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Evidence Quotes

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Evidence Quotes

“The scientific method is designed to help investigators overcome the most entrenched human cognitive habit: the confirmation bias, the tendency to notice and remember evidence that confirms our beliefs or decisions, and to ignore, dismiss, or forget evidence that is discrepant. That's why we are all inclined to stick to a hypothesis we believe in. Science is one way of forcing us, kicking and screaming if necessary, to modify our views.”

“Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial, and not an inquisitorial, system - a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured, and may not, by coercion, prove its charges against an accused out of his own mouth.”

“Bertrand Russell used to employ the method of "evidence against interest"; in other words of deciding that a critique of capital punishment, say, carried more weight if it came from a prison governor. (My friend John O'Sullivan puts it like this: If the pope says he believes in God, he's only doing his job; if he says he doesn't believe in God, he may be on to something.)”

Ifs Believe May Jobs Used Interest Evidence My Friends Argument Weight Method Prison Punishment Believe In God Governors Pope Critique Capital Punishment Interest In Others

Author:Christopher Hitchens

“Science has a culture that is inherently cautious and that is normally not a bad thing. You could even say conservative, because of the peer review process and because the scientific method prizes uncertainty and penalises anyone who goes out on any sort of a limb that is not held in place by abundant and well-documented evidence.”

Wells Culture Process Evidence Method Conservative Uncertainty Prize Bad Things Reviews Peers Limbs Cautious Gore Scientific Method Peer Review

Author:Al Gore

“We know the secret police's methods, and the way the archive and registry were run - that's how we know. We've also found evidence from the Bolek file cited in other files.”

Knows Way Running Found Secret Evidence Police Method Files Archives Secret Police

Author:Slawomir Cenckiewicz

“A popular feel for scientific endeavors should, if possible, be restored given the needs of the twenty-first century. This does not mean that every literature major should take a watered-down physics course or that a corporate lawyer should stay abreast of quantum mechanics. Rather, it means that an appreciation for the methods of science is a useful asset for a responsible citizenry. What science teaches us, very significantly, is the correlation between factual evidence and general theories, something well illustrated in Einstein's life.”

Source: Einstein: His Life and Universe

“This is not a dictatorship, this is based upon scientific evidence to support a given project. If you want to put up a building, say half a mile high, the material has to be available. Using statistics is not a dictatorship. It's a method of getting the most from existing resources.”

Ifs Want Given Half Support Building Materials Projects Evidence Resources Method Available Miles Statistics Dictatorship Scientific Evidence

Author:Jacque Fresco

“I think the evidence is just so overwhelming that Jesus existed, that it's silly to talk about him not existing. I don't know anyone who is a responsible historian, who is actually trained in the historical method, or anybody who is a biblical scholar who does this for a living, who gives any credence at all to any of this.”

Thinking Knows Giving Doe Jesus Evidence Responsible Method Historical Silly Overwhelming Historian Scholar Biblical Credence

Author:Bart D. Ehrman

“That the great majority of those who leave school should have some idea of the kind of evidence required to substantiate given types of belief does not seem unreasonable. Nor is it absurd to expect that they should go forth with a lively interest in the ways in which knowledge is improved and a marked distaste for all conclusions reached in disharmony with the methods of scientific inquiry.”

Source: The Middle Works, 1899-1924: 1910-1911

“Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its non-mystical methods; above all-which perhaps most explains the expert's sovereignty-of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.”

Age Science Faith Morality Evidence Tests Accounts Method Experts Superstitions Cop Traffic Mystical Sovereignty Inquiry Rabbits Infallibility

Author:Louis Kronenberger

“I think that everybody has acknowledged that, in controlling foxes, hunting is hardly used as a method at all. To say that other ways of killing foxes, such as shooting, are crueller is to accuse all those people who work in the countryside of being more cruel than they need to be. In all the time that I have lived in and represented the countryside, I have seen no evidence that those people have that view.”

People Thinking Way Needs Used Views Evidence Method Killing Shooting Hunting Foxes Countryside Fox Hunting

Author:Ian Cawsey

“RELIGION: A set of beliefs held as dogmas, dominating the conduct of life, going beyond or contrary to evidence, and inculcated by methods which are emotional or authoritarian, not intellectual.”

God Religion Belief Emotional Intellectual Evidence Method Contrary Dogma Dominating

Book:Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919-22

Source: Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919-22

“Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course. Despite all deficiencies not only is the death-blow dealt here for the first time to 'teleology' in the natural sciences, but their rational meaning is empirically explained.”

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: selected correspondence, 1846-1895: with explanatory notes