Evidence Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The gospel breathes the spirit of love. Love is the fulfilling of its precepts, the pledge of its joys, and the evidence of its power.

Gardiner Spring

At the same time it will not be forgotten that the physical reality of geometry can not be put in evidence with full clarity unless there is an abstract theory also... Thus, for example, while the term electron may have more than one physical meaning, it is by no means such a protean object as a point or a triangle.

If the evidence of an alleged phenomenon cannot be tested by verification, it is outside the range of science.

Joseph William Mellor

But when, in framing a theory of the earth, a geologist shall indulge his fancy in framing, without evidence, that which had preceded the present order of things, he then either misleads himself, or writes a fable for the amusement of his reader.

Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; and you can explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones. To do the latter, it sometimes isn't enough to lay the evidence before the reader in a dispassionate way. You have to become an advocate and use the tricks of the advocate's trade.

Richard Dawkins

We are entitled to make almost any reasonable assumption, but should resist making conclusions until evidence requires that we do so.

Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are manipulated to produce a new phenomena
[sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.

Science, like art and religion - neither more nor less - is a form of man's reaction against nature. It is an attempt to explain nature in its own terms, that is, to evidence its unity, wholeness, and congruency.

There is evidence that young men in the big law firms, although they still work harder than most of their clients, do not glory in putting in night work and weekend hours as they once did.

It is a grave difficulty in the analytical treatment of scientific ideas that the simple laws are so vaguely conceived that analysis is difficult and the theories that are precisely formulated are often put forward as dogma and the evidence in favor of them has sunk into oblivion or into the realm of myth.

Arthur David Ritchie

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.

No study has brought out any solid evidence that the death penalty deters crime. In fact, Amnesty reports that 'the murder rate in states which use the death penalty is twice that of states which do not, according to FBI statistics.

Antoinette Bosco

He that dies a martyr proves that he was not a knave, but by no means that he was not a fool; since the most absurd doctrines are not without such evidence as martyrdom can produce. A martyr, therefore, by the mere act of suffering, can prove nothing but his own faith.

Charles Caleb Colton

Knowledge has come to be defined as what can be proven by secular evidence and arguments.

If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have... a recipe for the fall of civilization.

Nor is any evidence to be found, either in History or Human Nature, that nations are to be bribed out of a spirit of encroachment and aggression, by humiliations which nourish their pride, or by concessions that extend their resources and power.

The Rationalist case needs no straining of evidence and always gains by the severest self-criticism.

Most Americans instinctively recoil from the claim that there is an antireligious bias running through the underlying assumptions with which their society approaches church-state issues. However, there is persuasive evidence that among some influential segments of the population, there is a very real antireligious strain.

Stephen V. Monsma

For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God's existence.

Walter Isaacson

Unless and until it can be proven that an unborn child is not a human being, can we justify assuming without proof that it isn't? No one has yet offered such proof; indeed, all the evidence is to the contrary. We should rise above bitterness and reproach, and if Americans could come together in a spirit of understanding and helping, then we could find positive solutions to the tragedy of abortion.

To condemn free-market capitalism because of anything going on today makes no sense. There is no evidence that capitalism exists today. We are deeply involved in an interventionist-planned economy that allows major benefits to accrue to the politically connected of both political parties. One may condemn the fraud and the current system, but it must be called by its proper names Keynesian inflationism, interventionism, and corporatism.

It does not seem to me that the evidence concerning the being of a God, and concerning immortality, is such as to enable us to assert anything in regard to either of these topics.

Charles Eliot Norton

PROOF, n. Evidence having a shade more of plausibility than of unlikelihood. The testimony of two credible witnesses as opposed to that of only one.

Given the ambiguity of religious texts and teachings, the mixed historical record, and the empirical evidence, it would be foolhardy to assert that religious faith necessarily upholds democratic values.

Kenneth D. Wald

I think abundant evidence may be found... to convince the most prejudiced against the colored man, that he is by no means so sadly degraded and miserably poor as the public have generally been led to suppose from all that has been said of him.