Quotes; Science

“We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts.”    Patrick Moynihan.

“Facts are stubborn things.”    John Adams (1770).

“Facts are stupid things.”   Ronald Reagan (1988—2004).

“If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.”   Albert Einstein.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”   Aldous Huxley (1894—1963).

“Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.”   Henri Poincaré.

“The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views… which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”  Dr Who.

“Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true !”    Homer Simpson.

“When it comes to science, thou shalt ban the verb ‘to believe’ out of thy vocabulary.”

“Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.”    Winston Churchill.

“The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘evidence’.”

“There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.”    — Enrico Fermi (1901—1954), Italian physicist.

“The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”  T. H. Huxley (1825-95), British biologist.

“As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life — so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.”   Matt Cartmill.

“Facts speak louder than statistics.”    — Geoffrey Streatfield (1897—1978), British lawyer.

“That’s not right. That’s not even wrong.”    — Wolfgang Pauli.

“Reason, Observation, and Experience — the Holy Trinity of Science.”  Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-99), US lawyer and agnostic.

“There’s a common myth that evidence speaks for itself. It doesn’t. It just sits there on the lab table, incapable of speaking.”

“Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs’ legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.”    — William James (1842—1910), US psychologist and philosopher.