Browsing Topic Best Evidence Quotes

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that’s also the definition of delusion.

Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence to make them believable.

Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.

Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right.

If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.

One of the biggest problems with the world today is that we have large groups of people who will accept whatever they hear on the grapevine, just because it suits their worldview—not because it is actually true or because they have evidence to support it. The really striking thing is that it would not take much effort to establish validity in most of these cases… but people prefer reassurance to research.

The disappointment I feel today is beyond words. I’m heartbroken that the mountain of evidence still was not enough to stand up to the disproportionate power, influence, and sway of my ex-husband.

Know yourself. Don’t accept your dog’s admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.

Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.

For those with faith, no evidence is necessary; for those without it, no evidence will suffice.

This truth I firmly hold, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding; my life has been a gift, a blessing to the world.

There’s good evidence that if people are disempowered, if they have little control over their lives, if they’re socially isolated or unable to participate fully in society, then there are biological effects.

If you judge after appearances, you will continue to be enslaved by the evidence of your senses.

Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there the resemblance ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.

There is considerable evidence that women’s education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children

When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution – we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species – the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.

Countries with more gender equality have better economic growth. Companies with more women leaders perform better. Peace agreements that include women are more durable. Parliaments with more women enact more legislation on key social issues such as health, education, anti-discrimination and child support. The evidence is clear: equality for women means progress for all.

It’s sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we’ve been wrong, this is information about ourselves worth having.

You’re supposed to trust friends. You have no reason to be his friend? That is part of the pleasure of friendship: trusting without absolute evidence and then being rewarded for that trust.

Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.

We must consider both the ultimate end and all clear sensory evidence, to which we refer our opinions; for otherwise everything will be full of uncertainty and confusion.

Evidence that [feminine aesthetic preferences and ways of expressing oneself] may be hardwired comes from the fact that they typically appear early in childhood and often in contradiction to one’s socialization. […] This indicates that some aspects of feminine verbal and aesthetic expression precede and/or supersede gender socialization.

While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you.

Emotionally I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.

I would assume that you were going to offer me refreshment, but the evidence so far suggests that that would be optimistic to the point of foolishness.

The evidence is overwhelming that marijuana can relieve certain types of pain, nausea, vomiting and other symptoms caused by such illnesses as multiple sclerosis, cancer and AIDS – or by the harsh drugs sometimes used to treat them. And it can do so with remarkable safety. Indeed, marijuana is less toxic than many of the drugs that physicians prescribe every day.

The Jews emerge into history, not a nation of keen spiritual aspirations and altruistic ethics, but that pagan people, worshipping rocks, sheep and cattle, and spirits of caves and wells, of whom the Old Testament, tending towards its higher ideal, gives fragmentary but convincing evidence.