Quotes About Facts And Theories

#1. Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress.

Paul Feyerabend

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

Henry Miller

#3. As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

Gustave Flaubert

#4. Not only are facts and theories in constant disharmony, they are never as neatly separated as everyone makes them out to be.

Paul Feyerabend

#5. 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

#6. [Modern scientific] theories can necessarily never be more than hypothetical, since their starting-point is wholly empirical, for facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations and so never have been and never will be able to guarantee the truth of any theory.

Rene Guenon

#7. My approach has never been to start from theories to arrive at facts, but on the contrary, to try to bring out from the facts the explanatory thread without which they appear incomprehensible and elude effective action.

Maurice Allais

#8. But you perceive, my boy, that it is not so, and that facts, as usual, are very stubborn things, overruling all theories.

Jules Verne

#9. It is a scientifically proven fact that all scientifically proven facts have originated from original and thereby unproven theories.

Silvia Hartmann

#10. Most elected officials cling to their ideological biases, despite the real-world facts that disprove their theories time and again. Most have no common sense, and most never acknowledge that they were wrong.

Lawrence Kudlow

#11. 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

#12. Some people have facts; these can be proven. Some people have theories; these can be disproven. But people with opinions are mindless and have their minds made up about it.

P. J. O'Rourke

#13. Facts quite often, I fear to confess, like lawyers, put me to sleep at noon. Not theories, however. Theories are invigorating and tonic. Give me an ounce of fact and I will produce you a ton of theory by tea this afternoon. That is, after all, my job.

Ray Bradbury

#14. Theory and fact are equally strong and utterly interdependent; one has no meaning without the other. We need theory to organize and interpret facts, even to know what we can or might observe. And we need facts to validate theories and give them substance.

Stephen Jay Gould

#15. In general, a fact is worth more than theories in the long run. The theory stimulates, but the fact builds. The former in due time is replaced by one better but the fact remains and becomes fertile.

Theobald Smith

#16. Most of beliefs that are commonly known as scientific facts are based on various theories, which have never been validated. Many of them will never be.
Question your beliefs. Choose what promotes love and unity.

Raphael Zernoff

#17. Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of fact, and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses; the problems they solve; and the problems they raise.

Karl R. Popper

#18. Well-established theories collapse under the weight of new facts and observations which cannot be explained, and then accumulate to the point where the once useful theory is clearly obsolete.

Al Gore

#19. All the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures - an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.

Mark Twain

#20. 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

#21. Theories are like a stairway; by climbing, science widens its horizon more and more, because theories embody and necessarily include proportionately more facts as they advance.

Claude Bernard

#22. We can invent as many theories we like, and any one of them can be made to fit the facts. But that theory is always preferred which makes the fewest number of assumptions.

Albert Einstein

#23. The fact of the existence of two theories [causal and acausal] that contradict each other in Jung ... corresponds psychologically to the vascillation between 3 and 4.

Wolfgang Pauli

#24. Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be ... We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology.

Stephen Jay Gould

#25. The mere fact that so many who espouse such far-right views and beliefs still exist in this society is incarnate proof that Darwin's theories apply solely to biological processes and not to processes of the spirit.

Derek R. Audette

#26. History is, and has always been trameled by facts. It may ignore some and deny others; but it cannot accommodate itself unreservedly to theories; it cannot be stripped of things evidenced in favor of things surmised.

Agnes Repplier

#27. It is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.

Vladimir Lenin

#28. Art ... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.

Agnes Repplier

#29. Generally the theories we believe we call facts,
and the facts we disbelieve we call theories.

Felix S. Cohen

#30. 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

#31. Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it.

Gene Wolfe

#32. We in China had been trained not to draw conclusions from facts, but to start with Marxist theories or Mao thoughts or the Party line and to deny, even condemn, the facts that did not suit them. I

Jung Chang

#33. Learning to learn is to know how to navigate in a forest of facts, ideas and theories, a proliferation of constantly changing items of knowledge. Learning to learn is to know what to ignore but at the same time not rejecting innovation and research.

Raymond Queneau

#34. In chemistry, our theories are crutches; to show that they are valid, they must be used to walk ... A theory established with the help of twenty facts must explain thirty, and lead to the discovery of ten more.

Jean-Baptiste Dumas

#35. When Logic congeals into all-encompassing and perfect-seeming theories, then it can actually become a very evil con trick. Wittgenstein has a point, you see: 'All the facts of science are not enough to understand the world's meaning!

Apostolos Doxiadis

#36. Civilizations have been founded and maintained on theories which refused to obey facts.

Joe Orton

#37. A man who is all theory is like "a rudderless ship on a shoreless sea." ... Theories and speculations may be indulged in with safety only as long as they are based on facts that we can go back to at all times and know that we are on solid ground.

Elisha Gray

#38. Facts per se can neither prove nor refute anything. Everything is decided by the interpretation and explanation of the facts, by the ideas and the theories.

Ludwig Von Mises

#39. International affairs must be completely permeated with scientific methodology and a democratic spirit, with a fearless weighing of all facts, views, and theories, with maximum publicity of ultimate and intermediate goals, and with a consistency of principles.

Andrei Sakharov

#40. Affery, like greater people, had always been right in her facts, and always wrong in the theories she deduced from them.

Charles Dickens

#41. These healers ... my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories ... But their facts are patent and startling; and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.

William James

#42. I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies."
"You are right," said Holmes demurely: "you do find it very hard to tackle the facts.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#43. Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.

Imre Lakatos

#44. It is often assumed that science starts from facts and eschews counter-factual theories. Nothing could be further from the truth. What is one of the basic assumptions of the scientific world-view? That the variety of events that surrounds us is held together by a deeper unity.

Paul Feyerabend

#45. The most obvious purpose of college education is to help students acquire information and knowledge by acquainting them with facts, theories, generalizations, principles, and the like. This purpose scarcely requires justification.

Derek Bok

#46. There are some current 'theories' that, when divested of begged questions, reduce to the non-controversial statement, 'Here are some facts and there may be some relation between them.'

Harold Jeffreys

#47. The facts will eventually test all our theories, and they form, after all, the only impartial jury to which we can appeal.

Louis Agassiz