The product oftheartist hasbecome less importantthan the fact of the artist.We wish to absorb this person.We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic.Inour society thisperson ismuchmore important than anything he might create.

-Mamet, David Alan
  Writing in Restaurants,'Exuvial Magic:  An Essay Concerning Magic'.

Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.

-Mencken, H(enry) L(ouis)
'Minority Report'. Collected in Notebooks (1956).

I take to be the central fact to man born in America† I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.

-Olson, Charles
SPACE1947  Call Me Ishmael, section1.

   L'on a beau se cacher a'   soi-me"  me, l'on aime toujours. We vainly conceal from ourselves the fact that we are always in love.

-Pascal, Blaise
c.1653  Discours sur les passions de l'amour (Discourse on the Passions of Love).This is usually attributed to Pascal.

Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power†but also in the fact that it lacks meaning.

-Paz, Octavio
  Alternating Current.

When every fact, every present or past phenomenon of [the] universe, every phase of present or past lifetherein, has been examined, classified, and coordinatedwith the rest, thenthemissionof sciencewill be completed.What isthisbut saying thatthetaskof science canneverend till man ceases to be, till history is no longer made, and development itself ceases?

-Pearson, Karl
  The Grammar of Science, pt.1, ch.5.

The grim fact, however, is that we prepare for war like precocious giants and for peace like retarded pygmies.

-Pearson, Lester Bowles
  Acceptance speech on receiving the Nobel peace prize, 11 Dec.

   It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.

-Pierce, C(harles) S(aunders)
SelectedWritings,'Lessons on the History of Science'.

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

-Rich, Adrienne Cecile
  Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,'Snapshots of a Daughter- in-Law,1'.

Only a fact could be so dreamlike.

-Rich, Adrienne Cecile
  Necessities of Life,'LikeThisTogether'.

   Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

-Ruskin,John
  Seven Lamps of Architecture,'The Lamp of Memory', sect.7.

You can't figure him out like a fact, because to Reagan themainfact was avision† He came fromtheheartland of the country, where people could be down-to-earth yet feel that the sky is the limitönot ashamed of, or cynical about, the American dream.

-Shultz, George P(ratt)
  Of Ronald Reagan.Turmoil andTriumph.

Quite as many false ideas prevail as to woman's true position in the home as to her status elsewhere. Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations.

-Stanton, Elizabeth ne¤  e  Cady
The History ofWoman Suffrage1848^61, vol.1, introduction.

You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news.

-Stevenson, Adlai E(wing)
  Speech, Michigan, 8 Jun.

The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it inourhearts either tomarry or not tomarry.Marriage isterrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.

-Stevenson, Robert Louis
Virginibus Puerisque,'Virginibus Puerisque', pt.1.

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know onlya few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, byany confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but reallyconcurring, laws, which Thoreau we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.

-Thoreau, Henry David
  Walden, or Life in theWoods,'The Pond inWinter'.

It isthespirit of theageto believethat any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

-Vidal, Gore originally Eugene Luther Vidal,Jr
  'French Letters:Theories of the New Novel', in Encounter, Dec.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else.But the fact is, you got to give 'em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

-Walker, Alice Malsenior
  Pa.The Color Purple.