Gene Siskel Quotes

Men are not necessarily more zealous for truth than they are for error.

Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has the right to be wrong in his facts.

Whether the story reflects the facts is obviously a different matter.

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.

Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.

No doubt about it: error is the rule, truth is the accident of error.

Bias, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. Facts are your firewall against bias.

I think journalists have the right to their opinions but I think their opinions should be based on history and what they see, not what they feel, how long they've been waiting or whether it's raining or it's snowing or whatever.

If you see a blatant error or misconception about yourself, you really want to set it straight.

A lot of journalism wants to have what they call objectivity without them having a commitment to pursuing the truth, but that doesn't work. Objectivity requires belief in and a commitment toward pursuing the truth - having an object outside of our personal point of view.

There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes.

It's a very complicated issue about when is a fact not a fact in the context of opinions.

An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.

It is difficult to discriminate the voice of truth from amid the clamor raised by heated partisans.

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

When there are multiple versions of a story, you really have three ways to go. You can pick the most sensational version. You can try to balance things in your gut to get to what you think is the honest truth. Or you can err on the side of kindness.

Writers don't have to keep themselves honest. They have to keep themselves accurate.

There's only one side with me. You get the right side. You get the correct version of the facts.

Theatre critics have no special access to the truth. And there should be no objective truth to art.

In my reviews, I feel it's good to make it clear that I'm not proposing objective truth, but subjective reactions; a review should reflect the immediate experience.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

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.

As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there's often a great deal of murkiness and muddiness, confusion and contradiction.

I think all good reporting is the same thing - the best attainable version of the truth.

Perfect objectivity is always impossible, no matter who writes a person's biography.