There is always a danger of accepting facts as proved which are really nothing of the kind.
The world divides into facts.[Die Welt zerfällt in Tatsachen.]
The totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.[Die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen bestimmt, was der Fall ist und auch, was alles nicht der Fall ist.]
The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.[Les faits ne pénètrent pas dans le monde où vivent nos croyances, ils n’ont pas fait naître celles-ci, ils ne les détruisent pas.]
The fact that society has become strong and sure of itself diminishes the external importance of the injury and so leads to a mitigation of its punishment.
The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact — of absolute undeniable fact — from the embellishments of theorists and reporters.
So long as we do not depend on the facts entirely, incomplete knowledge is better than complete ignorance.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That’s because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth.
Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with two focus. Facts are one, ideas are the other.[L’homme n’est pas un cercle à un seul centre; c’est une ellipse à deux foyers. Les faits sont l’un, les idées sont l’autre.]
It is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory. If one little fact will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant.
It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
