This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious." - Brendan Gill
"The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence ... Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist." - Donald Rumsfeld
"Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, then watching the evidence change." - Jim Wallis
"Faith is belief without evidence, in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
"Not... what opinions are held, but... how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, [liberal] opinions are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." - Carl Sagan
"You can prove almost anything with the evidence of a small enough segment of time. How often, in any search for truth, the answer of the minute is positive, the answer of the hour qualified, the answers of the year contradictory!" - Edwin Way Teale
"One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard." - Eric Hoffer
"It is without all controversy that learning doth make the minds of men gentle, amiable, and pliant to government; whereas ignorance makes them churlish, thwarting, and mutinous; and the evidence of time doth clear this assertion, considering that the most barbarous, rude and unlearned times have been most subject to tumults, seditions, and changes." - Francis Bacon
"Without controversy, learning doth make the mind of men gentle, generous, amiable and pliant to government; whereas ignorance makes them curlish, thwarting, and mutinous; and the evidence of time doth clear this assertion, considering that the most barbarous, rude, and unlearned times have been most subject to tumults, seditions, and changes." - Francis Bacon
"Philosophy being nothing else but the study of wisdom and truth, it may with reason be expected that those who have spent most time and pains in it should enjoy a greater calm and serenity of mind, a greater clearness and evidence of knowledge, and be less disturbed with doubts and difficulties than other men." - George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
"In the heat of speculation or of love there may come moments of equal perfection, but they are very unstable. The reason and the heart remain deeply unsatisfied. But the eye finds in nature, and in some supreme achievements of art, constant and fuller satisfaction. For the eye is quick and seems to have been more docile to the education of life than the heart or the reason of man, and able sooner to adapt itself to the reality. Beauty therefore seems to be the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its possibility." - George Santayana
"Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection must rest on circumstantial evidence." - George Santayana
"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce[s] them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim." - Gustave Le Bon
"Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Against the formidable array of cumulative evidence for Determinism, there is but one argument of real force: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate action." - Henry Sidgwick
"I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be." - Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
"It is a shallow mind which can see to the bottom of its own beliefs, and is conscious of nothing but what it can measure in evidence and state in words." - James Martineau
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." - John Adams
"Growth is the only evidence of life." - John Henry Newman
"There can be no doubt but that everything in the world, by the beauty of its order, and the evidence of a determinate and beneficial purpose which pervades its, testifies that some supreme efficient Power must have pre-existed, by which the whole was ordained for a specific end." - John Milton
"Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and working actively to change the evidence." - Michael Toms
"The thoughts we think of and the things we make are under our control, that we can manipulate them at will. The evidence seems to suggest the contrary. The information we generate has a life of its own, and its existence is sometimes symbiotic, sometimes parasitic, relative to ours.... It doesn’t seem that memes are any more dependent on their environment than we are." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem, the more likely one will be to treat others with respect, kindness, and generosity." - Nathaniel Branden
"Evidence of trust begets trust, and love is reciprocated by love." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"All necessary truth is its own evidence." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Our dissatisfaction with any other solution is the blazing evidence of immortality." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We should never allow ourselves to be persuaded excepting by the evidence of our Reason, of our Reason and not our imagination nor of our senses." - René Descartes
"Courage is the human virtue that counts most - courage to act on limited knowledge and insufficient evidence. That's all any of us have, so we must have the courage to go ahead and act on a hunch. It's the best we can do." - Robert Frost
"Faith is not trying to believe something regardless of the evidence. Faith is daring to do something regardless of the consequences." - Sherwood Eddy, born George Sherwood Eddy
"The highest and most profitable learning is the knowledge of ourselves. To have a low opinion of our own merits, and to think highly of others, is an evidence of wisdom. All men are frail, but thou shouldst reckon none so frail as thyself." - Thomas Kempis, aka Thomas à Kempis, Thomas von Kempen, Thomas Haemerkken or Hammerlein or Hemerken or Hämerken
"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. " - Christopher Hitchens
"Having seen how many follow and have followed false religions, and having our reason utterly against many of the principal points of the Bible, we require the most perfect evidence of facts, before we can believe. If you can prove to me that one miracle took place, I will believe that he is a just God who damned us all because a woman ate an apple; and you can't expect greater complaisance than that to be sure." - Edward FitzGerald, fully Edward Marlborough FitzGerald
"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular." - Edward R. Murrow, born Egbert Roscoe Murrow
"The overall idea behind the concept of an Akashic Field is that behind the materialistic and mechanistic world there is in fact another realm of interaction. This book presents compelling evidence for this from the fields of cosmology, quantum physics, biology and studies of consciousness. It is like a subtle communication network that underlies physical reality and that connects every point in space with every other point, and every thing with every other thing. This communication network operates in the realm of pure information that underlies empirical existence and thus does not rely on the transport of physical energy, hence, through this field, interactions can occur instantaneously regardless of physical separation and without any channel for the mechanistic transport of energy. Furthermore, like things tend to interact more strongly with like things, thus humans interact more strongly with humans, galaxies with galaxies and so on. The principle empirical and observable effect of this field is coherence between phenomena across any distances." - Ervin László
"In the conservative view human communication and interaction is limited to our sensory channels ... [but] we are linked by more subtle and encompassing connections as well...The connections that bind 'my' consciousness to the consciousness of others... are rediscovered today in controlled experiments with thought and image transference, and the effect of the mind of one individual on the body of another... Native tribes seem able to communicate beyond the range of eye and ear... In the laboratory also, modern people display a capacity for spontaneous transference of impressions and images, especially when they are emotionally close to each other... transpersonal contact includes the ability to transmit thoughts and images, and ... it is given to many if not all people... this is the finding of recent experiments... Reliable evidence is becoming available that the conscious mind of one person can produce repeatable and measurable effects on the body of another... [also] Intercessory prayer and spiritual healing, together with other mind- and intention-based experiments and practices, yield impressive evidence regarding the effectiveness of telepathic and telesomatic information- and energy-transmission. The pertinent practices produce real and measurable effects on people, and they are more and more widespread. But mainstream science has no explanation for them. Could it be that our consciousness is linked with other consciousnesses through an interconnecting Akashic Field, much as galaxies are linked in the cosmos, quanta in the microworld, and organisms in the world of the living?" - Ervin László
"Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology — we are quite unable to imagine the contrary." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
"Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial and not an inquisitorial system — a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charges against an accused out of his own mouth." - Felix Frankfurter
"There is no evidence that the tongue is connected to the brain." - Frank Tyger
"The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming." - Freeman John Dyson
"The principle of maximum diversity says that the laws of nature, and the initial conditions at the beginning of time, are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth. This is the confession of faith of a scientific heretic. Perhaps I may claim as evidence for progress in religion the fact that we no longer burn heretics." - Freeman John Dyson
"All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality." - Norman Douglas, aka George Norman Douglas
"If a person is capable of rectifying his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he is not prejudiced. Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge. A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it. We tend to grow emotional when a prejudice is threatened with contradiction. Thus the difference between ordinary prejudgments and prejudice is that one can discuss and rectify a prejudgment without emotional resistance." - Gordon Willard Allport
"Precedents deliberately established by wise men are entitled to great weight. They are evidence of truth, but only evidence...But a solitary precedent...which has never been reexamined, cannot be conclusive." - Henry Clay