Richard Flanagan Quotes

The logic of words should yield to the logic of realities.

Facts are better than dreams.

Ground not upon dreams; you know they are ever contrary.

Trying to ground everything in reality was the most important thing to me.

I'm a realist and I always have been.

The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.

We need realism to deal with reality.

I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.

Become reality driven. Don’t kid yourself or others.

We cannot make facts. All our wishing cannot change them. We must use them.

Facts are more mundane than fantasies, but a better basis for conclusions.

Facts are placed before reasonings and before ideals, even though the reasonings and the ideals be more beautiful, be seemingly more lofty, be seemingly better, be seemingly truer. The seemingly absurd and the seemingly impossible are sometimes true. The scientific disposition is to accept facts upon evidence, however absurd they may appear to our pre-conceptions.

One has to view things realistically.

I consider myself a realist.

I go with what I know and what I see, and I believe in reality.

I don't deal with hypotheticals. I deal with reality.

Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.

We cannot pretend that reality is different from what it is.

Facts are counterrevolutionary.

Reality isn't the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are.

Seek truth from facts.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

Don't make me into this airy-fairy, moralist, idealist because I'm not.

The safest words are always those which bring us most directly to facts.