Samuel McChord Crothers Quotes

I have been saying this from the beginning: people are going to say whatever they want to say or believe whatever they want to believe. I say this to people: stick to the facts.

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

I do not fear truth. I welcome it. But I wish all of my facts to be in their proper context.

Once we thought, journalists and readers alike, that if we put together enough 'facts' and gave them a fast stir, we would come up with something that, at least by the standards of short-order cooks, could be called the truth.

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.

Namely, we have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.

We’ve learned our lesson. We are not going to take any more intelligence at face value.

You can tell so many facts that you never get to the truth

If you believe everything you read, better not read.

Every person must be his own watchman for the truth, because the forefathers did not trust government to separate the true from the false for us.

There is so much unreliable information on the internet and in the media.

The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

If you are searching to figure out what is true and what is not, you will have a sad life. It means you have too much time, and you should do a hobby - like collecting art.

What I want people to consider is that no matter what it is we want to believe, and no matter what story it is we want to jam the world into, the truth is the truth.

I think it's true we look forward to enormous amounts of information, but I think we would be better off if we thought about the kinds of wisdom and thoughtfulness that we need in order to handle the amount of information ahead.

You cannot be insightful if you're deluged with information.

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.

Just because someone says something, whether it's at the podium during the briefing or the president tweets, I can't always assume that's factual. That's insane. We have to be very quick on our toes in fact checking.

I don't take anything that I read in the newspaper at face value on either side - from anybody.

Don't believe everything you read in the trades.

I'm kind of fascinated by this idea that we can surround ourselves with information: we can just pile up data after data after data and arm ourselves with facts and yet still not be able to answer the questions that we have.

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.

Being a skeptical and thoughtful consumer of polls is essential.

If you are a journalist, check and double-check your sources. Don't just swallow what politicians tell you.