Fact
A fact (derived from the Latin factum, see below) is something that has really occurred or is actually the case. The usual test for a statement of fact is verifiability, that is whether it can be proven to correspond to experience. Standard reference works are often used to check facts. Scientific facts are verified by repeatable experiments.
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Famous quotes containing the word fact:
“Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.””
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.”
—Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989)
“Being so wrong about her makes me wonder now how often I am utterly wrong about myself. And how wrong she might have been about her mother, how wrong he might have been about his father, how much of family life is a vast web of misunderstandings, a tinted and touched-up family portrait, an accurate representation of fact that leaves out only the essential truth.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)