Famous Quotes about Facts (71 Quotations)

Facts have a cruel way of substituting themselves for fancies. There is nothing more remorseless, just as there is nothing more helpful, than truth.

Facts in books, statistics in encyclopedias, the ability to use them in men's heads.

General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.

Get the facts, or the facts will get you. And when you get em, get em right, or they will get you wrong.

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

I deal with the obvious. I present, reiterate and glorify the obvious — because the obvious is what people need to be told.

I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing — a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

I have always found that if I move with seventy-five percent or more of the facts that I usually never regret it. It's the guys who wait to have everything perfect that drive you crazy.

I might show facts as plain as day: but, since your eyes are blind, you'd say, ''Where? What?'' and turn away.

I often wish that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.

I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called ''scientific'' mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

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

If you get all the facts, your judgment can be right; if you don't get all the facts, it can't be right.

It is easier to believe a lie that one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact that no one has heard before.

It is not the facts which guide the conduct of men, but their opinions about facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can only make them right by discussion

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears.

Men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.