Charles Dickens Quotes

We have an expression in New York City government - "In God we trust, but for everyone else, bring data." It's so easy to pick up a sound byte and say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I believe that," without really thinking.

Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.

Someone once told me to believe 5 percent of what everybody tells you.

It is not the least service which a college or university may render to those under its instruction, to habituate them to looking not only patiently but methodically on both sides, before adopting any conclusion upon controverted issues.

You've accepted a lot of things without evidence. Find out what the evidence is for that. Find out what the evidence is for everything that you accept.

The first thing you ought to do is verify what I present. Just because I say it doesn't make it true. So check it out, see what looks correct, what looks wrong, look at other material which wasn't discussed, figure out what the truth really is. That's what you've got a brain for.

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

Skeptics question the validity of a particular claim by calling for evidence to prove or disprove it.

If one knows only what one is told, one does not know enough to be able to arrive at a well-balanced decision.

We shouldn't accept things just because somebody says so.

The best protection for the people is not necessarily to believe everything people tell them.

One of the first things we should teach every student is not to believe everything they read and hear.

In my opinion, it helps enormously to know why something is true, rather than being told it is true, for why should you believe me? Never believe anything on the authority of a single person but seek confirmation — and reason is the best confirmation

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious—just dead wrong.

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

Do not believe just because you want to believe.

Beware of current truths.

Nobody should believe something just because an intelligence agent says it.

We need to take a step back and realize that not everything we encounter is true. You don't want to be gullibly accepting everything as true, but you don't want to be cynically rejecting everything as false. You want to take your time to evaluate the information.

We are not a court - not a judge or jury at work - but we've tried to apply the highest possible standards of rigorous analysis to the evidence where we make a criticism.

I think the most important thing that young people should be taught at school is how they can decide what they're being told is true.

I will never speculate on data. I always need to see data.

A judicious man looks at Statistics, not to "get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted 'on him".