Quotessence
Home / Topics / Evidence Quotes

Evidence Quotes

Browse 2987 quotes about Evidence.

Related topics

Evidence Quotes

“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.”

“I support the death penalty. I think that it has to be administered not only fairly, with attention to things like DNA evidence, which I think should be used in all capital cases, but also with very careful attention. If the wrong guy is put to death, then that's a double tragedy. Not only has an innocent person been executed but the real perpetrator of the crime has not been held accountable for it, and in some cases may be still at large. But I support the death penalty in the most heinous cases.”

“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.)”

“If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. [...] The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.”

“These doctors, who had long experience with people in pain in addition to their traditional training and schooling, had discovered that nothing happens without communication, treatment based on evidence of outcome, and what used to be called a good bedside manner.”

“I am certainly open to the idea that this might be used to explain other philosophical categories besides knowledge. I have some real sympathy with the work of those moral realists who have tried to give naturalistic accounts of human flourishing, and who offer accounts of right action in such terms. (I suppose this is more evidence that I really do have deep affinities with Aristotle!)”

“If you have evidence that C1 is a cause of E, and no evidence as to whether C2 is also a cause of E, then C1 seems to be a better explanation of E than C1&C2 is, since C1 is more parsimonious. I call the version of Ockham's razor used here "the razor of silence." The better explanation of E is silent about C2; it does not deny that C2 was a cause. The problem changes if you consider two conjunctive hypotheses.”

“Darwin repeatedly used the hypothesis of common ancestry as a platform on which to build his various ideas about testing hypotheses concerning natural selection. He also argued that adaptive similarities provide little or no evidence for common ancestry. Although this second claim needs to be fine-tuned, Darwin was right that ample evidence for common ancestry can exist even if none of the characteristics we observe were caused to evolve by natural selection.”

“Our soldiers in another area were attacked chemically. Our soldiers - they went to the hospital as casualties because of chemical weapons, but in the area where they said the government used chemical weapons, we only had video and we only have pictures and allegations. We're not there ; our forces, our police, our institutions don't exist there. How can you talk about what happened if you don't have evidence ?”

“The worst thing you can do is to turn over your life to a political party that simply is going to use you. And the evidence is clear. Look at all of these groups that have been voting Democrat for 50 years. Take a look at the towns that have been nothing but Democrat, towns and cities, for 30 years, and just take a look at them. The evidence is right there. We got the strong, silent type, and they have been replaced by this pajama-clad kid that the Regime used to sell Obamacare. The pajama kid! The nerd in his pajamas.”

“I can make some calls. There is a guy. Dagfinn Heyerdahl. He used to be with Norse Heritage Foundation." Norse Heritage Foundation wasn't so much about heritage as it was about viking, in the most cliché sense of the world. They drank huge quantities of beer, they brawled, and they wore horned helmets despite all historical evidence to the contrary. "Used to be?" Curran asked. "They kicked him out for being drunk and violent." Curran blinked. "The Norse Heritage?" "Mhm." "Don't you have to be drunk and violent just to get in?" he asked. "Just how disorderly did he get?”

“Atheists themselves used to be very comfortable in maintaining that the universe is eternal and uncaused. The problem is that they can no longer hold that position because modern evidence that the universe started with the Big Bang. So they can't legitimately object when I make the same claim about God - he is eternal and he is uncaused.”

“In order to understand what is meant by the word 'brain' as it is used by neuroscientists, we must bear in mind the evidence that this organ contains in some recorded form the basis of one's whole conscious life. It contains the record of all our aims and ambitions and is essential for the experience of all pleasures and pains, all loves and hates.”

“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.”

“One can see from space how the human race has changed the Earth. Nearly all of the available land has been cleared of forest and is now used for agriculture or urban development. The polar icecaps are shrinking and the desert areas are increasing. At night, the Earth is no longer dark, but large areas are lit up. All of this is evidence that human exploitation of the planet is reaching a critical limit. But human demands and expectations are ever-increasing. We cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere, poison the ocean and exhaust the land. There isn't any more available.”

“Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard-or try to turn back-the measureable advances that we have made.”

“I have come to doubt whether the FDA rules should apply to cannabis. There is no question about its safety. It is one of humanity's oldest medicines, used for thousands of years by millions of people with very little evidence of significant toxic effects. More is known about its adverse effects than about those of most prescription drugs.”

“It seems incredible that the trustees of typically American fortune-created foundations should have permitted them to be used to finance ideas and practices incompatible with the fundamental concepts of our Constitution. Yet there seems evidence that this may have occurred.”