John Locke Quotes

I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about.

The deductive method is the mode of using knowledge, and the inductive method the mode of acquiring it.

I think the most important thing journalism taught me is to mine for details. The details are key. You can't try to be funny or strange or poignant; you have to let the details be funny or strange or poignant for you.

I'm not a perfectionist. I'm just very observant.

A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact.

Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations.

The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

When truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.

When general observations are drawn from so many particulars as to become certain and indisputable, these are jewels of knowledge.

The forming of general maxims from particular observation is a very nice operation; and nothing is more usual, from haste or a narrowness of mind, which sees not on all sides, than to commit mistakes in this particular.

I think we all ought to be careful about too much generalization on this issue, even as I confess to painting with a pretty broad brush myself!

I don't want to tell people what to think. I'm the least qualified person in the world for that. If I'd go around pretending to be the expert on everything, I'd become Dan Brown, and I don't understand that. We all do our research if we're good writers, and we all work hard to get it right, but that doesn't mean we're experts in the field. The best we can do is challenge people to learn the facts themselves.

If science were nothing more than the best means of teaching the love of the simple fact, the indispensable need of verification, of careful and accurate observation and statement, its value would be of the highest order.

The facts, gentlemen, and nothing but the facts, for careful eyes are narrowly watching.

The philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of particular observations. He does not confuse truth with plausibility, he takes for truth what is true, for false what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is probable. The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit of observation and accuracy.

It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits

If my false figures came near to the facts, this happened merely by chance ... These comments are not worth printing. Yet it gives me pleasure to remember how many detours I had to make, along how many walls I had to grope in the darkness of my ignorance until I found the door which lets in the light of the truth ... In such manner did I dream of the truth.

It wasn't that I had gotten it right . . . but that I had gotten true.

Accuracy is essential to beauty.

I write about what I know, what I live, what I observe.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you're talking about.

Science is a way of equipping yourself with the tools to interpret what happens in front of you.

Information is bad for knowledge.