleaf

#29. Whatever my current beliefs are, on any topic, they're all open to being changed by the right facts and the right evidence.

Ramez Naam

#30. There is no other proposition in economics that has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis ... In the literature of finance, accounting, and the economics of uncertainty, the EMH is accepted as a fact of life.

Michael Jensen

#31. We used to speak familiarly of an agent, now do more, who was accustomed to manufacture evidence, and to invent facts in his cases, or at least to alter the aspects of facts to such an extent that they might fairly be viewed as new.

George Combe

#32. All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other, and I much fear that British juries have not yet attained that pitch of intelligence when they will give the preference to my theories over Lestrade's facts.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#33. All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible experience, through evidence toward which the intellect is merely passive, and over which the individual will and character have no control.

Chauncey Wright

#34. Debating, doubting, or rejecting the basic scientific facts about climate change in the face of the overwhelming evidence and overwhelming scientific opinion will not change those facts.

Bernie Sanders

#35. We need to ask our policy makers and those we elect to office who are supposed to make decisions to give us the evidence of the facts that are behind the decisions that we make. We should be skeptical.

Dixie Lee Ray

#36. It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.

Sam Harris

#37. It's unnecessary to make that, you know, strong of a statement. Let the facts, let the case, you know, and the evidence there speak for itself. You want to be careful that you're not poisoning the jury pool.

Kimberly Guilfoyle

#38. Miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidence of any revelation.

John Stuart Mill

#39. 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

#40. It is necessary, first of all, to find a correct logical starting point, one which can lead us to a natural and sound interpretation of the empirical facts.

Ernst Cassirer

#41. Chemistry is necessarily an experimental science: its conclusions are drawn from data, and its principles supported by evidence from facts.

Michael Faraday

#42. If, occasionally, historical evidence does not square with formulated laws, it should be remembered that a law is but a deduction from experience and experiment, and therefore laws must conform with historical facts, not facts with laws.

Immanuel Velikovsky

#43. Why did everyone keep demanding "evidence" and "facts"? I swear, cop and courtroom dramas were ruining the good name of gut instinct.

Chloe Neill

#44. I'm a career prosecutor. I have been trained, and my experience over decades, is to make decisions after a review of the evidence and the facts. And not to jump up with grand gestures before I've done that. Some might interpret that as being cautious. I would tell you that's just responsible.

Kamala Harris

#45. I was then and am now very much a happy warrior, very much joyful. Not engaging in character attacks myself, just putting out, "Here are the facts, here are the evidence."And I noted, for example, that both of them [Marco Rubio and Donald Trump] were relying on fabrications.

Ted Cruz

#46. It is the desire for explanations that are at once systematic and controllable by factual evidence that generates science; and it is the organization and classification of knowledge on the basis of explanatory principles that is the distinctive goal of the sciences.

Ernest Nagel

#47. Despite recent media reports that have clouded, or even misrepresented, the facts, there is compelling evidence that al-Qaida and Iraq have been linked for more than a decade.

Elizabeth Dole

#48. The final and conclusive evidence against evolution is the fact that the Bible denies it.

Henry M. Morris