“Politics have always covered two distinct kinds of problems: problems of administrative routine, and those that may be called 'questions of the moment.'… A question of the moment is, indeed, a substitute for some notion, such as the idea of God, or hereditary monarchy, or national glory, that has hitherto acted as a symbol of human co-ordination. It provides no new positive certainty to replace the discredited certainty, but is what the name implies: the raising of a question which the old certainty no longer answers.”

— Laura Riding Jackson

Laura Riding and Robert Graves from "Poetry and Politics", reprinted in The Common Asphodel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949)

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Laura Riding Jackson 42

poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer 1901–1991

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“Understand the problem. What kind of problem is it? There are three main types of problems:
‘Show that …’ or ‘Evaluate …’ questions, in which a certain statement has to be proved true, or a certain expression has to be worked out;
‘Find a…’ or ‘Find all…’ questions, which requires one to find something (or everything) that satisfies certain requirements;
‘Is there a …’ questions, which either require you to prove a statement or provide a counterexample”

Terence Tao (1975) Australian mathematician

and thus is one of the previous two types of problem
Source: Solving Mathematical Problems (2nd ed., 2006), Ch. 1 : Strategies in problem solving

“The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and makres real advances in science.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

http://umich.edu/~scps/html/01chap/html/summary.htm
Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and Religion (1999)

“You are faced with the problem of what to do in respect to this question, to that question, and to the other question, but perfectly obviously, after you have faced the more superficial aspects of the separate questions, you want to know in relation to a complete plan what you are actually giving and what you are actually getting. Therefore, when the departmental, or compartmental, exploration has gone on to a certain extent it cannot be finished until somebody, co-ordinating all your problems, sets out in one statement and declaration the complete scheme that this Conference can pass in order to give security, to give disarmament, to give hope to the future–until that scheme has been placed before you, you cannot complete your examination of compartmental problems and questions…”

Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) British statesman; prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Geneva Disarmament Conference (1933), quoted by John Gunther, Inside Europe (1940), p. 338, as an example of MacDonald's increasing mental deterioration.
1930s

“We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know?”

Richard Feynman book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don't know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.
from lecture "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society", given at the Galileo Symposium in Italy (1964)
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999)

“The moral government of God is a movement in a line onwards towards some grand consummation, in which the principles, indeed, are ever the same, but the developments are always new,— in which, therefore, no experience of the past can indicate with certainty what new openings of truth, what new manifestations of goodness, what new phases of the moral heaven may appear.”

Mark Hopkins (educator) (1802–1887) American educationalist and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 284.

“It may also be noted that the authoritarian states are in trouble internationally. Some regard this as intentional, as part of the diversion and scapegoat technique, while others think that it is more or less inevitable because of the very co-ordination of the economic activities of the individual nations in question.”

Luther H. Gulick (1892–1993) American academic

Source: "Notes on the Theory of Organization," 1937, p. 40

“The Imagination has always called for a return to the truest fundamentalism contained in the question "What does it mean to be a human being?" Needless to say, this is a question that deserves the deepest and most patient development. It will have to suffice for the present to say that our reigning social reality forbids— structurally, politically, violently— the broad posing of this question.”

Curtis White (1951) American academic

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

“The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html

“The philosophy of science is concerned with how you decide if a scientific finding is correct or true. You have to establish criteria to determine if the finding or theory is valid. Validity is a fundamental problem in the philosophy of science, but the fundamental problem in the philosophy of scientific administration is the question of value. Two scientific activities are equally valid if they achieve results that are true. Now, how do you decide which activity is more valuable? The question of value is the basic question that the scientific administrator asks so that decisions can be made about funding priorities.”

Alvin M. Weinberg (1915–2006) American nuclear physicist

Interview http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev28-1/text/wbgbar.htm by Bill Cabage and Carolyn Krause for the ORNL Review (April 1995).

“The most important questions of life… are indeed for the most part only problems of probability.”

Pierre-Simon Laplace book Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1902)
Context: The most important questions of life... are indeed for the most part only problems of probability. Strictly speaking it may even be said that nearly all our knowledge is problematical; and in the small number of things which we are able to know with certainty, even in the mathematical sciences themselves, the principal means for ascertaining truth—induction and analogy—are based on probabilities.<!--p.1

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