Quotes about doubt (5301 quotes, page 16)

“That question is so big that there is no end [Albers refers here to the relationship between colors and the source of light]. You see, they have just you cannot participate with it if you have not lubricated your eyes very thoroughly to see the little changes produced in our eye that has another action than any optical apparatus like photography. We must know that we have two ways of seeing. For instance, when we are indoors another part of the retina is engaged compared with when we are outdoors. If we are in warm light or cool light, in higher light or lower light.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Homage to the square' (1964), Oral history interview with Josef Albers' (1968)

Color , Way , Light , Change

“There is no question that religions have historically played the role of making people contented with their lot. …such a doctrine would be very appealing to the ruling classes of a society. …Many societies, for this reason alone, encourage the contentment with your lot that the religious premise of heaven affords.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

People , Religion

“There is not the slightest question but that the God of the Old Testament is a jealous, vengeful God, inflicting not only on the sinful pagans but even on his Chosen People fire, lightning, hideous plagues and diseases, brimstone, and other curses.”

Steve Allen (1921–2000) American comedian, actor, musician and writer

Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, and Morality (1990)

God , People , Disease

“Standing outside a factory farm, the first question that comes to mind is not a moral but a practical one: Where is everybody? Where are the owners, the farmers, the livestock managers, the extra hands, anybody? I have been driving around the North Carolina countryside on a Thursday afternoon in January 2001, pulling in at random to six hog farms, and have yet to find a single farmer or any other living soul. … There are so many factory farms around here that they are easy to miss. I doubt that the average visitor just passing through even knows what they are …”

Matthew Scully (1959) American political writer and speechwriter

Dominion (2002)

Soul

“A question which has long troubled astronomers and physicists is what becomes of the energy that is continually being poured out into space by the sun and the stars. To this question a complete answer is given by the new theory. It is used up, diluted, or degraded, by the expansion of the universe. …the light travelling through the expanding universe and, so to say, trying to reach a particular star, or stellar system, which is continually receding with great velocity, is losing energy in trying to catch up with it. It is this degradation of the light, technically known as the redshift of the spectral lines, by which we become aware of the receding velocities of the extra-galactic nebulae. It can be shown that the decrease of the total amount of radiant energy in the universe by this degradation exceeds the increase by the radiation of the stars. It would not be correct, however, to conclude that the expansion is caused by the energy thus lost by the radiation…”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932)

Travel , Star , Light , Universe

“There is no room for the scream in academic discourse. More than that: academic study provides us with a language and a way of thinking that makes it very difficult for us to express our scream. The scream, if it appears at all, appears as something to be explained, not as something to be articulated. The scream, from being the subject of our questions about society, becomes the object of analysis.”

John Holloway book Change the World Without Taking Power

Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)

Way , Thinking , Study , Appearance

“A belief is a question we have put aside so we can get on with what we believe we have to do.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#100
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Eighteen centuries have passed since the Bible was finished. They have been centuries of great changes. In their course the world has been wrought over into newness at almost every point. But, to-day, the text of the Scriptures, after copyings almost innumerable and after having been tossed about through ages of ignorance and tumult, is found by exhaustive criticism to be unaltered in every important particular — there being not a single doctrine, nor duty, nor fact of any grade, that is brought into question by variations of readings — a fact that stands alone in the history of such ancient literature.”

Enoch Fitch Burr (1818–1907) American astronomer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 35.

Age , World , History , Literature

“Now that I have been convicted, I want to explain my actions so that you … should understand why I chose to join the struggle for the freedom of my people…. It was during my primary school years that the bare facts concerning the realities of South African society and its discrepancies began to unfold before me. I remember a period in the early 1960s, when there was a great deal of political tension, and we often used to encounter armed police in Soweto…. I remember the humiliation to which my parents were subjected by whites in shops and in other places where we encountered them, and the poverty. All these things had their influence on my young mind … and by the time I went to Orlando West High School, I was already beginning to question the injustice of the society … and to ask why nothing was being done to change it. It is true that I was trained in the use of weapons and explosives. The basis of my training was in sabotage, which was to be aimed at institutions and not people. I did not wish to add unnecessarily to the grievous loss of human life that had already been incurred. It has been suggested that our aim was to annihilate the white people of this country; nothing could be further from the truth. The ANC is a national liberation movement committed to the liberation of all the people of South Africa, black and white, from racial fear, hatred and oppression. I am married and have one child, and would like nothing more than to have more children, and to live with my wife and children with all the people in this country. One day that might be possible - if not for me, then at least for my brothers.”

Tokyo Sexwale (1953) South African politician

Addressing the Pretoria Supreme Court judge in 1978 shortly after his conviction on a charge of high treason, as quoted in Down with Afrikaans - Oakes, D. (ed.), 1988. Illustrated history of South Africa – The real story, Reader’s Digest: Cape Town http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/down-afrikaans-oakes-d-ed1988-illustrated-history-south-africa-%26ndash%3B-real-story-reader%E2%80%99s-digest-, sahistory.org.za

Life , Children , People , Truth

“Pensioners in this country receive almost the lowest pension paid in any country in Europe. They live in the coldest homes with the highest rate of death through hypothermia, and have the worst possible conditions of all pensioners. Is that because the country is so poor that it cannot afford the pension, as Conservative Members seem to be saying, or is it because the Government prefer to spend money on other things, such as Trident submarines and the nuclear missile programme? It is question of choice. If we wish to end the monstrous death rate of pensioners every winter, something else has to go. I suggest that it is the arms programme, and I suggest the nuclear arms programme at that.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1986/mar/06/plight-of-the-elderly in the House of Commons (6 March 1986).
1980s

Death , Money , Home , Winter

“The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, "One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door." The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: "What were you thinking; why didn't you act?" Or they will ask instead: "How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?"”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Nobel Prize lecture http://nobelpeaceprize.org/en_GB/laureates/laureates-2007/gore-lecture/, 10 December 2007.

Courage , Thinking , Future

“To conclude: there are two well-known minor ways in which language has mattered to philosophy. On the one hand there is a belief that if only we produce good definitions, often marking out different senses of words that are confused in common speech, we will avoid the conceptual traps that ensnared our forefathers. On the other hand is a belief that if only we attend sufficiently closely to our mother tongue and make explicit the distinctions there implicit, we shall avoid the conceptual traps. One or the other of these curiously contrary beliefs may nowadays be most often thought of as an answer to the question Why does language matter to philosophy? Neither seems to me enough.”

Ian Hacking (1936) Canadian philosopher

Ian Hacking (1975), Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, p. 7.

Way , Sense

“The one question, the one principle, the one crisis in art of the twentieth century centers in the uncompromising 'purity' of art, and in the consciousness that art comes from art only, not from anything else.”

Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) American painter

Source: 1956 - 1967, Art-as-Art Dogma' part II, (1964), p. 155

Art

“How far down the evolutionary scale shall we go? Shall we eat fish? What about shrimps? Oysters? To answer these questions we must bear in mind the central principle on which our concern for other beings is based. As I said … the only legitimate boundary to our concern for the interests of other beings is the point at which it is no longer accurate to say that the other being has interests. To have interests, in a strict, nonmetaphorical sense, a being must be capable of suffering or experiencing pleasure. If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for disregarding that suffering, or for refusing to count it equally with the like suffering of any other being. But the converse of this is also true. If a being is not capable of suffering, or of enjoyment, there is nothing to take into account.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 4: Becoming a Vegetarian

Pleasure , Sense , Fish , Suffering

“We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask--and to answer--the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer.”

Matthew Stover book Blade of Tyshalle

(XIV.3) Del Rey, p. 472
Blade of Tyshalle (2001)

Birth , Waiting

“In New York I heard A Piece of Ground, written by a white South African, Jeremy Taylor. I modified it a little and sang it myself. That song is very special to me because it deals with the land question in southern Africa. We were dispossessed of our land.”

Miriam Makeba (1932–2008) South African singer and civil rights activist

As quoted in
About her favourite song.
Al-Ahram Weekly interview (2001)

“The terrorists are the van-guard of Mohammedanism. They set out to cow the non-Mohammedan population, so that the ‘moderate Muslims’ can get on establishing Sharia courts, forcing halal food in school and works canteens, and making the authorities look the other way regarding criminal activities for fear of being called racist and Islamophobic. A phobia is an irrational fear. A normal non Mohammedan should have a perfectly rational fear of ‘Islam’. The question is: what is our Government going to do about it? Or will they take the Mayor of London’s view that terrorist attacks are just ‘part and parcel of living in a major city’.”

Gerard Batten (1954) British politician

Yesterday’s attack has everything to do with Islam or rather ‘Mohammedanism' http://gerardbattenmep.co.uk/2017/03/23/yesterdays-attack-has-everything-to-do-with-islam-or-rather-mohammedanism/ (March 23, 2017)
2017

Fear , School , Food , Way

“I would summarize the Keynesian view in terms of four points:1. Economies sometimes produce much less than they could, and employ many fewer workers than they should, because there just isn’t enough spending. Such episodes can happen for a variety of reasons; the question is how to respond.
2. There are normally forces that tend to push the economy back toward full employment. But they work slowly; a hands-off policy toward depressed economies means accepting a long, unnecessary period of pain.
3. It is often possible to drastically shorten this period of pain and greatly reduce the human and financial losses by “printing money”, using the central bank’s power of currency creation to push interest rates down.
4. Sometimes, however, monetary policy loses its effectiveness, especially when rates are close to zero. In that case temporary deficit spending can provide a useful boost. And conversely, fiscal austerity in a depressed economy imposes large economic losses.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Keynesianism Explained http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/keynesianism-explained (September 15, 2015)
The Conscience of a Liberal blog

Money , Pain , Loss

“The new governmental reason does not deal with what I would call the things in themselves of governmentality, such as individuals, things, wealth, and land. It no longer deals with these things in themselves. It deals with the phenomena of politics, that is to say, interests, which precisely constitute politics and its stakes; it deals with interests, or that respect in which a given individual, thing, wealth, and so on interests other individuals or the collective body of individuals. … In the new regime, government is basically no longer to be exercised over subjects and other things subjected through these subjects. Government is now to be exercised over what we could call the phenomenal republic of interests. The fundamental question of liberalism is: What is the utility value of government and all actions of government in a society where exchange determines the value of things?”

Michel Foucault book The Birth of Biopolitics

Lecture 2, January 17, 1979, pp. 45-46
The Birth of Biopolitics (1978)

Exercises , Wealth

“No Scientific Christian ever considers hatred or execration to be "justifiable" in any circumstances, but whatever your opinion about that might be, there is no question about its practical consequences to you. You might as well swallow a dose of prussic acid in two gulps, and think to protect yourself by saying, "This one is for Robespierre; and this one for the Bristol murderer."”

Emmet Fox (1886–1951) American New Thought writer

You will hardly have any doubt as to who will receive the benefit of the poison.
The Sermon on the Mount (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1938), p. 78; quoted in Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies, in BarryPopik.com (20 December 2013) http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/resentment_is_like_drinking_poison.

Thinking

“[About Edith Stein] I see her groping, wonder-filled prayer, which in the beginning resembles a conversation she is conducting with herself and is very managed. It is half like a question she puts to herself without knowing exactly what she means; it may be that the step she takes does not need to be completed by her; the question does not need to be perfectly articulated; perhaps God would be able to intervene in the middle of her step, in order to make his presence known and answer her question in a much more profound way than she herself would have expected or even would have been capable of expecting. And God truly answers. She prays more and more and finally receives a victorious certainty and rejoices. From this moment of victorious certainty on, everything is perfectly simple and unambiguous. She will follow the path God shows to her; she belongs to him; she has rediscovered her childlike cheerfulness, which has increased and become clearly manifest through love and faith.”

Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) Swiss doctor and mystic

Book of All Saints (1966)

Love , God , Faith , Way

““I Critic am. Critics follow Festival for many lifetimes. We come to Criticize. First want I to know, am I Criticizing sapients? Or is just puppet show on cave wall of reality? Zombies or zimboes? Shadows of mind? Amusements for Eschaton?
A shiver ran up and down Burya’s spine. “I think I’m sapient,” he said cautiously. “Of course, I’d say that even if I wasn’t, wouldn’t I? Your question is unanswerable. So why ask it?”
Sister Seventh leaned forward. “None of your people ask anything,” she hissed. “Food, yes. Guns, yes. Wisdom? No. Am beginning think you not aware of selves, ask nothing.””

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 6, “Telegram from the Dead” (p. 143)

Wisdom , People , Food , Thinking

“A strange people, for whom it is out of the question that anyone can be moral without reading the Bible, and strong without playing cricket, and a gentleman without being English! And it is this that makes them so detested. They never fuse, they never lose their Englishness.”

José Maria Eça de Queiroz book Cartas de Inglaterra

Estranha gente, para quem é fora de dúvida que ninguém pode ser moral sem ler a Bíblia, ser forte sem jogar o críquete e ser gentleman sem ser inglês! E é isto que os torna detestados. Nunca se fundem, nunca se desinglesam.
"Os Ingleses no Egipto"; "The English in Egypt" pp. 159-60.
Cartas de Inglaterra (1879–82)

People , Strong , Reading

“English: Only a total idiot would think that a major channel is working to inform the audience. The channel sells product, it must be packaged. CNN, for example, is a colossal ideological tool in the West. An excellent example is the situation around Yugoslavia. How effectively a very civilized part of humankind was brainwashed! The question is in approaches. If a consumer "grubs" stale bread, nobody will offer him poppy-seed buns. I'm an absolutely engaged person. By myself. I have certain political views. I'm not a journalist. I practice political propaganda. I am a commentator, and if one comments on events without having one's own position, that's an unhealthy symptom.”

Mikhail Leontyev (1958) Russian television pundit

Только полный идиот может думать, что крупный канал готов работать ради информирования зрителя. Канал продает продукт, его надо паковать. CNN, к примеру, является на Западе колоссальным идеологическим инструментом. Яркий пример тому - ситуация вокруг Югославии. Как эффектно промыли мозги очень цивилизованной части человечества! Вопрос в методах. Если потребитель "хавает" черствый хлеб, никто не будет давать ему булочки с маком. Я человек ангажированный абсолютно. Самим собой. У меня есть конкретные политические взгляды. Я не журналист. Я занимаюсь политической пропагандой. Я комментатор, и если человек комментирует события, не имея своей позиции, то это явление болезненное.
Михаил Леонтьев: 'Придется стать придурком', Chelpress.ru (Mass Media of Chelyabinsk), 2000-06-29, 2007-03-25 http://www.chelpress.ru/newspapers/vecherka/archive/29-06-2000/9/2.DOC.shtml,

Thinking , Parting , Personality

“QUESTION: Is there a reason for the pen name? One you’d be willing to share, I suppose. As in, is it because you’re actually a secret CIA agent and/or Russian spy, or merely because you don’t ever want your mother knowing what you’ve written?
JTH: My mother and the rest of my family don’t know that I have written the novels. Those people I know who aren’t close friends see me as a failure by the American standards of success. Being a “failure” in such a way has been a continual lesson. It’s helped me realize that we make quick judgments of others based on little real information. We assume so much – but don’t know the secrets held within the heart.”

John Twelve Hawks American writer

From Interviews

People , Secret , Family , Way

“In our discussions and exchanges on Berlin and other international questions, the one thing that has most concerned me has been the possibility that your Government would not correctly understand the will and determination of the United States in any given situation, since I have not assumed that you or any other sane man would, in this nuclear age, deliberately plunge the world into war which it is crystal clear no country could win and which could only result in catastrophic consequences to the whole world, including the aggressor.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1962, First letter to Nikita Khrushchev

War , Age , World , Understanding

“Political philosophy seems often to reside at a distance from the world. Principles are one thing, politics another, and even our best efforts to ‘live up’ to our ideals typically founder on the gap between theory and practice.But if political philosophy is unrealizable in one sense, it is unavoidable in another. This is the sense in which philosophy inhabits the world from the start; our practices and institutions are embodiments of theory.... for all our uncertainties about ultimate questions of political philosophy — of justice and value and the nature of the good life — the one thing we know is that we live some answer all the time.”

Michael J. Sandel (1953) American political philosopher

The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self, 1984

Life , World , Justice , Nature

“"What the Republicans have been doing is an insult to America…. These are foot-dragging, knuckle-dragging neanderthals." [Questioned, 'Why are you name-calling?'] "I didn't call names, what I said is true."”

Alan Grayson (1958) American politician

CNN, YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTyAQEAseb0 –September 30, 2009. CNN Political Ticker http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/09/30/grayson-calls-republicans-knuckle-dragging-neanderthals/.
2009, Regarding the Republican Party

“I have one question for the Government, why can't it function without the coup perpetrators?”

Koila Nailatikau (1953) Fijian politician

21 July 2005
On the government's proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission, 21 July, 2005

“Foreign Spokesman Qin Gang let everyone act as journalists to ask him questions. Professor of Beijing United University Chen Delin got the mic first: “What principles do you follow when you answer questions from Chinese and foreign reporters?””

Qin Gang (1966) politician

Universe

“When you’ve parked the second car in the garage, and installed the hot tub, and skied in Colorado, and wind-surfed in the Caribbean, when you’ve had your first love affair and your second and your third, the question will remain, where does the dream end for me?”

Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York

Commencement address at Syracuse University, quoted in New York Times (12 May 1986)

Love , Dreams , Cars

“History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)

History

“Why should Cornishmen learn Cornish? There is no money in it, it serves no practical purpose, and the literature is scanty and of no great originality or value. The question is a fair one, the answer is simple. Because they are Cornish.”

Henry Jenner (1848–1934) British Celticist

Freethespirit http://www.freethespirit.org.uk/6rev-cor.htm.

Money , Literature , Learning

“I always come back to variations of the question that my son asked me when he was three. We were sitting in a jacuzzi, and he said, "Dad, why do we exist?" There is no other question. Nobody has any other question. We have variations of this one question, from three onwards. So when you spend time in a company, in a bureaucracy, in an organization and you're saying, boy -- how many people do you know who on their death beds said, boy, I wish I had spent more time at the office? So there's a whole thing of having the courage now -- not in a week, not in two months, not when you find out you have something -- to say, no, what am I doing this for? Stop everything. Let me do something else. And it will be okay, it will be much better than what you're doing, if you're stuck in a process.”

Ricardo Semler (1959) Brazilian businessman

TED: "How to run a company with (almost) no rules" https://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_how_to_run_a_company_with_almost_no_rules/ (October 2014)

Death , People , Boy , Courage

“Scientists who have thought that they were seeking Truth, but who were trying to find out astronomic, or chemic, or biologic truths. But Truth is that besides which there is nothing: nothing to modify it, nothing to question it, nothing to form an exception: the all-inclusive, the complete--By Truth I mean the Universal.”

Charles Fort (1874–1932) American writer

Source: The Book of The Damned (1919), Ch. 1, part 4 at resologist.net

Truth , Universe

“There was a time when I should have felt terribly ashamed of not being up-to-date. I lived in a chronic apprehension lest I might, so to speak, miss the last bus, and so find myself stranded and benighted, in a desert of demodedness, while others, more nimble than myself, had already climbed on board, taken their tickets and set out toward those bright but, alas, ever receding goals of Modernity and Sophistication. Now, however, I have grown shameless, I have lost my fears. I can watch unmoved the departure of the last social-cultural bus—the innumerable last buses, which are starting at every instant in all the world’s capitals. I make no effort to board them, and when the noise of each departure has died down, “Thank goodness!” is what I say to myself in the solitude. I find nowadays that I simply don’t want to be up-to-date. I have lost all desire to see and do the things, the seeing and doing of which entitle a man to regard himself as superiorly knowing, sophisticated, unprovincial; I have lost all desire to frequent the places and people that a man simply must frequent, if he is not to be regarded as a poor creature hopelessly out of the swim. “Be up-to-date!” is the categorical imperative of those who scramble for the last bus. But it is an imperative whose cogency I refuse to admit. When it is a question of doing something which I regard as a duty I am as ready as anyone else to put up with discomfort. But being up-to-date and in the swim has ceased, so far as I am concerned, to be a duty. Why should I have my feelings outraged, why should I submit to being bored and disgusted for the sake of somebody else’s categorical imperative? Why? There is no reason. So I simply avoid most of the manifestations of that so-called “life” which my contemporaries seem to be so unaccountably anxious to “see”; I keep out of range of the “art” they think is so vitally necessary to “keep up with”; I flee from those “good times” in the “having” of which they are prepared to spend so lavishly of their energy and cash.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“Silence is Golden,” p. 55
Do What You Will (1928)

Life , People , World , Fear

“From the summit of power men no longer turn their eyes upward, but begin to look about them. Aspiration sees only one side of every question; possession, many.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), New England Two Centuries Ago

Men

“The immediate occasion for alarm is the government's announcement that British contractors for supplying armaments to our armed forces must in future share the work with what are called ‘European firms’, meaning factories situated on the mainland of the European continent. I ask one question, to which I believe there is no doubt about the answer. What would have been the fate of Britain in 1940 if production of the Hurricane and the Spitfire had been dependent upon the output of factories in France? That a question so glaringly obvious does not get asked in public or in government illuminates the danger created for this nation by the rolling stream of time which bears away the generation of 1940, the generation, that is to say, of those who experienced as adults Britain's great peril and Britain’s great deliverance. Talk at Bruges or Luxembourg about not surrendering our national sovereignty is all very well. It means less than nothing when the keys to our national defence are being handed over: an island nation which no longer commands the essential means of defending itself by air and sea is no longer sovereign…The safety of this island nation reposes upon two pillars. The first is the impregnability of its homeland to invasion by air or sea. The second is its ability and its will to create over time the military forces by which the last conclusive battle will be decided. Without our own industrial base of military armament production neither of those pillars will stand. No doubt, with the oceans kept open, we can look to buy or borrow from the other continents; but to depend on the continent of Europe for our arms is suicide.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Birmingham branch of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers Association (18 February 1989), from Enoch Powell on 1992 (Anaya, 1989), pp. 49-50
1980s

Fate , Suicide , Time , Future

“Questions at home and school should be decided in the light of the future. It is a process of toughening, but not the sort of false physical thing that we have called toughening. Our boys and girls ought to know that the bully type, the false "tough," has been the first to break down under the actual fire of battle. The quiet, the calm, the determined have made the best soldiers. Why? Obviously the bully is insecure in himself- he blusters to muster his own courage. Children ought to know that. They ought to be taught to retort to the bully, "You're a coward or you wouldn't make such a noise about being brave. The really brave man simply acts brave- he doesn't have to talk about it."”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Source: What America Means to Me (1943), p. 151-152

Children , School , Home , Girl

“Are we, in this age of civilization and political progress… to roll back the whole current of human thought, and again return to the mere brute force which prevails between beasts of prey, as the only method of settling questions between men?”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Speech https://web.archive.org/web/20070621205516/http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/24.1/belz.html (1861)
1860s

Men , Age

“Big questions get big answers.”

Francis Crick (1916–2004) British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

Life Story (1987, BBC)

“[About the Swiss] The nice Germans, Yeah. Or as they like to say, the other white race. Now, I have only one question. How can you trust an army, how butch is an army that has a wine opener on its knife? "Many of you have never opened Chardonnay under fire! First, you pull the cork out, sniff it, say, 'Meat or fish?', and throw! (Military cadence) I don't know, but I've been told, Chardonnay must be served cold! Ja!"”

Robin Williams (1951–2014) American actor and stand-up comedian

Robin Williams: Live on Broadway (2002)

Fish , Wine

“Enforced solitude, as in solitary confinement, is a terrible and disorienting punishment, but freely chosen solitude is an immense blessing. To be out of the rattle and clang of quotidian life, to be away from the garbage of other people's amusements and the overflow of their unwanted subjectivities, is the essential escape. Solitude is, beyond question, one of the worlds great gifts and an indispensable aid to creativity, no matter what level that creation may be hatched at.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

Life , People , World , Solitude

“During the Battle of Britain the question "fighter or fighter-bomber?" had been decided once and for all: The fighter can only be used as a bomb carrier with lasting effect when sufficient air superiority has been won.”

Adolf Galland (1912–1996) German World War II general and fighter pilot

Quoted in "The First and the Last," 1954.
The First and the Last (1954)

“On "Priya Duryodhani": She was a slight frail girl, with a thin tapering face like kernel of a mango and dark-brown eyebrows that nearly joined together over high-ridged nose, giving her to look of a desiccated school teacher at an age when she was barely old enough to enroll at school. She had dark and lustrous eyes. They shone from that finished face like blazing gems on a fading backcloth, flashing, questioning.”

Shashi Tharoor book The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

Age , School , Girl , Teachers

“1. The standard neoclassical model the formal articulation of Adam Smith's invisible hand, the contention that market economies will ensure economic efficiency provides little guidance for the choice of economic systems, since once information imperfections (and the fact that markets are incomplete) are brought into the analysis, as surely they must be, there is no presumption that markets are efficient.
2. The Lange-Lerner-Taylor theorem, asserting the equivalence of market and market socialist economies, is based on a misguided view of the market, of the central problems of resource allocation, and (not surprisingly, given the first two failures) of how the market addresses those basic problems.
3. The neoclassical paradigm, through its incorrect characterization of the market economies and the central problems of resource allocation, provides a false sense of belief in the ability of market socialism to solve those resource allocation problems. To put it another way, if the neoclassical paradigm had provided a good description of the resource allocation problem and the market mechanism, then market socialism might well have been a success. The very criticisms of market socialism are themselves, to a large extent, criticisms of the neoclassical paradigm.
4. The central economic issues go beyond the traditional three questions posed at the beginning of every introductory text: What is to be produced? How is it to be produced? And for whom is it to be produced? Among the broader set of questions are: How should these resource allocation decisions be made? Who should make these decisions? How can those who are responsible for making these decisions be induced to make the right decisions? How are they to know what and how much information to acquire before making the decisions? How can the separate decisions of the millions of actors decision makers in the economy be coordinated?
5. At the core of the success of market economies are competition, markets, and decentralization. It is possible to have these, and for the government to still play a large role in the economy; indeed it may be necessary for the government to play a large role if competition is to be preserved. There has recently been extensive confusion over to what to attribute the East Asian miracle, the amazingly rapid growth in countries of this region during the past decade or two. Countries like Korea did make use of markets; they were very export oriented. And because markets played such an important role, some observers concluded that their success was convincing evidence of the power of markets alone. Yet in almost every case, government played a major role in these economies. While Wade may have put it too strongly when he entitled his book on the Taiwan success Governing the Market, there is little doubt that government intervened in the economy through the market.
6. At the core of the failure of the socialist experiment is not just the lack of property rights. Equally important were the problems arising from lack of incentives and competition, not only in the sphere of economics but also in politics. Even more important perhaps were problems of information. Hayek was right, of course, in emphasizing that the information problems facing a central planner were overwhelming. I am not sure that Hayek fully appreciated the range of information problems. If they were limited to the kinds of information problems that are at the center of the Arrow-Debreu model consumers conveying their preferences to firms, and scarcity values being communicated both to firms and consumers then market socialism would have worked. Lange would have been correct that by using prices, the socialist economy could "solve" the information problem just as well as the market could. But problems of information are broader.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz book Whither Socialism?

Source: Whither Socialism? (1994), Ch. 1 : The Theory of Socialism and the Power of Economic Ideas

Books , Way , Communication , Failure

“[During 'If This Is The Answer, What Is The Question' -- the answer is "24%"] Is it "What is the proportion of my penis that is medically safe for a woman to accommodate?"”

Ed Byrne (1972) Irish comedian

Mock the Week

“There is no question that advertising is an art, and manipulation is the art of advertising through the medium of the tape.”

Edwin Lefèvre book Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

Source: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923), Chapter XX, p. 236

Art

“As for 'taste' as a criterion of painting I find that it is most frequently applied to work that is essentially insensitive, brutal or vulgar beyond question. Could it now be a term with political undertones to seduce, or cover profounder motives of exploitation? I propose it be kept to the wine cellar. There it deceives no one but him who over-indulges.”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

Clyfford Still, in an interview with Ti Grace Sharpless, 1963; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 201
1960s

Motivation , Wine , Painting

“The question to address is that of the conscious unity of student life … the will to submit to a principle, to identify completely with an idea. The concept of "science" or scholarly discipline serves primarily to conceal a deep-rooted bourgeois indifference.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

An das Leben der Studenten tritt die Frage nach seiner bewußten Einheit heran. ... Das Auszeichnende im Studentenleben ist in der Tat der Gegenwille, sich einem Prinzip zu unterwerfen, mit der Idee sich zu durchdringen. Der Name der Wissenschaft dient vorzüglich, eine tiefeingesessene, verbürgerte Indifferenz zu verbergen.
The Life of Students (1915)

Life , Idea , Science , Indifference

“[A certain Italian judge] declared in an interview that at night he has no need of sleeping pills since, with regards to the Law, his conscience is at peace. We believe him without further ado. But if he asked himself the same question with regards to Justice, I ask myself if his sleep would be equally untroubled. And we are after all aware that he'll never ask himself this question, and on the contrary it would seem to him totally odd. Because, for an Italian judge, the Law and Justice have nothing to do with each other.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

Il testimone, p. 386.
2000s - 2010s

Peace , Justice , Law , Sleep

“The great question is: from which country shall we copy the Constitution?”

Lima Barreto book Os Bruzundangas

Os Bruzundangas (1923)

Country

“Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.”

Charles Lamb Last Essays of Elia

Amicus Redivivus.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)

“The myth of Canada, its hidden story, is of a contemplative country, a place of inwardness, where people can question the idea of nationhood and ponder what values we wish to see expressed and achieved, and what solitudes of identity and reverie we wish to preserve.”

B. W. Powe (1955) Canadian writer

First Meditation, p. 38
Towards a Canada of Light (2006)

People , Idea , Solitude , Country

“Your Honor, I think I can shorten this testimony. The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible, but I will answer his question. I will answer it all at once, and I have no objection in the world. I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in a God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee to slur at it, and while it will require time, I am willing to take it.”

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) United States Secretary of State

Scopes Trial (1925), Day 7

God , World , Thinking , Time

“We alone can be wracked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-seeking methods. Wanting to keep better track of our food supplies, our territories, our families, our enemies, we discovered the benefits of talking it over with others, asking questions, passing on lore. We invented culture. Then we invented measuring, and arithmetic, and maps, and writing. These communicative and recording innovations come with a built-in ideal: truth. The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to find your way to your destination. … In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Postmodernism and truth (1998)

Truth , Family , Food , Way

“Ghostwritten’s secret agenda is to offer up eight different answers to the question, "Why do things happen?" so it has the right to monkey about with time and history. number9dreams’s secret agenda is to offer eight different answers to the question, "In what space does the mind operate?"”

David Mitchell (1969) English novelist

Interview in Stop Smiling magazine (29 June 2007) http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/story_detail.php?id=841

Secret , History , Time

“How often will the lip frame some indifferent question, when the heart is full of the most important!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Heart , Indifference

“Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?”

June Jordan (1936–2002) Poet, essayist, playwright, feminist and bisexual activist

Source: Black Studies: Bringing Back The Person (1969), p. 46

Life , Soul , Freedom

“On reaching the age of eighty, I feel fortunate that I am able to lead a life always feeling gratitude to those who have rebuilt Japan and who continue to commit themselves across the nation to the betterment and development of our country in various ways. Having already lived eighty years, I am somewhat perplexed by the question about my life in the coming years, but I would say that, while accepting the limits arising from age, I hope to continue to fulfill my role as best I can.”

Akihito (1933) Emperor of Japan

Life , Age , Hope , Way

“Education ent only books and music – it's asking questions, all the time. There are millions of us, all over the country, and no one, not one of us, is asking questions, we're all taking the easiest way out.”

Arnold Wesker (1932–2016) British dramatist

Roots, Act 3 (1959)

Books , Education , Music , Way

“When then is liberalism correctly understood? Liberalism is not an exclusvely political term. It can be applied to a prison reform, to an economic order, to a theology. Within the political framework, the question is not (as in a democracy) “Who should rule?” but “How should rule be exercised?” The reply is “Regardless of who rules—a monarch, an elite, a majority, or a benevolent dictator—governments should be exercised in such a way that each citizen enjoys the greatest amount of personal liberty.” The limit of liberty is obviously the common good. But, admittedly, the common good (material as well as immaterial) is not easily defined, for it rests on value judgments. Its definition is therefore always somewhat arbitrary. Speed limits curtail freedom in the interests of the common good. Is there a watertight case for forty, forty-five, or fifty miles an hour? Certainly not…. Freedom is thus the only postulate of liberalism—of genuine liberalism. If, therefore, democracy is liberal, the life, the whims, the interests of the minority will be just as respected as those of the majority. Yet surely not only a democracy, but a monarchy (absolute or otherwise) or an aristocratic (elitist) regime can be liberal. In fact, the affinity between democracy and liberalism is not at all greater than that between, say, monarchy and liberalism or a mixed government and liberalism. (People under the Austrian monarchy, which was not only symbolic but an effective mixed government, were not less free than those in Canada, to name only one example.)”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Source: Leftism Revisited (1990), p. 21

Life , People , Way , Exercises

“Q: …would he possibly stand under a sign that says "Mission Accomplished" today as he did three years ago?
Scott McClellan: Well, Peter, I think that there are some Democrats that refuse to recognize the important milestone achieved by the formation of a national unity government. And there is an effort simply to distract attention away from the real progress that is being made by misrepresenting and distorting the past. And that really does nothing to help advance our goal of achieving victory in Iraq.
Q: Scott, simple yes or no question, could the President stand under a sign that says --
Scott McClellan: No, see, this is -- this is a way that --
Q: It has nothing to do with Democrats.
Scott McClellan: Sure it does.
Q: I'm asking you, based on a reporter's curiosity, could he stand under a sign again that says, "Mission Accomplished"?
Scott McClellan: Now, Peter, Democrats have tried to raise this issue, and, like I said, misrepresenting and distorting the past --
Q: This is not --
Scott McClellan: -- which is what they're doing, does nothing to advance the goal of victory in Iraq.
Q: I mean, it's a historical fact that we're all taking notice of --
Scott McClellan: Well, I think the focus ought to be on achieving victory in Iraq and the progress that's being made, and that's where it is. And you know exactly the Democrats are trying to distort the past.
Q: Let me ask it another way: Has the mission been accomplished?
Scott McClellan: Next question.
Q: Has the mission been accomplished?
Scott McClellan: We're on the way to accomplishing the mission and achieving victory.”

Scott McClellan (1968) Former White House press secretary

Source: Press briefing http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/05/20060501-4.html, May 1, 2006

Way , Thinking , Effort , Past

“We feel like more than just the sum of a trillion neurons. We feel like more than just three pounds of wet flesh, and so simply describing the brain in terms of its neurotransmitters and neurons and all these chemicals and exciting ingredients doesn't fully grapple with what it feels like to be human, the first person subjective experience of being a conscious being. When you think about the really grand epic questions of neuroscience … what is consciousness? How can we form a scientific explanation for consciousness, for human experience? That is the holy grail.”

Jonah Lehrer (1981) American science writer

Chimeras of Experience: A Conversation with Jonah Lehrer (2009)

Feeling , Thinking , Personality

“If Evolution is true, how would you answer the question, ‘where did I come from?’ Well if Evolution is true, you came from a cosmic burp about twenty billion years ago. Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Well if Evolution is true, there is no purpose to life. So we might as well have fun. If it feels good, do it. Where am I going when I die? Well if Evolution is true, you’re just going to the grave and you’re going to get recycled into a worm or a plant. But the Bible says, ‘In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth.’ Now if that’s true, that puts a whole different set of answers to those questions.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Age of the Earth

Life , God , Feeling

“MR. PANSCOPE. (suddenly emerging from a deep reverie.) I have heard, with the most profound attention, everything which the gentleman on the other side of the table has thought proper to advance on the subject of human deterioration; and I must take the liberty to remark, that it augurs a very considerable degree of presumption in any individual, to set himself up against the authority of so many great men, as may be marshalled in metaphysical phalanx under the opposite banners of the controversy; such as Aristotle, Plato, the scholiast on Aristophanes, St Chrysostom, St Jerome, St Athanasius, Orpheus, Pindar, Simonides, Gronovius, Hemsterhusius, Longinus, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine, Doctor Paley, the King of Prussia, the King of Poland, Cicero, Monsieur Gautier, Hippocrates, Machiavelli, Milton, Colley Cibber, Bojardo, Gregory Nazianzenus, Locke, D'Alembert, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Erasmus, Doctor Smollett, Zimmermann, Solomon, Confucius, Zoroaster, and Thomas-a-Kempis.
MR. ESCOT. I presume, sir, you are one of those who value an authority more than a reason.
MR. PANSCOPE. The authority, sir, of all these great men, whose works, as well as the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the entire series of the Monthly Review, the complete set of the Variorum Classics, and the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions, I have read through from beginning to end, deposes, with irrefragable refutation, against your ratiocinative speculations, wherein you seem desirous, by the futile process of analytical dialectics, to subvert the pyramidal structure of synthetically deduced opinions, which have withstood the secular revolutions of physiological disquisition, and which I maintain to be transcendentally self-evident, categorically certain, and syllogistically demonstrable.
SQUIRE HEADLONG. Bravo! Pass the bottle. The very best speech that ever was made.
MR. ESCOT. It has only the slight disadvantage of being unintelligible.
MR. PANSCOPE. I am not obliged, Sir, as Dr Johnson remarked on a similar occasion, to furnish you with an understanding.
MR. ESCOT. I fear, Sir, you would have some difficulty in furnishing me with such an article from your own stock.
MR. PANSCOPE. 'Sdeath, Sir, do you question my understanding?
MR. ESCOT. I only question, Sir, where I expect a reply, which from what manifestly has no existence, I am not visionary enough to anticipate.
MR. PANSCOPE. I beg leave to observe, sir, that my language was perfectly perspicuous, and etymologically correct; and, I conceive, I have demonstrated what I shall now take the liberty to say in plain terms, that all your opinions are extremely absurd.
MR. ESCOT. I should be sorry, sir, to advance any opinion that you would not think absurd.
MR. PANSCOPE. Death and fury, Sir!
MR. ESCOT. Say no more, Sir - that apology is quite sufficient.
MR. PANSCOPE. Apology, Sir?
MR. ESCOT. Even so, Sir. You have lost your temper, which I consider equivalent to a confession that you have the worst of the argument.
MR. PANSCOPE. Lightnings and devils!”

Thomas Love Peacock book Headlong Hall

Headlong Hall, chapter V (1816).

Death , Men , Pain , Fear

“An exacting leader can always command more affection that one who is indifferent. The best way to impose severity is to have about one only those whose qualities one values. Any man ca easily endure criticism if his character and intelligence are clearly not called into question. To say quickly and forcefully what one feels strongly is the wise course. A sever reproach, if rapidly spoken, is less painful than hostile and sulky dissatisfaction. Subordinates must realize that if an order is not carried out they will suffer, but also that they will be exonerated if its execution leads to disaster. A true leader will always take full responsibility for his actions.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Leadership

Pain , Hostility , Way , Feeling

“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)

“Who built Thebes of the 7 gates ?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock ?

And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times ?

In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live ?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?

Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Who erected them?

Over whom did the Caesars triumph?

Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants ?

Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it,
The drowning still cried out for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?

Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him?

Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep?

Frederick the Second won the Seven Years' War.
Who else won it?

Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?

Every ten years a great man.
Who paid the bill?

So many reports.

So many questions.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

"Questions from a worker who reads" [Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters] (1935) from The Svendborg Poems (1939); trans. Michael Hamburger in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 252
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)

War , Books , Time , Reading

“There were two problems which had to be faced. One was spatial and the other methodological. In the first case I had to do something about relational painting, i. e. the balancing of the various parts of the painting with and against each other. The obvious answer was symmetry – make it the same all over. The question still remained, though, of how to do this in depth. A symmetrical image or configuration symmetrically placed on a open ground is not balanced out in the illusionistic space. The solution I arrived at, and there are probably quite a few, although I only know of one other, color density, forces illusionistic space out of the painting at constant intervals by using a regulated pattern. The remaining problem was simply to find a method of paint application which followed and complemented the design solution. This was done by using the house painters technique and tools.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, The Pratt lecture (1960), p. 114

Color , Problem , Parting , Painting

“Question: Guru Maharaji Ji, what do you mean about the mind being evil? Answer: This mind is jiggling around trying to find out that perfectness. It is inquiring, trying to investigate the perfectness, which is impossible. To the mind, God is a perfect criminal. He has done such a perfect crime by creating this world that mind cannot trace how He did it. That is why the mind always freaks out about God.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

September 1973, Los Angeles, USA, published in Light Reading Vol.1 No.1 Spring 1978 “Question on devotion and other answers”
Students of Prem Rawat clarify that at that time Rawat was making a distinction between the mind, which he described as including the dark or negative thoughts that a person may have; and heart, the place within each person where peace can be found.
1970s

God , World , Evil , Perfection

“No question of priority arose to embarrass me in my loyalties to the railway companies until the Parliamentary session of 1924-25… In Scotland the Dean of Faculty [of Advocates] is the deciding authority… He pointed out that the L. M. S. Company which was claiming me was not the L. M. S. Company which had retained me… So I was awarded to the L. N. E. R. and duly appeared in the Committee Rooms on their behalf.”

Hugh Macmillan, Baron Macmillan (1873–1952) British judge

Source: A Man of Law's Tale (1952), At the Scottish bar, p. 138-9

Appearance , Loyalty

“I asked a women I was with once, simple question, I asked her 'Have you ever eaten pheasant?' See, it's direct, isn't it?! It's enclosed, it contains everything that needs to be said! And she said a wonderful thing. She said "Erm…"—she thought about it—and she said "Er, not really." What does that mean? On any level? I mean, did you suck it and throw it away? Did someone drop it in your drink? What happened? Was it a speeding car, one lick? WHAT, WHAT?!?!”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On women.
Monster (2004)

Women , Cars , Drink , Speed

“By age 10, nearly all kids have fatty streaks in their arteries. This is the first sign of atherosclerosis, the leading cause of death in the United States. So the question for most of us is not whether we should eat healthy to prevent heart disease, but whether we want to reverse the heart disease we may already have.”

Michael Greger (1972) American physician, author, and vegan health activist

"Heart Disease Starts in Childhood" https://nutritionfacts.org/video/heart-disease-starts-in-childhood/?utm_content=buffer364bf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer, in NutritionFacts.org (23 September 2013).

Death , Age , Disease , Heart

“In a democracy, a government’s policies are rarely questioned until the underlying assumptions that create them are questioned.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 147.

Democracy

“I would not expect religion to be the right tool for sequencing the human genome and by the same token would not expect science to be the means to approaching the supernatural. But on the really interesting larger questions, such as ‘Why are we here?’ or ‘Why do human beings long for spirituality?,’ I find science unsatisfactory. Many superstitions have come into existence and then faded away. Faith has not, which suggests it has reality.”

Francis S. Collins (1950) Geneticist; Director of the National Institutes of Health

WOL http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102002402?q=collins&p=par

Faith , Religion , Reality , Science

“I’m basically interested in intervention. The key question for me is: how can you intervene more systemically? Systems approaches make the assumption that things are interconnected. That’s the fundamental starting point. However, we don’t have the privilege of a God’s eye view of that interconnectedness, so there are inevitable limits to understanding, and it is those limits that we call boundaries. So systemic intervention, for me, at a fundamental level, is how to explore those boundaries, and how to take account of the inevitable lack of comprehensiveness and begin to deal with that.”

Gerald Midgley (1960) New Zealand acaedmic

Midgley (2012) Interview with systems thinker Gerald Midgley http://www.shiftn.com/news/detail/interview_with_systems_thinker_gerald_midgley, March 5, 2012.

God , Understanding

“Once upon a time a young man of American background thought he had discovered the Great Secret, the Skeleton Key to the Cosmos, the Absolute Answer to the Age Old Question asked by every Wizard, and Alchemist and Mystic that ever peered curiously into the Perplexing Heavens, by every Doctor and Scientist and Explorer that ever wondered about the Winding Ways of this world, by every Philosopher and Holyman and Politician that ever listened for the Mysterious Song beneath the beat of the Human Heart… the answer to "What Makes It All Go?"”

Ken Kesey book Kesey's Garage Sale

Kesey's Garage Sale (1973)

Secret , Age , World , Way

“As so often I have pointed out, intuition is a level of the highest range. In details, I don’t have to think or to worry about the realization of my interpretation; no, it’s something that spreads out of my artistic all-compassion. Probably I have to be sorry for it, but this is my deepest artistic conviction for the rightness of an interpretation - interpretation as a summary of something unique and whole, not of a combining of details. Intuition is a level that includes all levels of emotion, intelligence, structure, and architecture. And I’m also confronted with the question of poetry and poesy, something that is so often neglected - especially in Bach.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Intelligence , Thinking

“Unless the person is aiming upward, there is nothing you can do about their situation. And this seems to be about that initial choice between good and evil. Once someone comes to therapy, they've already done something. They've already said: I have a problem, conceivably I can fix it, and I need to do something about it. And so half the work is already done before they show up, because they've already said that 'things aren't as good as they could be, and I want to do something about it.' The question is, can you do anything about that person who is not at that state? You can't. All you can do is serve by example. But until the person has decided, on their own, that they're wrong (that's why they're suffering – there's something wrong about what they are doing) and that they want to fix it… I think that hammering against their situation often makes it worse. That's part of free will. I do not think that people can learn unless they admit that they're wrong.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

People , Problem , Thinking , Suffering

“As attorneys, as lawmakers, and as judges, our first questions should be the effect of our decisions on real human lives.”

Gloria Allred (1941) American civil rights lawyer

Gloria Allred. (September 13, 1990). Testimony before United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

Decision

“Tell me, suit, don’t you wonder if it’s all worth it?’
“If what’s all worth what?” it says, and I can hear that condescending tone in its voice again.
“You know; living. Is it worth all the… bother?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, I don’t ever wonder about it.”
“Why not?” I’m keeping my questions short as we walk, conserving energy and breath.
“I don’t need to wonder about that. It’s not important.”

Iain Banks (1954–2013) Scottish writer

“Not important?”
“It’s an irrelevant question. We live; that’s enough.”
“Descendant” (p. 44)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

“Supergravity theories generically contain non-compact global symmetry groups. The general rule is that the scalar fields of the theory in question parametrize a symmetric space. Thus, if the non-compact symmetry group is G, and its maximal compact subgroup is H, the scalar fields map the space-time into the symmetric space G/H, and the number of scalar fields is dim G – dim H. The first supergravity example of this type to be found, N = 4 supergravity is one of the most interesting. In this case there are two scalar fields and the symmetric space is SL(2,R)/SO(2).”

John Henry Schwarz (1941) American theoretical physicist

p. 1

Time

“When I was ambushed by global warming advocates recently—no, they haven't given up—they asked me the same questions they always ask: "What if you're wrong?" and "If you're wrong will you apologize to future generations?" I always answer, "What if you're wrong? Will you apologize to my twenty kids and grandkids for the largest tax increase in American history?"”

James Inhofe (1934) American politician

They usually don't have anything to say after that.
[The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, WorldNetDaily Books, 9781936488490, 25334579M]

History , Future

“Let anyone who believes that a high standard of living is the achievement of labor unions and government controls ask himself the following question: If one had a "time machine" and transported the united labor chieftains of America, plus three million government bureaucrats, back to the tenth century—would they be able to provide the medieval serf with electric light, refrigerators, automobiles, and television sets?”

Ayn Rand book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

Light , Time

“I was reading an article about this case in California, where two lesbians were fighting over the custody of children that genetically were traceable to one, but which the other had raised. You know what? Nobody even thought about or mentioned, nobody asked a simple question about whether the father of those children should have any claim, because, very often in these relationships, they are conducted in such a way and conception occurs in such a way as to intentionally mask who the father might be, so that children must grow up without knowing who their father is. And that means that an incestuous situation could easily arise in our society, it's more than likely to arise--not to mention every other kind of incestuous complication.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Rally in defense of marriage, Boston, Massachusetts, May 14, 2004. http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/04_05_14boston.htm.
2009

Children , Way , Reading , Fight

“To the average mathematician who merely wants to know that his work is securely based, the most appealing choice is to avoid difficulties by means of Hilbert's program. Here one regards mathematics as a formal game and one is only concerned with the question of consistency.”

Paul Cohen (1934–2007) American mathematician

p. 11 of "Comments on the foundations of set theory." https://books.google.com/books?id=TVi2AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA11 In Axiomatic set theory, pp. 9-15. Providence (RI). American Mathematical Society, 1971.

Game , Mathematics

“My gut reaction to all these questions is negative. But it appears that one set or the other must be answered in the affirmative. Either way, we are missing something fundamental about the nature of our universe.”

Stacy McGaugh (1964) American astronomer

[Stacy McGaugh, http://astroweb.case.edu/ssm/mond/boileddown.html, "The MOND Issue"] at astroweb.case.edu. Accessed 2014.

Way , Nature , Universe , Appearance

“Roles of pathos were available to boys at my high school, but I eschewed them in favor of a role more akin to Prosecutor, Ironist. I advanced by questions. In some more perfect world, like American Bandstand, I suppose I would have been happier in a sexually integrated high school. I knew how to talk to girls. I had two sisters. And I loved to talk. But early nonsexual female companionship would have come at a price. “Sissy” is the chrysalis of “darling.””

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Love , World , School , Girl

“Man must not be turned into a chicken or a rat as in the well-known experiments in which elation is induced electrically through electrodes inserted into the brain. Related to this is the question of the ever-increasing use of tranquilizers and anti-depressants, legal and illegal narcotics, and so forth.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, The Threat to Intellectual Freedom

“Eudoxes… not only based the method [of exhaustion] on rigorous demonstration… but he actually applied the method to find the volumes (1) of any pyramid, (2) of the cone, proving (1) that any pyramid is one third part of the prism which has the same base and equal height, and (2) that any cone is one third part of the cylinder which has the same base and equal height. Archimedes, however, tells us the remarkable fact that these two theorems were first discovered by Democritus, though he was not able to prove them (which no doubt means, not that he gave no sort of proof, but that he was not able to establish the propositions by the rigorous methods of Eudoxes. Archimedes adds that we must give no small share of the credit for these theorems to Democritus… another testimony to the marvellous powers, in mathematics as well as in other subjects, of the great man who, in the words of Aristotle, "seems to have thought of everything"…. Democritus wrote on irrationals; he is also said to have discussed the question of two parallel sections of a cone (which were evidently supposed to be indefinitely close together), asking whether we are to regard them as equal or unequal… Democritus was already close on the track of infinitesimals.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Achimedes (1920)

Mathematics , Parting

“And for me Michelangelo's greatest work is one that was in his studio partly finished, partly unfinished when he died 'The Rondanini Pietà'. I don't know of any other single work of art by anyone that is more poignant, more moving. It isn't the most powerful of Michelangelo's works – it's a mixture, in fact, of two styles…. the changing became so drastic that I think he knocked the head off the sculpture… So the figure must originally have been a good deal taller. And if we see also the proportion of the length of the body of Christ compared with the length of the legs, there's no doubt that the whole top of the original sculpture has been cut away. Now this to me is a great question. Why should I and other sculptors I know, my contemporaries – I think that Giacometti feels this, I know Marino Marini feels it – find this work one of the most moving and greatest works we know of when it's a work which has such disunity in it?… But that's so moving, so touching: the position of the heads, the whole tenderness of the top part of the sculpture, is in my opinion more what it is by being in contrast with the rather finished, tough, leathery, typical Michelangelo legs. The top part is Gothic and the lower part is sort of Renaissance.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Henri Moore in his interview with David Silvester, in 'The Sunday Times Magazine', 16 Febr. 1964, pp. 18, 20-22
1955 - 1970

Art , Feeling , Thinking , Change

“I knew im, she knew im, e knew im, we all knew im.’ After this paradigm, which impressed his hearers, he paused. ‘E was a customer ere. Not perhaps one of the best customers. Not like Roger Alliwell ere oo drinks whisky to the tune of near one bottle a day, which is good for the ouse and, as far as we can see, does imself no arm. But e was a customer, loyal to the ouse, regular in attendance, and that’s all we ask of any man or woman for that matter. Well, now e’s gone. We’re sorry e’s gone. You’re sorry e’s gone. I’m sorry e’s gone. And we can’t say much more than that. Now the question is: is e gone to a better place? I don’t know the answer to that, nor do you, nor does she. Perhaps e knows,’ said Ted, shrugging towards the vicar, ‘because it’s is job to know. But the rest of us don’t know. Right. But I say this. E done is best for all. Never a ard word come out of that man’s art. Right. Well loved e was and for all is faults we would love im still, if e was still alive. But e’s dead now and we wish im all the best in is new destination. And I can’t say no fairer than that.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Love , Art , Drink , Dead

“Science is incapable of supplying answers to ultimate questions about why things exist and what their purpose is.”

Nicola Cabibbo (1935–2010) Italian physicist

interview by John L. Allen, Jr. on July 18, 2005, National Catholic Reporter (July 21, 2005) http://www.natcath.org/mainpage/specialdocuments/cabibbo.htm

Science

“I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: "Who're the right actors for these roles?" "How should this be staged?" "Do I really want to set this in Denmark?" His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. "Is the financing in place?" "Are there enough good seats for my patrons?" "Where am I going to get a human skull?"”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind was the question "Is this literature?"
Nobel Banquet Speech

Literature , Thinking , Reading

“I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

in The Romantics were prompted, essay by Mark Rothko, 1947/48; as quoted in Possibilities, vol 1, no. 1, winter 1947-48, Kate Rothko Prizel and Christophor Rothko.
1940's

Solitude , Silence

“Unless disputants understand the meaning attached by each other to the terms of a controversy, they may worry along indefinitely without making an inch of progress. The contending parties may think they agree on the proposition, when, as a matter of fact, their apparent agreement is due to ambiguity in the use of the terms. On the other hand, the contending parties may work themselves into a quarrel over imaginary disagreements concerning ideas, when in fact they are merely confused as to the meaning of words. Disputes which seem interminable are sometimes ended abruptly and happily upon the accidental discovery that the parties in dispute agreed all the time as to the real questions at issue, while neither side understood what the other side meant.”

William Trufant Foster (1879–1950) American economist

Source: Argumentation and debating, 1908, p. 24 ; as cited in: Branham (2013, p. 38)

Idea , Understanding , Thinking , Time

“So I thought my first Prime Ministers Question time I'd do in a slightly different way and I'm sure the Prime Minister's going to absolutely welcome this as he welcomed this idea in 2005 but something has seemed to have happened to his memory during that period. So I sent out an email to thousands of people and asked them what questions they would like to put to the Prime Minister, and I recieved forty thousand replies.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/16/pmqs-jeremy-corbyn-verdict Jeremy Corbyn makes his debut as leader of the opposition (16 September 2015).
2000s

People , Way , Idea , Memory

“The aesthetics of painting were always in a state of development parallel to the development of painting itself. They influenced each other and vice versa. But all of the sudden, in that famous turn of the century [1900] a few people thought they could take the bull by the horns and invent an aesthetic beforehand. After immediately disagreeing with each other, they began to form all kinds of groups, each with the idea of freeing art... The question as they saw it, was not so much what you could paint, but what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that the subject matter came into existence as something you ought not to have.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
1950's

People , Art , Mountain , Idea

Quotes about doubt page 16

Quotes about doubt
page 16