Penelope Fitzgerald Quotes

If you're a scientist, and you have to have an answer, even in the absence of data, you're not going to be a good scientist.

The reason I spend so much of my time doing science is that the whole point of science is to help people resolve conflicting claims by saying: 'Show me the data.'

Never, ever, compromise on science.

The scientist is a lover of truth for the very love of truth itself, wherever it may lead.

It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there's no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic.

Most importantly, I agree that the truth of these matters should be determined by interpretation of scientific evidence - experiments, fossil studies and the like.

I love science. I hate supposition, superstition, exaggeration and falsified data. Show me the research, show me the results, show me the conclusions - and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.

I'm a bit of a freak for evidence-based analysis. I strongly believe in data.

We have to keep up the fight for evidence-based science and policy.

My personal conviction is that science is concerned wholly with truth, not with ethics.

A scientist... must accept the results of experiment, and nothing but the results of experiment.

Truth in science is always determined from observational facts.

My books are based 98 percent on documentary evidence.

Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans.

We should all be troubled when science is treated as if it were an ideology rather than a discipline.

Generally, TED speakers are believers in the scientific method.

Disregard belief systems that aren't based on empirical studies.

The biggest thing I worry about is the unsubstantiated story. You have to tell the people what you know -- and acknowledge what you don't know.

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

I always felt that a scientist owes the world only one thing, and that is the truth as he sees it. If the truth contradicts deeply held beliefs, that is too bad. Tact and diplomacy are fine in international relations, in politics, perhaps even in business; in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts.

I would stand upon facts.

scientists ... resist ... making more of the data than the data make of themselves.

The only way to have real success in science, the field I'm familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory , you must try to explain what's good and what's bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty .

Part of what it is to be scientifically-literate is how you think about information that's presented in front of you. I think that's the great challenge. You have people who believe they do know how to think about the information, but don't, and they're in the position of power and legislation. You can't base a society on non-objectively verifiable truth. Otherwise, it's a fantasy land and science is the pathway to those emerging truths that are hard-earned and that some have taken decades, if not centuries, to emerge from experiments all around the world.

Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.