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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.
-William Hazlitt
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Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.
-Heraclitus
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Facts are counterrevolutionary.
-Eric Hoffer
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All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called facts. They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two that they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no facts at this table.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions -- adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes
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Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
-Aldous Huxley
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Facts are ventriloquist's dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense.
-Aldous Huxley
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Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
-Thomas Henry Huxley
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A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.
-Thomas Henry Huxley
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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.
-Lee Iacocca
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The fatal futility of Fact.
-Henry James
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Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
-William James
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The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
-William James
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One precedent creates another and they soon accumulate and constitute law. What yesterday was a fact, today is doctrine.
-Junius
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The fastidious are unfortunate; nothing satisfies them.
-Jean De La Fontaine
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The ultimate umpire of all things in life is -- fact.
-Agnes C. Laut
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One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.
-Karl Menninger
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Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle.
-Michelangelo Buonarroti
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Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes.
-Jawaharlal Nehru
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There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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There are no facts, only interpretations.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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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.
-Cynthia Ozick
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One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite -- that particular peach is but a detail.
-Pablo Picasso
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A fact is like a sack -- it won't stand up if it's empty. To make it stand up, first you have to put in it all the reasons and feelings that caused it in the first place.
-Luigi Pirandello
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Facts have a cruel way of substituting themselves for fancies. There is nothing more remorseless, just as there is nothing more helpful, than truth.
-William C. Redfield
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Books about Facts
