Objective Reality Quotes

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.

I only believe in what I see and hear with my own eyes and ears.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

The good thing about science is that it is true whether or not you believe in it.

Facts are stubborn things.

We have the right to our own opinions, but not our own facts.

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

Science is true, whether you believe it or not.

Understanding truth is the primary objective of science, not doing good for the world.

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.

The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.

We're awash in toxic memes right now. One of the most toxic, I think because it enables so many others, is the idea that truth doesn't matter, that truth is just relative, that there's no such thing as establishing the truth of anything. Your truth, my truth, we're all entitled to our own truths. That's pernicious, it's attractive to many people, and it is used to exploit people in all sorts of nefarious ways. The truth really does matter.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

I'm an educator, and I'm a scientist, and I speak what is objectively true. And if that offends you, I can try to have a conversation with you to ask why it offends you, and tell you why objective truth should not offend you because that's how the world works.

Exactitude is not truth.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

We have freedom of speech, and anybody's idea can't be a fact.

If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.

By convention sweet is sweet, by convention bitter is bitter, by convention hot is hot, by convention cold is cold, by convention color is color. But in reality there are atoms and the void. That is, the objects of sense are supposed to be real and it is customary to regard them as such, but in truth they are not. Only the atoms and the void are real.

Truth cannot be sacrificed at the altar of pretended tolerance. Real tolerance is deference to all ideas, not indifference to the truth.