Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

It is a very long and very difficult road from a fact to a conclusion. But it is a million times longer from a theory to a fact.

Hypotheses are what we lack the least.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

Just as houses are made of stone, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house, and a collection of facts is not necessarily science

Without a theory the facts are silent.

Facts themselves do not give knowledge

Of course, having information to use is one thing. Knowing what it means and how to use it is a different story.

Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.

Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.

Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.

If the modern leader doesn't know the facts, he is in grave trouble, but rarely do the facts provide unqualified guidance.

People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.

Learn, compare, collect the facts!

Making good judgments when one has complete data, facts, and knowledge is not leadership - it's bookkeeping

No facts to me are sacred; none are profane.

Before anything can be reasoned upon to a conclusion, certain facts, principles, or data, to reason from, must be established, admitted, or denied.

One of the reasons we do history, in fact, is because it acts as a brake, a control, on our otherwise unbridled enthusiasm for our own ideas.

What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.

There is no knowledge without theory.

The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.

Students are often in no position to judge 'relevance' until long after the fact.

The theory must not contradict empirical facts.

The facts never speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted in terms of some understanding of where they come from and what the relation between them is.

Our problems are not with the data, itself, but arise from our interpretation of the data.