Winston Churchill Quotes

My colleagues have learned to respect nothing but evidence, and to believe that their highest duty lies in submitting to it, however it may jar against their inclinations.

When the fact doesn't meet the theory then let go the theory.

Rationalism doesn't require "belief," only observation. The real, measurable world doesn't care what you believe.

For scientists, reality is not optional.

The good thing about science is that it is true whether or not you believe in it.

I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.

Facts are better than dreams.

Facts are placed before reasonings and before ideals, even though the reasonings and the ideals be more beautiful, be seemingly more lofty, be seemingly better, be seemingly truer. The seemingly absurd and the seemingly impossible are sometimes true. The scientific disposition is to accept facts upon evidence, however absurd they may appear to our pre-conceptions.

I'm more of an empiricist. I'm focused on right or wrong, as opposed to left or right.

Science rejects the indeterminate.

Now, what I want is, Facts. . . . Facts alone are wanted in life.

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.

No amount of belief makes something a fact.

The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are-that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them to be.

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.

We must reason in natural philosophy not from what we hope, or even expect, but from what we perceive.

My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat--a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.

Natural science sharpens the discrimination. There is no false logic in nature. All its properties are permanent: the acids and metals never lie; their yea is yea, their nay, nay. They are newly discovered but not new.

Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, 'Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith!'

Science asks no questions about the ontological pedigree or a priori character of a theory, but is content to judge it by its performance; and it is thus that a knowledge of nature, having all the certainty which the senses are competent to inspire, has been attained--a knowledge which maintains a strict neutrality toward all philosophical systems and concerns itself not with the genesis or a priori grounds of ideas.

Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.

The thing about the truth is that it exists outside of belief. Even if nobody believes it, that thing is still true.

Everyone has been a witness sometime - It doesn't change it if you don't believe.

One of the nice things about math and science is it’s obvious, you get the answer or you don’t get the answer.