Factual Quotes - Page 3

• Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information - facts, more than just the surfaces of things.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Reading, People, Musical

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• The American West is just arriving at the threshold of its greatness and growth. Where the West of yesterday is glamorized in our fiction, the future of the American West now is both fabulous and factual.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Future, Greatness, Yesterday

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• By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods, but it has an earthly taste; he's a god of the earth, like one of the Grecian deities who lives on worldly mountains and descended for intercourse with men. But at night, over a stratus layer, all sense of the planet may disappear. You know that down below, beneath that heavenly blanket is the earth, factual and hard. But it's an intellectual knowledge; it's a knowledge tucked away in the mind; not a feeling that penetrates the body.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Wine, Night, Men

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• The contingency of history (both for life in general and for the cultures of Homo sapiens ) and human free will (in the factual rather than theological sense) are conjoined concepts, and no better evidence can be produced than the "experimental" production of markedly different solutions in identical environments.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Different, Culture, Environment

  Stephen Jay Gould (1993). “Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history”, Vintage

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• Most impediments to scientific understanding are conceptual locks, not factual lacks. Most difficult to dislodge are those biases that escape our scrutiny because they seem so obviously, even ineluctably, just. We know ourselves best and tend to view other creatures as mirrors of our own constitution and social arrangements. ( Aristotle , and nearly two millennia of successors, designated the large bee that leads the swarm as a king.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Kings, Views, Two

  Stephen Jay Gould (1991). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition. Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content. The performance - how it is done - that is the content of art.

  Josef Albers

  Art, Expression, Done

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• The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Imagination, Historical, Fiction

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• In fact, nothing in science as a whole has been more firmly established by interwoven factual information, or more illuminating than the universal occurrence of biological evolution. Further, few natural processes have been more convincingly explained than evolution by the theory of natural selection, or as it has been popularly called, Darwinism.

  E. O. Wilson

  Religion, Atheism, Information

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• That claim was not intended to be a factual statement.

  Jon Kyl

  Abortion, Claims, Statements

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• It is the desire for explanations that are at once systematic and controllable by factual evidence that generates science; and it is the organization and classification of knowledge on the basis of explanatory principles that is the distinctive goal of the sciences.

  Ernest Nagel

  Knowledge, Science, Organization

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• The breathtaking inanity of the [school] Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial.

  John E. Jones III

  School, Decision, Religion

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• I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a 'matter-of-fact' habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations. Without 'ethical culture' there is no salvation for humanity.

  Albert Einstein

  Attitude, Educational, Lying

  Albert Einstein (2010). “Ideas And Opinions”, p.53, Broadway Books

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• ...it is appropriate to have an over representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

  Al Gore

  Opening Up, Hopeful, Dangerous

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• I make my music to express everything I feel is necessary to communicate at a given time. Through music, I can express myself with statements that are more nuanced and more contradictory than factual details.

  Sophie

  Contradictory, Communicate

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Why are we so addicted to factual knowledge? Why are we so uncomfortable with the unknown? Is it something about the anxiety of our time? Because of course that wasn't always the way. Even now the whole idea of the rational individual has been subject to question and yet we still cling to this idea of factual, rational knowledge being more valuable than whatever its opposite might be.

  Nicole Krauss

  Anxiety, Individual, Uncomfortable

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I have to remind myself - I think the population of the United States has been subjected to the most sophisticated form of propaganda and mind control that any group of people has been exposed to in a very, very long time. It's difficult for people in this country to get any kind of factual information and to make intelligent decisions based on them.

  Aaron McGruder

  Country, Thinking, Intelligent

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The amount of knowledge which we can justify from evidence directly available to us can never be large. The overwhelming proportion of our factual beliefs continue therefore to be held at second hand through trusting others, and in the great majority of cases our trust is placed in the authority of comparatively few people of widely acknowledged standing.

  Michael Polanyi

  Trust, Knowledge, Science

  Michael Polanyi (2012). “Personal Knowledge”, p.221, Routledge

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• Science is not marginal. Like art, it is a universal possession of humanity, and scientific knowledge has become a vital part of our species' repertory. It comprises what we know of the material world with reasonable certainty. . . . Thanks to science and technology, access to factual information of all kinds is rising exponentially.

  E. O. Wilson

  Art, Technology, Humanity

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• Look, taste is clearly the crudest of our senses: this is scientifically, objectively factual. It is less nuanced. Eyesight is extraordinary - hearing, touch. I find people who devote their whole lives to taste a little strange.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  People, Looks, Littles

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• I love the protest signs protected by the First Amendment - some of them humorous, some of them passionate, some factual, some entirely incorrect - all of them free ideas.

  Jennifer Granholm

  Humorous, Ideas, Passionate

  "Occupy a Wing of the Democratic Party" by Jennifer M. Granholm, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 3, 2012.

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• When you think of how history is revealed, we know certain things to be facts at certain periods of time, which turn out not to be so factual as time marches on.

  John Malkovich

  Thinking, Facts, March

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• It is probably safe to say that all the changes of factual knowledge which have led to the relativity theory, resulting in a very great theoretical development, are completely trivial from any point of view except their relevance to the structure of a theoretical system.

  Talcott Parsons

  Views, Development, Safe

  TALCOTT PARSONS (1937). “THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL ACTION”

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• The hypothesis may be put forward, to be tested by the s subsequent investigation, that this development has been in large part a matter of the reciprocal interaction of new factual insights and knowledge on the one hand with changes in the theoretical system on the other.

  Talcott Parsons

  Hands, Development, May

  Talcott Parsons, Peter Hamilton (1985). “Readings from Talcott Parsons”, Chichester [West Sussex] : E. Horwood ; London ; New York : Tavistock Publications

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• Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.

  Salman Rushdie

  World Religions, Historical, Islam

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• Like, I took no poetic license with 'Schindler's List' because that was historical, factual documents.

  Steven Spielberg

  Poetic License, Historical, Lists

  Interview with Steve Head, www.ign.com. December 17, 2002.

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