Evidence Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Some beliefs may be subject to such instant, brutal and unambiguous rejection. For example: no left-coiling periwinkle has ever been found among millions of snails examined. If I happen to find one during my walk on Nobska beach tomorrow morning, a century of well nurtured negative evidence will collapse in an instant.

Stephen Jay Gould

What evidence is there that we've adequately empathized with the other person? First, when an individual realizes that everything going on within has received full empathic understanding, they will experience a sense of relief. We can become aware of this phenomenon by noticing a corresponding release of tension in our own body.

Marshall Rosenberg

Molecular evidence suggests that our common ancestor with chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between five and seven million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards … in your left hand you hold the right hand of your mother. In turn she holds the hand of her mother, your grandmother. Your grandmother holds her mother's hand, and so on … How far do we have to go until we reach our common ancestor with the chimpanzees? It is a surprisingly short way. Allowing one yard per person, we arrive at the ancestor we share with chimpanzees in under 300 miles.

Richard Dawkins

Well, I think comparing Common Lisp to Scheme is prima facie evidence of ill will, even if Common Lisp wins. It is somewhat like a supposed compliment like "man, you are even smarter than George W. Bush".

The God that our neighbors believe in is essentially an invisible person. He's a creator deity, who created the universe to have a relationship with one species of primates – lucky us. And he's got galaxy upon galaxy to attend to, but he's especially concerned with what we do, and he's especially concerned with what we do while naked. He almost certainly disapproves of homosexuality. And he's created this cosmos as a vast laboratory in which to test our powers of credulity, and the test is this: can you believe in this God on bad evidence, which is to say, on faith? And if you can, you will win an eternity of happiness after you die.

There remains a third source from which we arrive at the knowledge of the existence of a supreme Creator, namely, from an examination of his works. Unlike transmitted testimony, which is weakened at every stage, this evidence derives confirmation from the progress of the individual as well as from the advancement of the knowledge of the race.
Almost all thinking men who have studied the laws which govern the animate and the inanimate world around us, agree that the belief in the existence of one Supreme Creator, possessed of infinite wisdom and power, is open to far less difficulties than the supposition of the absence of any cause, or of the existence of a plurality of causes.

Charles Babbage

There is no surer evidence of an unconverted state than to have the things of the world uppermost in our aim, love, and estimation.

The fact that there is a general belief in a future life is no evidence of its truth

Clarence Darrow

In 1968 Ian Wilson made his final sculpture. Since then, he has explored the idea of oral communication as an art form... Wilson's work is very hard to track down, even in terms of documentation. He has been compared to the Socratic philosophers but if there is a similarity between his practice and theirs, it probably lies mainly in the fact that everything we have from that period of philosophy takes the form of secondary fragments embedded in other texts. Wilson's work functions almost like archaeological or geological evidence: it consists of objects that we examine in order to deduce, from scanty clues, what must have happened.

Edward Allington

I have reason to know, as do many of you, that when the evidence on a controversial subject is fairly and calmly presented, the public recognizes it for what it is—an effort to illuminate rather than to agitate.

Edward R. Murrow

A theorist today is hardly considered respectable if he or she has not introduced at least one new particle for which there is no experimental evidence.

Steven Weinberg

But for their right to judge of the law, and the justice of the law, juries would be no protection to an accused person, even as to matters of fact; for, if the government can dictate to a jury any law whatever, in a criminal case, it can certainly dictate to them the laws of evidence.

Lysander Spooner

The fact is that science itself must change, as it discovers that its net of evidence is equipped only to catch certain kinds of fish, and that it is constructed of webs of assumptions that can only hold certain varieties of reality, while others escape its bet entirely.

Despite his crimped shirts and flowing mane (or perhaps because of them) I had seen no evidence as yet that Nathaniel even knew what a girl was. If he'd ever met one, chances are they'd both have run screaming in opposite directions.

Jonathan Stroud

The neatly integrated paradigm for brain water... was derived from experiments done by Walter Dandy... Most brain scientists and brain physicians honour the Dandy paradigm as a navigator honours the North Star.... yet new scientific evidence makes it difficult, if not impossible, to accept... It is a mismeme; the experimental facts no longer allow it to be 'true', and we need a paradigm switch.

Richard Bergland

If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge. A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.

Lawrence M. Krauss

Einstein showed us that the Universe might contain a mysterious form of vacuum energy.... Last year, two teams of astronomers used Earth's most powerful telescopes... to gather persuasive evidence for the reality of the cosmic vacuum energy. Its effects are dramatic. It is accelerating the expansion of the Universe.

The fact that these principles, collected from the writings of half a dozen different people, many of whom made no attempt to correlate their work with others, can be presented in a coherent and logical pattern is in itself strong evidence that there is a common element in all experience of the conduct of social groups, that a true science of administration is ultimately possible.

Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary

From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.

It would strike me as ridiculous to want to doubt the existence of Napoleon; but if someone doubted the existence of the earth 150 years ago, perhaps I should be more willing to listen, for now he is doubting our whole system of evidence.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

There has been little morphological evidence offered since Darwin in support of the relatedness of humans and one or both of the African apes, but that, when the relationships among the extant humanoids are investigated cladistically in an evaluation of more than 200 morphological features, there are well over twice as many morphological synapomorphies in support of uniting humans with the orang-utan as with the African ape clad and very few in support of uniting the chimpanzee more closely with humans than with the gorilla.

Jeffrey H. Schwartz

There has never been any evidence that the death penalty reduces capital crimes or that crimes increased when executions stopped. Tragic mistakes are prevalent...It is clear that there are overwhelming ethical, financial, and religious reasons to abolish the death penalty.

Contemporary philosophers have exercised themselves with the problem of our knowledge of other minds. Enmeshed in the dogma of the ghost in the machine, they have found it impossible to discover any logically satisfactory evidence warranting one person in believing that there exist minds other than his own. I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does, and my pretensions to infer from what your body does to what your mind does all collapse, since the premises for such inferences are either inadequate or unknowable.

It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.

Thomas Henry Huxley