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facts

Wednesday 24th of April 2024

2016 Presidential election It feels like we are in a world where, to me, some meaningful part of the electorate is beyond reasoning with – beyond fact, anti-science. Michael Lewis, Financial Times, December 10-11, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
2020 Presidential election I was somewhat demoralized because I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has, you know, lost contact with — detached from reality. … There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were. William Barr, testimony presented to the Select Committee to Investigate the Attack on the United States Capitol concerning Trump's professed belief in allegations of widespread voter fraud and vote flipping by machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which Barr called “bullshit”  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Bad news  As we lose people who produce facts, we are in danger of losing the very idea of truth. Timothy Snyder, Malady © 2021 Kwiple.com
Bad news Right-wing claims that fact-checking is a left-wing conspiracy to censor the right and must be resisted at all costs © 2016 Kwiple.com
Dead-in-the-heads say Don't bother me with facts © 2017 Kwiple.com
Fact  In the cockney accent, Michael Caine is pronounced “my cocaine” © 2018 Kwiple.com
Facts Birth, and copulation, and death That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks; Birth, and copulation, and death T. S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes © 2018 Kwiple.com
Facts  Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Daniel Patrick Moynihan © 2023 Kwiple.com
Facts Facts are stupid things. Ronald Reagan © 2023 Kwiple.com
Facts Facts are what you feel comfortable believing. No one in your social group is likely to challenge you. Edward Luce, on divisiveness in America Financial Times, December 21, 2015 © 2015 Kwiple.com
Facts During the first day of public impeachment hearings on Wednesday, Mark Meadows, one of Mr Trump's most loyal congressional allies, said: “Everyone has their own impression of what truth is.” When conservatives embrace relativism, facts have clearly lost their use. Edward Luce, Financial Times, November 13, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Facts Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.  Aldous Huxley © 2023 Kwiple.com
Facts Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. Mark Twain quoted by Rudyard Kipling in “From Sea to Sea, No. XXXVII” © 2024 Kwiple.com
Facts I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are. George H. W. Bush © 2016 Kwiple.com
Facts [N]o reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.  Sidney Powell, on her widely-believed lies about voting fraud by Dominion Voting Systems voting machines and Smartmatic software during the 2020 presidential election © 2023 Kwiple.com
Facts Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. Thomas Gradgrind, school board Superintendent, in Charles Dickens's Hard Times  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Facts Our recent research … examined a slippery way by which people get away from facts that contradict their beliefs. Of course, sometimes people just dispute the validity of specific facts. But we find that sometimes they go one step further and, as in the opening example [in which people transformed debate about safety of immunization into debate about parental rights], reframe an issue in untestable ways. This makes potential important facts and science ultimately irrelevant to the issue. Troy Campbell and Justin Friesen, Why People “Fly from Facts,” Scientific American, March 3, 2016 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Facts The problem in western democracies is not mass confusion about points of fact. The problem is that, even when apprised of the facts, even when exposed to the most objectively persuasive arguments, millions of voters remain unmoved. In a blurring of the line between politics and sport, they have picked their team, and that is that. … In other words: my president, right or wrong. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, March 7, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Facts To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then  no one can criticize power because there is no basis on which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century © 2017 Kwiple.com
Facts When the facts change,  I change my mind. What do you do, sir? John Maynard Keynes © 2019 Kwiple.com
Fascism The prominent fascist leaders of the twentieth century — from Mussolini to Hitler — regarded lies as the truth incarnate in themselves. This stood at the center of their notions of power, popular sovereignty, and history. An alternate universe where truth and falsehood cannot be distinguished rests on the logic of myth. in Fascism, mythical truth replaced factual truth. Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Global warming Climate scepticism is being driven out by climate cynicism. A sceptic questions the evidence for a given claim and asks whether it is believable. A cynic questions the motives of the people who deploy the evidence, regardless of whether it is believable or not. Any attempt to defend the facts gets presented as evidence that the facts simply suit the interests of the people peddling them. David Runciman © 2017 Kwiple.com
Government I don't know jokes — I just watch the government and report the facts. Will Rogers © 2024 Kwiple.com
History In 2020, the United Kingdom's culture secretary asked Netflix to add a disclosure to the show [The Crown ] making it clear that it is, fundamentally, a work of fiction. Netflix declined, saying it was confident that viewers knew the show was fiction. Yet its executives surely understood that the series is appealing precisely because it presents its fictions with the swagger of settled fact. Megan Garber, “We're Already Living In the Metsverse”, The Atlantic, March 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Impeachment Don’t confuse me with the facts. I've got a closed mind. I will not vote for impeachment. I'm going to stick with my president even if he and I have to be taken out of this building and shot. Earle Landgrebe, Indiana Republican Representative, Nixon supporter, and revered role model for today's Republican Congressmen, the day before Nixon resigned in 1974 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Memory The Right Honourable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, in a speech replying to Henry Dundas, Britain's Secretary of War from 1794-`1801 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Snapshot Trump does much more than appeal to emotion. He insists that, in politics, emotion is all there is.  He interprets liberty as freedom from facts. More than a year after Trump lost the 2020 election, one of his voters was  asked why he continued to doubt the defeat. His reply: “It didn't smell right.” Donald Trump portrayed by Megan Garber, The Atlantic, January/February 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Require candidates for state and national electoral offices to take a test about facts relevant to the office they seek, with the test being created and administered by subject matter experts and the results being widely publicized one month before the election © 2017 Kwiple.com
Law Racism and segregation is no longer de jure, but it is still de facto.  Alvin Holmes © 2017 Kwiple.com
Lies “Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You're saying it's a falsehood … Sean Spicer. our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that,” she said. — “Alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods,” replied Mr Todd. Financial Times, January 21, 2017, quoting an exchange between Kellyanne Conway, Trump's Minister of Propaganda and defender of Spicer, who, echoing Trump, had lied by claiming that turnout for the inauguration was larger than turnout for the protest march a day later, and Chuck Todd, moderator of NBC's Meet the Press © 2017 Kwiple.com
Opinions Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts. Daniel Patrick Moynihan © 2015 Kwiple.com
Polarization The U.S. is the outlier, in the sense that we are the one case without a major public broadcaster. In Norway, Sweden, Germany, the U.K., and Japan, on the other hand, the public broadcaster is the dominant  media source commanding huge audiences. By definition, public broadcasters are committed to nonpartisan journalism, meaning that citizens are exposed to fact- based reporting rather than commentary. Shanto Iyengar © 2023 Kwiple.com
Politics Americans more and more begin by choosing their politics and then choose facts to support their politics. David Frum © 2017 Kwiple.com
Politics  Practical politics consists in ignoring facts. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams © 2024 Kwiple.com
Populism  They endlessly retell the story of the people  against the elite — an echo of Marx’s account of “proletarians” and “capitalists”. …  The thing to grasp about the populist story is  that it’s just that: a story, laden with values. It’s not a collection of facts or policies. That means it cannot be defeated by rival facts or policies. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, April 11, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Post-truth [P]ost-truth is not so much a claim that truth does not exist  as that facts are subordinate to our political point of view. The Oxford definition focuses on “what” post-truth is: the idea that feelings sometimes matter more than facts. But just as important is the next question, which is why  this ever occurs. Someone does not dispute an obvious or easily confirmable fact for no reason; he does so when it is to his or her advantage. Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth © 2019 Kwiple.com
Public discourse Comment is free but facts are on expenses. Tom Stoppard, Night and Day  © 2024 Kwiple.com
Public discourse I don't debate. There are too many debates. Too much Word, not enough Excel. Hans Rosling © 2017 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Evolution is just a theory, not a fact © 2015 Kwiple.com
Resisters say Alt facts are √ −1  Placard, NYC Science March, Earth Day, April 22, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Resisters say Make America fact-check again Placard, New York City Women's March, January 21, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Science For the discipline of science is the only one which gives any assurance that from the same set of facts men will come approximately to the same conclusion. And as the modern world can be civilized only by the effort of innumerable people we have a right to call science the discipline of democracy. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery  © 2021 Kwiple.com
State of the union Everyone's entitled to their own facts © 2015 Kwiple.com
State of the union Today, we may be witnessing a collision between the power of a remedy meant to curb presidential misconduct and the power of faction determined to defend against the use of that remedy on a president of the same party. But perhaps even more corrosive to our democratic system of governance, the President and his allies are making a comprehensive attack on the very idea of fact and truth. How can a democracy survive without acceptance of a common set of experiences? Adam Schiff, preface to Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report © 2019 Kwiple.com
Surely you jest Unlike you and unlike the media, before I make a statement, I like to know the facts.  Donald Trump, addressing reporters about the Charlotteville, Virginia, riot © 2017 Kwiple.com
Trumpism [T]he Trump administration doesn't believe in fact-based policy. Basically, it doesn't believe in facts, period. Everything is political. Paul Krugman, New York Times, May 9, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Trumpists say There is no such thing, unfortunately, as facts anymore. Scottie Nell Hughes, Kellyanne Conway's aide  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Truth The issue for me is not to learn how to adjust to living in a world in which facts do not matter, but instead to stand up for the notion of truth and learn how to fight back. Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth © 2019 Kwiple.com