Accuracy Quotes

“A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty.”
― Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills

“A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. ”
― Richard Avedon

“It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.”
― Longfellow

“Supplying correct information and providing adequate tools to restructure the eroded parts in the minds of the people should be a primary condition for a well-oiled society. Fine-tuning the factuality and accuracy of issues is a paramount civic duty of each responsible individual. ("Labyrinth of the mind")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“Extroverts are more likely to take a quick-and-dirty approach to problem-solving, trading accuracy for speed, making increasing numbers of mistakes as they go, and abandoning ship altogether when the problem seems too difficult or frustrating. Introverts think before they act, digest information thoroughly, stay on task longer, give up less easily, and work more accurately. Introverts and extroverts also direct their attention differently: if you leave them to their own devices, the introverts tend to sit around wondering about things, imagining things, recalling events from their past, and making plans for the future. The extroverts are more likely to focus on what's happening around them. It's as if extroverts are seeing "what is" while their introverted peers are asking "what if.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Connubial

Because with alarming accuracy
she’d been identifying patterns
I was unaware of—this tic, that
tendency, like the way I've mastered
the language of intimacy
in order to conceal how I felt—

I knew I was in danger
of being terribly understood.”
― Stephen Dunn

“It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

“Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.”
― Perry Anderson, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas

“Never take advice about never taking advice. That is an old vice of men - to dish it out without being able to take it - the blind leading the blind into more blindness.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness."

(On the Bravery of the English Common Soldiers)”
― Samuel Johnson, Works of Samuel Johnson

“They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.”
― Neal Stephenson, Reamde

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I wrote. Something. Yes.
And you were truthful.
No.
You weren't truthful?
I was accurate.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“When we begin to reflect Christ, the Bible, when more understood as being centered around Christ, seems to be potentially every man's biography regarding God's promised experiences and truth for him - his individual, unique path of humbling oneself before the Lord and then being exalted by the Lord back into his true and righteous personhood. Many followers may speak of it merely to try to change other people (before changing themselves), but the prophets speak of it as a living word which miraculously tells their very own experiences.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“In many ways. . .the completeness of biography, the achievement of its professionalization, is an ironic fiction, since no life can ever be known completely, nor would we want to know every fact about an individual. Similarly, no life is ever lived according to aesthetic proportions. The "plot" of a biography is superficially based on the birth, life and death of the subject; "character," in the vision of the author. Both are as much creations of the biographer, as they are of a novelist. We content ourselves with "authorized fictions.”
― Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form

“It's simple, it's not that simple; or life is simple, but the things in it are not. When a man does not understand it, he tends to inflate it. When he does, he tends to deflate it. In the end, neither images are fully accurate.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Since human knowledge is not perfect, a more knowledgeable person is not always right.”
― Raheel Farooq, Why I Am a Muslim: And a Christian and a Jew

“Ramona required accuracy from books as well as people.”
― Beverly Cleary, Ramona Quimby, Age 8

“There are people who’d rather be wrong, standing with the crowd, than be right standing alone.”
― Vincent H. O'Neil, The Unused Path: Skills for living an authentic life

“MARY: Renaissance, not medieval. Most of the castle was built during the sixteenth century, although I believe its foundations date from the fourteenth.

CATHERINE: And our readers will care why?

MARY: You may not care for accuracy, but I do—and Carmilla will, when she reads this book.

CATHERINE: If I ever get the damn thing written, with all these interruptions!”
― Theodora Goss, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman

“Accuracy of prophecy is a legacy of supremacy that set the Bible above all others.”
― Vincent Okay Nwachukwu

“Don't you ever imagine?"
"What's the imagination got to do with anything?"
"It's better than your ever increasing accuracies. They're as phoney as silicon boobs. Like proper tits, inaccuracies are much more entertaining.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“To rewrite history is a deliberate action perpetrated by those who are too driven by their fear and too captivated by their greed to acknowledge that the flaws in their agenda won't stand up to the truth of history. And to arrogantly declare that their revision of history is anything less is to have their own history systematically destroyed in a manner forever beyond revision.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Bean mentions that the tree does not flower until 30 to 40 years of age. American references have stated 10 to 14 years. All authors, including this one, tend to pass along time-honored information without determining, first hand, the actual response in question.”
― Michael Dirr, Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, Propogation and Uses

“The most accurate solution is a combination of many approaches.”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Quantraz

“It was the earliest demonstration of a phenomenon popularized by—and now named for—James Surowiecki’s bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds. Aggregating the judgment of many consistently beats the accuracy of the average member of the group, and is often as startlingly accurate as Galton’s weight-guessers.”
― Philip E. Tetlock, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

“It is the best truth I can recall—but what is recollection and what is exaggeration that has merged with recollection over the years? What is my own memory, and what do I trust to the memory of others? How accurate is my mind, and how accurate those of so many who have told these stories? These are questions I cannot answer, any more than you can answer whether God is a god of war or peace.”
― Charlie Lovett, The Lost Book of the Grail

“In 1927, Robert Graves published a little book called *Lars Porsena or the Future of Swearing and Improper Language*. He noted a recent decline in the use of foul language by the English, and predicted that this decline would continue indefinitely, until foul language had all but disappeared from the average man’s vocabulary. History has not borne him out, to say the least: indeed, I have known economists make more accurate predictions.”
― Theodore Dalrymple