
“Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.”
Southey's Colloquies on Society (1830)
Source: Speech in the House of Commons (14 May 1866)
“Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.”
Southey's Colloquies on Society (1830)
“No question is ever settled
Until it is settled right.”
Settle the Question Right. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/AHQ2617.0001.001/20?rgn=full+text;view=image
Poetry quotes, Poems of Pleasure (1900)
“What on earth do you want? The question is settled. There are no more Armenians.”
After the German Ambassador persistently brought up the Armenian question in 1918. Quoted in The History of the Armenian Genocide (2003) by Vahakn N. Dadrian, p. 211
“The only question on which we did not agree has been settled, and the Lord has decided against me.”
To Marsena Patrick, as quoted in "Honoring Lee Anew" http://wluspectator.com/2014/07/15/cox-honoring-lee-anew/ (15 July 2014), by David Cox, A Magazine of Student Thought and Opinion
1860s
Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).
Context: Other areas were being mapped by anthropologists, who seemed to have some interest in my problem, but who were inclined (at that time) to say that what human beings had in common was not in the end very important; that the key to all the mysteries did lie in culture. This seemed to me shallow. It is because our culture is changing so fast, because it does not settle on everything that we need to go into these questions.
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV
Context: I thought of all those wise men, poets, artists before me who had suffered, wept, and smiled on the road to truth. I thought of the Latin poet who wished to reassure and console men by showing them truth as unveiled as a statue. A fragment of his prelude came to my mind, learned long ago, then dismissed and lost like almost everything that I had taken the pains to learn up till then. He said he kept watch in the serene nights to find the words, the poem in which to convey to men the ideas that would deliver them. For two thousand years men have always had to be reassured and consoled. For two thousand years I have had to be delivered. Nothing has changed the surface of things. The teachings of Christ have not changed the surface of things, and would not even if men had not ruined His teachings so that they can no longer follow them honestly. Will the great poet come who shall settle the boundaries of belief and render it eternal, the poet who will be, not a fool, not an ignorant orator, but a wise man, the great inexorable poet? I do not know, although the lofty words of the man who died in the boarding-house have given me a vague hope of his coming and the right to adore him already.
“Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.”
Udny v. Udny (1869), L. R. 1 Sc. & Div. Ap. Ca. 454.