Hearsay Quotes

I only decide my Universe. My Universe is my eyes and my ears. Everything else is hearsay. (Douglas Adams)
Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character. View quote
Hosea Ballou
Men must always have distinguished (e. g. in judicial matters) between hearsay and seeing with one's own eyes and have preferred what one has seen to what he has merely heard from others. But the use of this distinction was originally limited to particular or subordinate matters. As regards the most weighty matters-the first things and the right way-the only source of knowledge was hearsay. View quote
Leo Strauss
I have never indulged our society's misguided notion that my personal life is relevant to my work, so any reporting surrounding that is necessarily hearsay, speculation or fantasy. View quote
Billy Crudup
About 90 percent of what's out there in cyberspace is hearsay - or lies - and opinion, often misinformed opinion, and it's all repeated over and over again. View quote
David Tang
In cyberspace, 95 per cent of what you read is hearsay. View quote
David Tang
People who don't know me have opinions about me. That's the part that's very hurtful. Because how do you form an opinion about somebody if you've never met them or spent any time with them? So it's all based upon hearsay or things that they've read. View quote
Rick Barry
The man whom Nature has appointed to do great things is, first of all, furnished with that openness to Nature which renders him incapable of being insincere! To his large, open, deep-feeling heart Nature is a Fact: all hearsay is hearsay; the unspeakable greatness of this Mystery of Life, let him acknowledge it or not, nay even though he seem to forget it or deny it, is ever present to him,-fearful and wonderful, on this hand and on that. View quote
Thomas Carlyle
Those who know only scriptures know nothing. To know is to be. I know what I am talking about; it is not from reading, or hearsay. View quote
Nisargadatta Maharaj
The difference between hearsay and prophecy is often one of sequence. Hearsay often turns out to have been prophecy. View quote
Hubert Humphrey
I'm trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed. (Barbara Kruger)
The historian...loaden with old mouse-eaten records, authorizing himself (for the most part) upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundation of hearsay; having much ado to accord differing writers and to pick truth out of partiality; better acquainted with a thousand years ago than with the present age, and yet better knowing how this world goeth than how his own wit runneth; curious for antiquities and inquisitive of novelties; a wonder to young folks and a tyrant in table talk, denieth, in a great chafe, that any man for teaching of virtue, and virtuous actions is comparable to him. View quote
Philip Sidney
Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay. View quote
Robert Conquest
The hearsay that lieutenant general Manvel Grigoryan and lieutenant general Gagik Melkonyan support Levon Ter-Petrosyan does not correspond to the truth. These statements are absolutely false. All Deputies to the Defense Minister are performing their duties. The army doesn't deal with politics. We obey the orders of the Supreme Commander. Dreams of the opposition will never come true. View quote
Mikael Harutyunyan
How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies, I give thanks For a new relish, careless to inquire My pleasure's pedigree, if so it please, Nobly, I mean, nor renegade to art. The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness, Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained, The one thing finished in this hasty world, Forever finished, though the barbarous pit, Fanatical on hearsay, stamp and shout As if a miracle could be encored. View quote
James Russell Lowell
The second doctrine of the Perennial Philosophy - that it is possible to know the Divine Ground by a direct intuition higher than discursive reasoning - is to be found in all the great religions of the world. A philosopher who is content merely to know about the ultimate Reality - theoretically and by hearsay - is compared by Buddha to a herdsman of other men's cows. Mohammed uses an even homelier barnyard metaphor. For him the philosopher who has not realized his metaphysics is just an ass bearing a load of books. Christian, Hindu, Taoist teachers wrote no less emphatically about the absurd pretensions of mere learning and analytic reasoning. View quote
Aldous Huxley
The hearsay of hearsay is not admissible as scholarship. View quote
Michael Swanwick
Biographies usually begin with the smack on the bottom and the first lusty cry of the subject. I deplore this literary custom, because it is impossible to remember anything about one's birth firsthand. It is bound to be hearsay, and embellished, gilded hearsay at that. View quote
Walter Slezak
All truths begin as hearsay, as far as I'm concerned. View quote
Matt Drudge
The only other things, and again these things are hearsay, is that he could be pretty rough on directors, because he knew exactly the way he wanted to play the part. And he did so. View quote
Tommy Bond
No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it..... When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former (Book of Exodus). I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it. (Thomas Paine)
For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay... View quote
W. Somerset Maugham
The more books and articles on Ayodhya and on "communalism" I look into, the more I feel confirmed in my assessment that the Hindu presentation of their own case regarding Ayodhya is the single worst public relations job in world history. (...) Future books on the affair will certainly include a chapter on "the Ayodhya scandal": the unscrupled use of academic and media power positions by the secularists to suppress relevant evidence, and the gullibility of foreign scholars relying on hearsay from Indian colleagues whose bona fides is open to question. (...) Future scholars of political and communications science will study the reporting on the Ayodhya affair as an absolute classic of brilliantly successful disinformation. ... The buffoon of the affair is the Western class of India-watchers .... they have swallowed the anti-Hindu propaganda hook, line and sinker. View quote
Koenraad Elst
INADMISSIBLE, adj. Not competent to be considered. Hearsay evidence is inadmissible ... but there is no religion in the world that has any other basis than hearsay evidence. View quote
Ambrose Bierce
All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things themselves had faded in men' s minds. View quote
Cormac McCarthy