51 quotes found
“What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit o...”
“I've poured my heart out on this page. Now burn it and destroy the evidence that anyone ever cared this much for you.”
“I couldn't care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.”
“I'm frequently asked, "Do you believe there's extraterrestrial intelligence?" I give the standard arguments- there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the wor...”
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? in ancient astronauts? in the Bermuda triangle? in life after death?No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.On...”
“...and when is enough proof enough?”
“Faith is not something that goes against the evidence, it goes beyond it. The evidence is saying to us, 'There is another country. There is something beyond mere reason'.”
“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.”
“Since when has love ever looked for reasons, or evidence? Why would love bow to the reality of things, when it creates a reality of its own, so much more vivid, wherein everything resonates to the ...”
“Cultivate an intellectual habit of subordinating one's opinions and wishes to objective evidence and a reverence for things as they really are.”
“Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it information is not knowledge. And history is not the past it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance ...”
“Intellectually, what is stimulating to a young man is a problem of obvious practical importance. A young man learning economics, for example, ought to hear lectures from individualists and socialis...”
“Shakespeare 'never owned a book,' a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his i...”
“Such elusive puzzles recall the historian's basic dilemma: the absence of evidence does not always signify evidence of absence. In the end, we will likely never know.”
“The thing is, it's very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right”
“Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value the may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.”
“There is no truth that does not ultimately rest upon what is evident to us in our own experience.”
“Scientists can test only what they do not take for granted. That can make studying familiar phenomena particularly challenging...This may be especially true of masculinity, femininity and sexuality...”
“If someone were to propose that the planets go around the sun because all planet matter has a kind of tendency for movement, a kind of motility, let us call it an oomph, this theory could explain a...”
