H. L. Mencken Quotes

Hypotheses non fingo. I frame no hypotheses.

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

Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.

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

I must begin with a good body of facts and not from a principle (in which I always suspect some fallacy) and then as much deduction as you please.

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

Facts have to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

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.

I have great hope and faith, but it's a humanistic faith based in facts; you have to believe that facts exist. We can all arrive at the same facts if we engage in the process of experimentation, observation, and verification, which can solve more of the world's major problems than a debate over whether God does or doesn't exist.

A few observation and much reasoning lead to error; many observations and a little reasoning to truth.

Educated guesswork' is what science is. You form hypotheses, test them against the evidence, and if they fit the evidence, you can assume you've got close to the truth.

Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of Nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being.

There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.

Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.

Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.

[One's] inability to invalidate your hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.

Science has nothing to do with any dogma. Science ceases to exist when there is a dogma.

When deciding between two competing theories, always go with the one that doesn't involve a magic spell.

The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science.

It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

The truth of a theory can never be proven, for one never knows if future experience will contradict its conclusions.

Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements.

We must have the real thing before we can have a science of a thing.