When Ronald Reagan said "facts are stupid things" I thought he was making a profound statement about the difficulty of deriving objective meaning from facts. Apparently, he was actually just fumbling an attempt to quote John Adams, who called facts "stubborn things." I thought of this while reading Leonard Pitts latest column in which he expresses his ongoing frustration with what he sees as the profound anti-intellectualism of the Bush Administration.As I sat down to write this post, I googled the Reagan quote to confirm it. I actually thought he had called facts "silly," not "stupid." Glad I checked. What I found was an entertaining list of famous quotations about "facts." Some cynical, some humorous, and some adamant. The variation of these quips suggests that while facts are clear and objectively verifiable, there significance, meaning, and value rarely are. In this sense, gaffe or not, Reagan's characterization could be understood as profound.
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