“We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests. ”

“Generally the theories we believe we call facts,and the facts we disbelieve we call theories.”

“We read books, talked books, argued over books and became dearer and dearer to one another.”

“And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, - we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?”

“Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".”

“It is a documented fact. I read it in People magazine.”