Quotes
Quotes about Facts
Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by discovery of new facts...
I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it.
There are no tragedies, just facts not recognized in time.
The truth is more important than the facts.
If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himselfâ ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanityâ before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.
The safest words are always those which bring us most directly to facts.
It was the human spirit itself that failed at Paris. It is no use passing judgments and making scapegoats of this or that individual statesman or group of statesmen. Idealists make a great mistake in not facing the real facts sincerely and resolutely. They believe in the power of the spirit, in the goodness which is at the heart of things, in the triumph which is in store for the great moral ideals of the race. But this great faith only too often leads to an optimism which is sadly and fatally at variance with actual results. It is the realist and not the idealist who is generally justified by events. We forget that the human spirit, the spirit of goodness and truth in the world, is still only an infant crying in the night, and that the struggle with darkness is as yet mostly an unequal struggle. . . . Paris proved this terrible truth once more. It was not Wilson who failed there, but humanity itself. It was not the statesmen that failed, so much as the spirit of the peoples behind them.
