“Asked to prove a questioner's existence, Morgenbesser shot back, "Who's asking?"”
Remembering Sidney Morgenbesser, https://web.archive.org/web/20040821091507/http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getmailfiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2004/08/03&ID=Ar01400 by Gary Shapiro in 'The New York Sun' 3 August 2004 (Archived by Wayback Machine).
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Sidney Morgenbesser16
American philosopher 1921–2004Related quotes
“Asking what the question is, and why the question is asked, is always asking a pertinent question.”
Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics
Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 17.
“The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.”
Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
Gerald Durrell (1925–1995) naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter
Two in the Bush (1966)
Context: The attitude of the average person to the world they live in is completely selfish. When I take people round to see my animals, one of the first questions they ask (unless the animal is cute and appealing) is, "what use is it?" by which they mean, "what use is it to them?" To this one can reply "What use is the Acropolis?" Does a creature have to be of direct material use to mankind in order to exist? By and large, by asking the question "what use is it?" you are asking the animal to justify its existence without having justified your own.
Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed
Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.13
Ikujiro Nonaka (1935) Japanese business theorist
"The Practical Wisdom of Ikujiro Nonaka," 2008
Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States
Source: The Expanse, Tiamat's Wrath (2019), Chapter 34 (p. 357)
“Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions.”
Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas
As quoted in The Listener (1978)
“The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.”
Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism
Preface
1840s, Philosophical Fragments (1844)
Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist
Part 6 : Doing Sixty, p. 270
Moving Beyond Words (1994)