Quotes about doubt
page 30

“Kids don't hesitate to ask questions. And it's a great honor to have the kids say, "Your books have made me trust you."”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)

Books

“Cybernetics is a young discipline which, like applied mathematics, cuts across the entrenched departments of natural science; the sky, the earth, the animals and the plants. Its interdisciplinary character emerges when it considers economy not as an economist, biology not as a biologist, engines not as an engineer. In each case its theme remains the same, namely, how systems regulate themselves, reproduce themselves, evolve and learn. Its high spot is the question of how they organize themselves.
A cybernetic laboratory has a varied worksheet - concept formation in organized groups, teaching machines, brain models, and chemical computers for use in a cybernetic factory. As pure scientists we are concerned with brain-like artifacts, with evolution, growth and development; with the process of thinking and getting to know about the world. Wearing the hat of applied science, we aim to create what Boulanger,' in his presidential address to the International Association of Cybernetics, called the instruments of a new industrial revolution - control mechanisms that lay their own plans.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: An Approach to Cybernetics (1961), p. 11. Partly cited in: A.M.E. Salazar, A. Espinosa, J. Walker (2011) A Complexity Approach to Sustainability: Theory and Application. p. 11.

World, Mathematics, Nature, Thinking

“In Flight (a quantum fiction novel), essentially our protagonist is a writer who is writing a novel and then begins to see things from his novel occurring in the reality around him, and he questions "am I losing my mind?"”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

or "am I somehow influencing reality around me?"
Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum fiction: Author Interview (2007)

Reality

“The man who comes home exhausted because he has been taught to believe without question that his male identity is based on nine-to-five loyalty and the giving of his best energies to the corporation has made a decision about his sexuality. He sacrifices his corpus to the corporation. His chosen method of expending energy and structuring time disallows afternoon dalliance with his wife or lover.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 101

Home, Lovers, Decision, Time

“The first thing I said was a question: Does this really come from the family? I think that was essential to me sort of processing the honor. And when I found out that, in fact, it had, it took me about 48 hours to sort of strike the balance in how I was going to approach being -- you know, being invited to this unbelievable event without actually having the proximity to Michael Jackson personally. I'd never met him.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

Mayer on performeing Human Nature at Michael Jackson's Memorial service
"Episode title unknown". Larry King Live. July 7, 2009. No. unknown, season 24.

Family, Thinking, Personality

“Once we understand that the flags in question are those of an army, we can have a more intelligent discussion about what those armies did, such as the fact that the Army of Northern Virginia was under orders to capture and send south supposed escaped slaves during that army's invasion of Pennsylvania in 1863.”

Brooks D. Simpson (1957) American historian

Brooks D. Simpson. "The Soldiers' Flag?" https://cwcrossroads.wordpress.com/2015/07/05/the-soldiers-flag/ (5 July 2015), Crossroads, WordPress 2010s

Intelligence, Understanding

“The question is whether you'll tell your children that this decade was the beginning of a new dark age, or whether it was the time of something new and wonderful.”

Steve Blank (1953) American businessman

Dalhousie University Commencement Speech (2017)

Children, Age, Time

“You and I do not meet on one branch or in one place. You make your way along one path and I along another. Your questions arise from human thinking, and I respond from a knowledge that is far beyond all human comprehension. You must give up human understanding if you want to reach the goal, because the truth is known by not knowing You must give up human understanding if you want to reach the goal, because the truth is known by not knowing”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Truth

Truth, Way, Understanding, Knowledge

“They use [the term Isolationist] all the time, and they do that to be very negative. There are a few people in the country who say, "Well, that's good. I sort of like that term." I don't particularly like the term because I do not think I am an isolationist at all. Because along with the advice of not getting involved in entangling alliances and into the internal affairs of other countries, the Founders said – and it's permissible under the Constitution – to be friends with people, trade with people, communicate with them, and get along with them – but stay out of the military alliances. The irony is they accuse us, who would like to be less interventionist and keep our troops at home, of being isolationist. Yet if you look at the results of the policy of the last six years, we find that we are more isolated than ever before. So I claim the policy of those who charge us with being isolationists is really diplomatic isolationism. They are not willing to talk to Syria. They are not willing to talk to Iran. They are not willing to trade with people that might have questionable people in charge. We have literally isolated ourselves. We have less friends and more enemies than ever before. So in a way, it's one of the unintended consequences of their charges. They are the true isolationists, I believe.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Interview by Scott Horton, April 4, 2007 http://www.antiwar.com/horton/?articleid=10798 2000s, 2006-2009

People, Way, Home, Communication

“Once employees base their motivation on extrinsic factors they are much less likely to take chances, question established policies and practices, or explore the territory that lies beyond the company vision as defined by management.”

Chris Argyris (1923–2013) American business theorist/Professor Emeritus/Harvard Business School/Thought Leader at Monitor Group

Source: On organizational learning (1999), p. 236; as cited in: Edward D. Garten, ‎Delmus E. Williams (2008) Advances in Library Administration and Organization. p. 51

Motivation, Chance

“The spirit and outlook of 'Sankhya' will be universal, but its form and content must necessarily be, to some extent, regional. We shall keep the special needs of India in view without, however, restricting the scope of the journal in any way. We shall naturally devote closer attention to the collection and analysis of data relating to India, but we shall try to study all Indian questions in relation to world problems…. The study of modern statistical methods in its infancy in our country, and we do not expect to be able to achieve immediate results. We shall be satisfied if we can help by our humble efforts to lay the foundations for future work.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

His editorial in his Journal the Sankhya cited in Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, 14 December 2013, School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Mahalanobis.html, Quote

World, Way, Nature, Problem

“"By what method or methods can the able men from every rank of life be gathered, as diamond-grains from the general mass of sand: the able men, not the sham-able;—and set to do the work of governing, contriving, administering and guiding for us!" It is the question of questions. All that Democracy ever meant lies there: the attainment of a truer and truer Aristocracy, or Government again by the Best.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Downing Street (April 1, 1850)

Life, Men, Democracy

“Natural historians tend to avoid tendentious preaching in this philosophical mode (although I often fall victim to such temptations in these essays). Our favored style of doubting is empirical: if I wish to question your proposed generality, I will search for a counterexample in flesh and blood. Such counterexamples exist in abundance, for they form a staple in a standard genre of writing in natural history — the “wonderment of oddity” or “strange ways of the beaver” tradition.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Reversing Established Orders", p. 394
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Way, History, Search, Nature

“In my experience one of the most common causes for programs, products, and change initiatives that don't work is that the wrong question has been asked.”

Tim Hurson (1946) Creativity theorist, author and speaker

Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking

Change

“Education is the strongest weapon available for restricting the questions people ask, controlling what they think, and ensuring that they get their thoughts ‘from above’.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 34

People, Education, Thinking

“That should answer your question. I don't have to respond to every cretin, do I? I am already responding to most of them.”

Luboš Motl (1973) Czech physicist and translator

http://motls.blogspot.com/2017/03/czechs-vow-defiance-after-irrational-eu.html#more The Reference Frame http://motls.blogspot.com/

“Darwin grasped the philosophical bleakness with his characteristic courage. He argued that hope and morality cannot, and should not, be passively read in the construction of nature. Aesthetic and moral truths, as human concepts, must be shaped in human terms, not “discovered” in nature. We must formulate these answers for ourselves and then approach nature as a partner who can answer other kinds of questions for us—questions about the factual state of the universe, not about the meaning of human life. If we grant nature the independence of her own domain—her answers unframed in human terms—then we can grasp her exquisite beauty in a free and humble way. For then we become liberated to approach nature without the burden of an inappropriate and impossible quest for moral messages to assuage our hopes and fears. We can pay our proper respect to nature's independence and read her own ways as beauty or inspiration in our different terms.”

Stephen Jay Gould book I Have Landed

"Art Meets Science in The Heart of the Andes", p. 109
I Have Landed (2002)

Life, Truth, Fear, Beauty

“We often take for granted the terms, the premises, and the methods that prevail in our time and place. We take for granted, as the starting points for our own thinking, the outcomes of a process of thinking by our predecessors. … New questions are built from the answers that were given to the old questions, but the old questions are now no longer asked. Foundations get covered up by what is built upon them.”

Harvey Flaumenhaft (1938) American writer

Preface to Masterworks of Discovery series (2011)

Thinking, Time

“This consideration must alter the form of our proposed inquiry; for the question being thus at least partly decided, since it is ascertained that we have rays of heat which give no light, it can only become a subject of inquiry whether some of these heat-making rays may not have a power of rendering objects visible, superadded to their now already established power of heating bodies. This being the case, it is evident that the onus probandi [burden of proof] ought to lie with those who are willing to establish such an hypothesis, for it does not appear that Nature is in the habit of using one and the same mechanism with any two of our senses. Witness the vibration of air that makes sound, the effluvia that occasion smells, the particles that produce taste, the resistance or repulsive powers that affect the touch—all these are evidently suited to their respective organs of sense.”

William Herschel (1738–1822) German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and composer

Source: Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works (1880), Ch.4 "Life and Works" on his discovery of the infrared.

Lie, Nature, Sense, Light

“It's a universal tendency in films to be more about sex and violence than the real world is, but I would pose the opposite question: Why are so many characters that you see on TV so desexualized? A lot of them seem to be completely asexual — especially animated characters — and it implies that those characters are normal. The characters in Aeon Flux are normal people who have normal sex lives and appetites.”

Peter Chung (1961) Korean-American animator

Sexuality Desexualized http://www.mtv.com/shared/movies/features/a/aeon_flux_050706/

People, World, Sex, Universe

“Do you know anyone who's never watched TV, never seen a movie, never read a book? Of course not. So let me ask you one more question. Do you know someone, maybe even in your own family, who's never played a video game? I bet you do. How can this be? If we want to consider ourselves a true mass medium, if we want to grow as an industry, this has to change.”

Reggie Fils-Aimé (1961) American businessman

On market expansion Source: E3 2006 Press Conference, YouTube http://youtube.com/watch?v=O2kt3h8b6yE

Books, Family, Game, Change

“It is not, I think, going too far to say, that every fact connected with the human organization goes to prove, that man was originally formed a frugivorous animal … This opinion is principally derived from the formation of his teeth and digestive organs, as well as from the character of his skin, and the general structure of his limbs. It is not my intention now to go further into the discussion of this subject, than to observe, that if analogy be allowed to have any weight in the argument, it is wholly on that side of the question which I have just taken. Those animals, whose teeth and digestive apparatus most nearly resemble our own, namely, the apes and monkeys, are undoubtedly frugivorous.”

Thomas Bell (zoologist)

The Anatomy, Physiology, and Diseases of the Teeth, Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1830, p. 35 https://books.google.it/books?id=LK-_LIeEq2oC&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35.

Thinking, Animals

“What does it mean to be “successful”? How do you achieve your dreams?
Does it mean creating an impressive list of achievements? Does it mean gaining significant wealth, status, position, and power? Maybe it means pleasing your parents, family, and friends?
I wrote this book to address these questions and to create a road map to help you achieve your aspirations. Following this road map involves taking a series of steps and answering a set of questions, all of which require you to look inward as well as outward. It also involves developing a set of new skills and habits, some of which may be challenging and uncomfortable for you.”

Robert S. Kaplan (1940) American accounting academic

Source: What You're Really Meant To Do, 2013, p. 1; Lead paragraph

Books, Family, Dreams, Parent

“All arguments based on the unequal status of texts are questionable. In principle, all ancient readings have an equal status, without relation to the text or translation in which they are found.”

Emanuel Tov (1941) Israeli biblical scholar and linguist

Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (2012), p.272

Reading

“Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaningof a passage in his poem. He replied, "God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows."”

Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) Italian criminologist

Pt. I, ch. 2.
The Man of Genius (1891)

God

“The equilibrium price level is determined at the point where the money market is in equilibrium. The temporary suspension of Walras' Law, far from making economic nonsense, thus appears as the crucial "trick" by which the tatonnement process is decomposed in two parts.
This analysis confirms that for a neoclassical general equilibrium system with neutral money there is indeed a consistent decomposition procedure, based on appropriate compensation principles, permitting the determination of real variables in the real sector while the price level is determined in the monetary sector. However, the amount of intellectual effort which, in the wake of Lange and Patinkin, was devoted to this issue, is entirely out of proportion to its economic significance. The real economic question is not whether a system can be dichotomized, but whether money is neutral.”

Jürg Niehans (1919–2007) Swiss economist

Source: The theory of money, 1978, p. 12

Money, Law, Effort, Appearance

“When I go back to school everyone asks a lot of questions. Then, after about a week, when I've answered everything, we get back to normal. I've never been one of the cool people at school, but then again, I don't get the people who are cool. It's not that I don't like them, it's just that they don't interest me.”

Daniel Radcliffe (1989) English actor

on being bullying at school http://www.flixster.com/actor/daniel-radcliffe/daniel-radcliffe-quotes

People, School

“They left no stone unturned in de-Hinduizing or denationalizing the Hindus, in effect de-Indianizing the Indians, in various ways. It is preposterous to question their credentials as true Muslims. Their 'Ulama' exhorted them off and on to make the best of their sword to root out the Hindus and convert India into a full-fledged Dar al-lslam. Sayyid Nur ad-Din Mubarak Ghaznawi Suhrawardi, at once a leading Sufi, a leading Muslim divine, and the Shaykh al-lslam of Sultan Iltutmish. led a deputation of Ulama to the Sultan and advised him to give an ultimatum to the Hindus to embrace Islam or face death. The Sultan’s prime minister pleaded powerlessness on his behalf to do so." Then the Shaykh offered an alternative suggestion: ’… the king should at least strive to disgrace, dishonour, and defame the Mushrik and idol- worshipping Hindus…. The sign of the kings being protectors of the faith is this: When they see a Hindu, their faces turn red and they wish to swallow him alive….' A similar suggestion was made to Jalal ad-Din Khalji, who returned ruefully: 'Don’t you see that Hindus, who are the worst enemies of God and of Islam, pass daily below my royal palace to the Jamuna beating drums and playing flutes, and practise before our eyes the worship of the idols with all the rituals? Fie on us unworthy leaders who declare ourselves Muslim kings!… Had I been a Muslim ruler, a real king, or a prince and felt myself strong and powerful enough to protect Islam, any enemy of God and the faith of the Prophet of Islam would not have been allowed to chew betels in a care-free manner and put on a clean garment or live in peace. Qadi Mughis ad- Din’s advice to Sultan Ala' d-Din Khaiji was on similer lines, and the Sultan confessed that he had humiliated and pauperized the Hindus to his utmost even though without caring to know the provisions of the Shari'ah on the subject.”

Harsh Narain (1921–1995) Indian writer

Myths of Composite Culture and Equality of Religions (1990)

Death, God, Peace, Faith

“Although Keynes’s General Theory provides the foundation for much of our current understanding of economic fluctuations, it is important to remember that classical economics provides the right answers to many fundamental questions.”

N. Gregory Mankiw (1958) American economist

N. Gregory Mankiw]], Macroeconomics, Preview ; Cited in: David Colander (2005). 'The Stories Economists Tell. p. 182
2000s -

Understanding

“It is the social issues which unremittingly demand that I make a responsible personal effort and which also lay increasing claims on my physical and mental powers. For me, the moral difficulties lie in the continual pressure brought to bear on my friends and immediate family, pressure which is not directed against me personally but which at the same time is all around me. I have written about this on many occasions but, sad to report, all that I said before applies equally today. I am no professional politician — which is perhaps why I am continually obsessed by the question as to the purpose served by the work done by my friends and myself, as well as its final result. I tend to believe that only moral criteria, coupled with mental objectivity, can serve as a sort of compass in the cross-currents of these complex problems.”

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

Nobel autobiography (1975)

Lie, Sadness, Family, Problem

“There is a limit to the number of (and I'm going to use this word in an entirely neutral sense) aliens who can be brought into a nation, particularly as close-knit and concentrated a nation as Britain is, without breaking the bounds of that society and setting up intolerable frictions and stresses as damaging to one side as to the other. Now, this is a question of number. But the relationship between number and difference is clearly important, because the more different they are – and colour is a signal, an outward signal of differences (not significant in itself, but it signalizes other differences that one can't deny) – the greater the difference, the smaller the numbers that can at any one time be accepted without breaking, or being thought to break (which comes to the same thing if we're talking about psychology), the framework of a nation and a society. So it's numbers.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: The Trouble with Enoch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN6sTBSAp-A&feature=youtu.be&t=12m8s (recorded 19 May 1969) 1960s

Sense, Time

“It occurs to me that I really need a picture of Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard driving Optimus Prime through space. I would follow either of them into the gates of hell without question or hesitation.”

Brian Clevinger (1978) writer

http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=060622

Hell

“There is no question of ever accepting Nazi representatives in the Austrian cabinet. An absolute abyss separates Austria from Nazism. We do not like arbitrary power, we want law to rule our freedom. We reject uniformity and centralization.... Christendom is anchored in our very soil, and we know but one God: and that is not the State, or the Nation, or that elusive thing, Race. Our children are God’s children, not to be abused by the State. We abhor terror; Austria has always been a humanitarian state. As a people, we are tolerant by predisposition. Any change now, in our "status quo", could only be for the worse.”

Kurt Schuschnigg (1897–1977) Chancellor of Austria

"Morning Telegraph" of London (January 5, 1938), reprinted in "Let the Record Speak", Dorothy Thompson, Boston: MA, Houghton Mifflin Company (1939) p. 135

God, Children, People, Law

“In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality — heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Bk. 1, ch. 7, sct. 1
The Ministry of Fear (1943)

God, Truth, Books, World

“The Administration says then, there are no downsides or upsides to treating terrorists like civilian criminal defendants.But a lot of us would beg to differ. For example, there are questions we would've liked this foreign terrorist to answer before he lawyered up and invoked our US constitutional right to remain silence. Our US constitutional rights. Our rights that you, sir [addressing veteran in audience], fought and were willing to die for to protect in our Constitution. The rights that my son, as an infantryman in the United States Army, is willing to die for. The protections provided — thanks to you, sir! — we're gonna bestow them on a terrorist who hates our Constitution?! And tries to destroy our Constitution and our country. This makes no sense because we have a choice in how we're going to deal with a terrorist — we don't have to go down that road.There are questions that we would have liked answered before he lawyered up, like, "Where exactly were you trained and by whom? You—you're braggin' about all these other terrorists just like you — uh, who are they? When and where will they try to strike next?" The events surrounding the Christmas Day plot reflect the kind of thinking that led to September 11th. That threat — the threat, then, as the U. S. S. Cole was attacked, our embassies were attacked, it was treated like an international crime spree, not like an act of war. We're seeing that mindset again settle into Washington. That scares me, for my children and for your children. Treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at grave risk. Because that's not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this. They know we're at war. And to win that war, we need a commander-in-chief, not a perfesser of law standing at the lectern!”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

National Tea Party Convention keynote speech, Nashville, Tennessee, , quoted in
regarding President Obama
2014

Hate, War, Children, Law

“I pay the entrance fee at the desk, no questions asked, and get a key to a locker. After changing into shorts and a T-shirt in he locker room, I do some stretching exercises. As my muscles relax so do I. I'm safe inside this container called me. With a little click, the outlines of this being - me - fit right inside and are locked nearly away. Just the way I like it. I'm where I belong.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter Seven

Way, Exercises, Change

“The educated classes were apt to speak in a patronizing tone of the "masses of the people", and to talk of political education as if it were only needed by those masses, but the fact was that the middle classes needed education, especially on this Irish question, quite as much as the masses. The whole trouble and difficulty of our dealings with Ireland had arisen from our ignorance. … He confidently believed that the country would arrive at but one conclusion, and that that would be in favour of Home Rule. The work would not be a long one, because two or three years would undoubtedly see the solution of this question in the sense which they desired to see it concluded—a consummation which was so much to be desired not only in the interests of Ireland but also of England, Scotland, and Wales.”

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce (1838–1922) British academic, jurist, historian and Liberal politician

Speech to the Home Rule Union at the National Liberal Club, London (24 February 1887), quoted in The Times (25 February 1887), p. 4
1880s

People, Education, Home, Confidence

“All those agonizing philosophical-theological conundrums amount to "Ask a silly question, get a silly answer."”

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Source: Harvest of Stars (1993), Ch. 63

“In its new aspect the corporation is a means whereby the wealth of innumerable individuals has been concentrated into huge aggregates and whereby control over this wealth has been surrendered to a unified direction. The power attendant upon such concentration has brought forth princes of industry, whose position in the community is yet to be defined. The surrender of control over their wealth by investors has effectively broken the old property relationships and has raise the problem of defining these relationship anew. The direction of industry by persons other than those who have ventured their wealth has raised the question of the motive force back of such direction and the effective distribution of the returns from business enterprise.”

Adolf A. Berle (1895–1971) American diplomat

Source: The Modern Corporation and Private Property. 1932/1967, p. 2 (1967, p. 4)

Communication, Motivation, Business, Problem

“Anyone who thinks about the great questions of Christian theology soon finds out that a lot of them have already been addressed. It is virtually impossible to do theology as if it had never been done before. There is always an element of looking over one’s shoulder to see how things were done in the past, and what answers were then given. Part of the notion of “tradition” is a willingness to take seriously the theological heritage of the past.”

Alister McGrath (1953) Northern Irish priest and academic

Introduction.
Christian Theology: An Introduction

Thinking, Past, Parting

“Economists are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in.”

Thomas Piketty book Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Source: Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), p. 32.

World, Way, Mathematics, Problem

“"What do we do if we don't go through a hole?" asked Suzy.
"I think we get smashed to bits," said Arthur. "But like Longtayle said, it's mostly holes. And the current must aim for the holes, or get directed through them. We'll be all right."
"What happens if we don't get smashed completely to bits, but just a bit smashed to bits?" asked Suzy after a while. "I mean, so we're still alive but drowning?"
"Suzy, please don't ask me these questions right now," said Arthur, with as much restraint as he could manage.”

Garth Nix (1963) Australian fantasy writer

Source: The Keys to the Kingdom series, Drowned Wednesday (2005), p. 276.

Thinking

“Some theologians and religious practitioners tell me that dry spells happen and that perhaps I gave up on God too quickly, but years later I am surer than ever that I don’t believe in God, and struggle to recall why I did in the first place. To be honest, the question no longer intrigues me—I’m much too interested in the complexities of being human to spend much time thinking about anything beyond that.”

Chris Stedman (1987) American activist

Source: Faitheist (2012), Chapter 5, “Unholier Than Thou: Saying Goodbye to God” (p. 86)

God, Thinking, Time

“Question number one is from someone who calls himself "The Controvert." He says, "Hi, Tina, I love you in the show. In my humble opinion, when a show pushes the boundaries, you end up with a lot of passionate people on both sides. What do you think of the criticism the show gets?" I think that people who say they love the show and they think it's great and they write good reviews of it, are-are correct and that people who don't like the show for any reason are probably-they're just confusing it with Studio 60.”

Tina Fey (1970) American comedian, writer, producer and actress

"Ask Tina" segment from NBC's 30 Rock website

Love, People, Thinking, Passion

“Very clearly according to scripture, man’s nature is not an open question but a given fact from God. Then next and of central importance in all that you’re going to be saying in the next few months is this: Man was created in Genesis not as a child, Adam was not born a baby, but a mature man. This is a fact of central importance. Man was created into maturity. As a result, the key command is not child psychology, or animal psychology. Evolution cites that man must be understood in terms of the child, the child in terms of an animal ancestry, and the animal ancestry as an emergent out of chaos!”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Creationism and Psychology (n. d.)

God, Nature, Animals, Baby

“What might be called, perhaps somewhat grandiloquently, the Epistemological Question has received rather scant attention at the hands of economists. There are, of course, a number of epistemological questions, some of which lie more in the province of the philosopher than they do the economist or the social scientist. The one with which I am particularly concerned here is that of the role of knowledge in social systems, both as a product of the past and as a determinant of the future.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1960s, The economics of knowledge and the knowledge of economics, 1966, p. 1, cited in: Brian Chi-ang Lin (2007) " A New Vision of the Knowledge Economy http://newdoc.nccu.edu.tw/teasyllabus/205016255002/JOES%20(July%202007).pdf"

Lie, Knowledge, Past, Future

“The fundamental deficiency in HTML is that it reduces hypertext and the intertwinedness of human communication to a question of how it is rendered and what happens when you click on it. … HTML is to the browser what PostScript is to the laser printer.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: LISP and AI http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/92b063a1787b26c8 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Communication

“Many Muslim women will not consider themselves as inferior but wear a veil because they feel as dignified human beings. Because they want to protect themselves against staring and judging by men. If women are so dignified, why is it the burden of women to cover up, in order to protect themselves from the stares of men? Why can't be accepted from men to control their own instincts or animal behaviour? This is a question that I have never heard a satisfactory answer from a Muslim women.”

Irshad Manji (1968) Feminist from Canada, author, journalist, activist

Muslims need critical thinking - Irshad Manji http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2004/0818verhofstadt.html August 18, 2004 (interview by Dirk Verhofstadt)

Women, Men, Feeling, Animals

“It seems that we are revisiting the whole argument about a European central bank. Many of us have the deepest misgivings about the establishment of such a bank, with no accountability to member states and an office life of eight years, in which it can do what it likes, provided that it supports the market economy throughout Europe, despite the social consequences. There is no time limit on the period of office of the political directors, and there is nothing about who they would be or where they would come from. But I ask the quite serious question: what on earth are these political directors to do, where do they come from, to whom are they answerable and how do we get rid of them if we do not like what they do?”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1993/mar/30/treaty-on-european-union in the House of Commons (30 March 1993). 1990s

Life, Support, Time

“The use of "nurture" as a synonym for "environment" is based on the assumption that what influences children's development, apart from their genes, is the way their parents bring them up. I call this the nurture assumption. Only after rearing two children of my own and coauthoring three editions of a college textbook on child development did I begin to question this assumption. Only recently did I come to the conclusion that it is wrong.”

Judith Rich Harris book The Nurture Assumption

The Nurture Assumption, chapter 1, p. 2. http://books.google.com/books?id=-uKBJRMJBjcC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=%22nurture%22%20as%20a%20synonym%20for%20%22environment%22&f=false http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/harris-nurture.html

Children, Way, Parent

“Good deeds remain good, no matter whether we know how the world was made or not. Vile deeds are vile, no matter whether we know or do not know what, after death, will be the fate of the doer. We know, at least, what his fate is now, namely, to be wedded to the vileness.
The question for anyone to decide, who hesitates between good and evil, is whether he aspires to be a full-weight man, or merely the fragment, nay, the counterfeit of a man. Only he who ceaselessly aims at moral completeness is, in the true sense, a human being.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 9 : Ethical Outlook
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)

Death, Fate, World, Sense

“Once launched into some activity, conceiving of himself as an instrument of God’s will, the ascetic did not stop to ask about the meaning of it all. On the contrary, the more furious his activity, the more the problem of what his activity meant receded from his mind. … To meet the demands of the day was as near as one could come to doing the pious thing, in this—God’s—world. To trouble about meaning was really an impiety and, of course, frivolous, because futile. For the question of meaning, therefore, neither the ascetic nor the therapeutic type feels responsible, if his spiritual discipline has been successful. The recently fashionable religious talk of “ultimate concern” makes no sense either in the ascetic or in the therapeutic mode. To try to relate “ultimate concern” to everyday behavior would be exhausting and nerve-shattering work; indeed, it could effectively inhibit less grandiose kinds of work. Neither the ascetic nor the therapeutic bothers his head about “ultimate concern.” Such a concern is for mystics who cannot otherwise enjoy their leisure. In the workaday world, there are no ultimate concerns, only present ones. Therapy is the respite of every day, during which the importance of the present is learned, and the existence of what in the ascetic tradition came to be called the “ultimate” or “divine” is unlearned.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

God, World, Behavior, Feeling

“The first thing that Allah made obligatory upon my Ummah was the five prayers; and the first thing from their acts of worship that shall be taken up will be the five prayers; and the first thing that they will be questioned about will be the five prayers.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Kanzul `Ummal, Volume 7, Tradition 18859
Shi'ite Hadith

“It is better to have the child in the chimney corner moved by what happens in the poem, in spite of his ignorance of its real meaning, than to have the poem a puzzle to which that meaning is the only key. Still, complicated subjects make complicated poems, and some of the best poems can move only the best readers; this is one more question of curves of normal distribution. I have tried to make my poems plain, and most of them are plain enough; but I wish that they were more difficult because I had known more.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Answers to Questions," from Mid-Century American Poets, edited by John Ciardi, 1950 [p. 170]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“And, (relief pitcher Dennis Eckersley) walked (pinch-hitter Mike Davis) … and look who's comin' up!
(36 seconds of crowd cheering)
All year long, they looked to him to light the fire, and all year long, he answered the demands, until he was physically unable to start tonight—with two bad legs: the bad left hamstring, and the swollen right knee. And, with two out, you talk about a roll of the dice … this is it. If he hits the ball on the ground, I would imagine he would be running 50 percent to first base. So, the Dodgers trying to catch lightning right now!
Fouled away.
He was, you know, complaining about the fact that, with the left knee bothering him, he can't push off. Well, now, he can't push off and he can't land. … 4-3 A's, two out, ninth inning, not a bad opening act!
Mike Davis, by the way, has stolen 7 out of 10, if you're wondering about Lasorda throwing the dice again. 0-and-1.
Fouled away again. … 0-and-2 to Gibson, the infield is back, with two out and Davis at first. Now Gibson, during the year, not necessarily in this spot, but he was a threat to bunt. No way tonight, no wheels.
No balls, two strikes, two out.
Little nubber … foul—and, it had to be an effort to run that far. Gibson was so banged up, he was not introduced; he did not come out onto the field before the game. … It's one thing to favor one leg, but you can't favor two. 0-and-2 to Gibson.
Ball one. And, a throw down to first, Davis just did get back. Good play by Ron Hassey using Gibson as a screen; he took a shot at the runner, and Mike Davis didn't see it for that split-second and that made it close.
There goes Davis, and it's fouled away! So, Mike Davis, who had stolen 7 out of 10, and carrying the tying run, was on the move.
Gibson, shaking his left leg, making it quiver, like a horse trying to get rid of a troublesome fly. 2-and-2! … Tony LaRussa is one out away from win number one. … two balls and two strikes, with two out.
There he goes! Wa-a-ay outside, he's stolen it! … So, Mike Davis, the tying run, is at second base with two out. Now, the Dodgers don't need the muscle of Gibson, as much as a base hit, and on deck is the lead-off man, Steve Sax. 3-and-2. Sax waiting on deck, but the game right now is at the plate.
High fly ball into right field, she i-i-i-is gone!!
(67 seconds of cheering and organ music)
In a year that has been so improbable … the impossible has happened!
And, now, the only question was, could he make it around the base paths unassisted?!
You know, I said it once before, a few days ago, that Kirk Gibson was not the Most Valuable Player; that the Most Valuable Player for the Dodgers was Tinkerbell. But, tonight, I think Tinkerbell backed off for Kirk Gibson. And, look at Eckersley—shocked to his toes!
They are going wild at Dodger Stadium—no one wants to leave!”

Vin Scully (1927) American sports broadcaster

Kirk Gibson's World Series-game-winning home run, October 15, 1988, transcribed from mlb.com archives <nowiki>[</nowiki>excising comments by color commentator Joe Garagiola]

Music, Way, Imagination, Game

“On the question of the tariff, it may come as news to Professor DiLorenzo that the protective tariffs were first instituted by Jefferson and Madison, not by the Hamiltonian party. Hamilton tried to get the tariffs, but he was not successful. And the reason why, the protective tariffs first entered our system in the wake of Jefferson’s embargo, which put the New England shipping interests out of business. And so the first protective tariffs were put in, I think, under Madison’s administration, and supported by John C. Calhoun, who agreed that at that time it was owed to the New England people to give their infant industries protection because they had been put out of business by the embargo, and later by the War of 1812, conducted under Madison’s administration.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Rebuttal

War, People, Business, Support

“The third element alone remains — the institution itself, acting in such a way as to make social acts a state of habit and instinct. This element — history proves it — has never missed its aim, never has it acted as a double-bladed sword; and its influence has only been weakened when custom strove to become immovable, crystallized, to become in its turn a religion not to be questioned when it endeavored to absorb the individual, taking all freedom of action from him and compelling him to revolt against that which had become, through its crystallization, an enemy to progress.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896)

Religion, Way, History, Freedom

“The stem cell debate was an introduction to a phenomenon I witnessed throughout my presidency: highly personal criticism. Partisan opponents and commentators questioned my legitimacy, my intelligence, and my sincerity. They mocked my appearance, my accent, and my religious beliefs. I was labeled a Nazi, a war criminal, and Satan himself. That last one came from a foreign leader, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. One lawmaker called me both a loser and a liar. He became majority leader of the U. S. Senate. In some ways, I wasn't surprised. I had endured plenty of rough politics in Texas. I had seen Dad and Bill Clinton derided by their opponents and the media. Abraham Lincoln was compared to a baboon. Even George Washington became so unpopular that political cartoons showed the hero of the American revolution being marched to the guillotine. Yet the death spiral of decency during my time in office, exacerbated by the advent of twenty-four-hour cable news and hyper-partisan political blogs, was deeply disappointing. The toxic atmosphere in American politics discourages good people from running for office.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Source: 2010s, 2010, Decision Points (November 2010), p. 121

Death, War, People, Disappointment

“The respondents in this case insist that a difficult question of public policy must be taken from the reach of the voters, and thus removed from the realm of public discussion, dialogue, and debate in an election campaign. Quite in addition to the serious First Amendment implications of that position with respect to any particular election, it is inconsistent with the underlying premises of a responsible, functioning democracy. One of those premises is that a democracy has the capacity—and the duty—to learn from its past mistakes; to discover and confront persisting biases; and by respectful, rationale deliberation to rise above those flaws and injustices. That process is impeded, not advanced, by court decrees based on the proposition that the public cannot have the requisite repose to discuss certain issues. It is demeaning to the democratic process to presume that the voters are not capable of deciding an issue of this sensitivity on decent and rational grounds. The process of public discourse and political debate should not be foreclosed even if there is a risk that during a public campaign there will be those, on both sides, who seek to use racial division and discord to their own political advantage. An informed public can, and must, rise above this. The idea of democracy is that it can, and must, mature. Freedom embraces the right, indeed the duty, to engage in a rational, civic discourse in order to determine how best to form a consensus to shape the destiny of the Nation and its people.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 572 U. S. ____, (2016), plurality opinion.

People, Democracy, Idea, Freedom

“Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.”

Steven Pinker book How the Mind Works

2009 ed., p. 517
How the Mind Works (1997)

Love, People, Books, Dreams

“The European Union is happy to suck money from member states like a giant leech, with absolutely no respect for how it is spent. Whenever more transparency is called for, they simply hide behind smoke and mirrors and fancy words, and completely ignore common sense. They show a total lack of respect to the citizens of the European Union. The problem with the EU is that it spends money like it is going out of fashion, when actually it’s the Euro which is going out of fashion right now, with so many countries now questioning its membership.”

Jill Seymour (1958) British politician

Where is the transparency? More EU smoke and mirrors… http://jillseymourukip.org/where-is-the-transparency-more-eu-smoke-and-mirrors/ (February 28, 2017)

Money, Fashion, Problem, Sense

“These gentlemen have not had much chance — they did not come here to try this case. They came here to try revealed religion. I am here to defend it and they can ask me any question they please.”

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

Scopes Trial (1925), Day 7

Religion, Chance

“Philosophy is an activity: it is a way of thinking about certain sorts of question.”

Nigel Warburton (1962) British author and lecturer

Philosophy : the basics (Fifth Edition, 2013), Introduction

Way, Thinking

“Respect authority while questioning it.”

Randy Pausch book The Last Lecture

Presentation placard
The Last Lecture (2007)

“So, ungentle reader, (as you and I value what we should ashamed—after witnessing a few minor circus-marvels—to call our "lives,") let us never be fooled into taking seriously that perfectly superficial distinction which is vulgarly drawn between the circus-show and "art" or "the arts." Let us not forget that every authentic "work of art" is in and of itself alive and that, however "the arts" may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme alive-ness which is known as "beauty." This being so, our three ring circus is art—for to contend that the spectacle in question is not an authentic manifestation of "beauty" is as childish, as to dismiss the circus on the ground that it is "childish," is idiotic.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

"The Adult, the Artist and the Circus." Vanity Fair (October 1925)

Beauty, Fools, Art, Forgetting

“The one that's easy to say now is, "I Support The Troops". Doesn't cost ya anything. But I've got a question for you: can you really support the troops if you also support these massive tax cuts for the very rich? Because the people we say are our heroes are paid by tax dollars. And we hear about, teachers have to buy their own school supplies, soldiers in this country are on food stamps…couldn't somebody in congress stand up and say, "Why don't we take half of that big tax cut and give it to our heroes?"”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Or is that why they're our heroes, because they work cheap?
Victory Begins at Home (20 January 2004)

People, School, Food, Support

“English: "We are going to win without question."”

Carlos Menem (1930) Argentine politician who was President of Argentina from 1989 to 1999

Said on April 28th, 2003, after winning the first election round

“That from the outset they expect or even impose all the properties of finite numbers upon the numbers in question, while on the other hand the infinite numbers, if they are to be considered in any form at all, must (in their contrast to the finite numbers) constitute an entirely new kind of number, whose nature is entirely dependent upon the nature of things and is an object of research, but not of our arbitrariness or prejudices.”

Georg Cantor (1845–1918) mathematician, inventor of set theory

Letter to Gustac Enestrom, as quoted in Georg Cantor : His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite (1990) by Joseph Warren Dauben ~ ISBN 0691024472

Nature, Dependency

“The real question is, Did God use evolution as His plan? If it could be shown that man, instead of being made in the image of God, is a development of beasts we would have to accept it, regardless of its effort, for truth is truth and must prevail. But when there is no proof we have a right to consider the effect of the acceptance of an unsupported hypothesis.”

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

God and Evolution (1922)

God, Truth, Effort

“Look upon men and pity them. Look at yourself amid all men and pity yourself. In the obscure dusk of life we touch and fumble at each other, we ask questions, we listen, we shout for help.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)

Life, Men, Help

“The original answer defines certain conditions, […] Anything else is a different question.”

Marilyn vos Savant (1946) US American magazine columnist, author and lecturer

Regarding ambiguity in her famous statement of the Monty Hall problem. "Ask Marilyn" column, Parade Magazine, 17 February 1991, p. 12.

“And as you know, this whole Hillary e-mail scandal brought Anthony Wiener back into the news. Now here's a question nobody has asked. Anthony Wiener is Jewish, right? Right? So does this scandal make him a Hebrew National Wiener?”

Jay Leno (1950) American comedian, actor, writer, producer, voice actor and television host

Guest monologue on The Tonight Show http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/jay-leno-takes-jimmy-fallons-867267, 31 October, 2016 The Tonight Show

“The process in which something functions as a sign may be called '. This process, in a tradition which goes back to the Greeks, has commonly been regarded as involving three (or four) factors: that which acts as a sign, that which the sign refers to, and the effect on some interpreter in virtue of which the thing in question is a sign to that interpreter. These three components in semiosis may be called, respectively, the sign vehicle, the designatum, and the interpretant; the interpreter may be included as a fourth factor. These terms make explicit the factors left undesignated in the common statement that a sign refers to something for someone.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 3

“Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Part 2: "The Virus of Faith"
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

“I urge everybody to stay inside the Labour Party and fight to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. There must now be a serious question over whether Frank can hope to beat Steven Norris on May 4 when Londoners will widely perceive the Labour nomination to have been stolen. The lesson of Wales is that our voters will not be taken for granted. A Labour campaign that was dead in the water from day one will limp on to polling day and never allow us to get on to the real issues that matter to Londoners, such as transport, unemployment and crime. In the interests of uniting the Labour party, I hope Frank Dobson will consider his position over the next few days. He must decide whether he is willing to accept this tainted result or stand down in the interests of Labour and London. Over the last six months Londoners have had to listen to politicians. Now it is time for politicians to listen to Londoners, and I shall be saying nothing further until I have had a chance to listen to Londoners.”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

Statement following the London Labour Party ballot for a Mayoral candidate, in which Livingstone was defeated by Frank Dobson due to the electoral system chosen by the party, as quoted in "Winner is challenged to refuse `tainted' victory" in The Guardian (21 February 2000), p. 2.

Hope, Water, Chance, Time

“Jose Diaz-Balart: Mr. Trump, you know 53,000 hispanics turn 18 years of age in this country every month, born in the country of voting age. 54 million plus hispanics — many feel that what you said when you said that the people who cross the border are rapists and murderers—
Donald Trump: No, no, no! We're talking about illegal immigration and everybody understands that. And you know what? That's a typical case. That's a typical case of the press with misinterpretation. They take a half a sentence, they take a half a sentence, then they take quarter of a sentence and put it all together. It's a typical thing…
Diaz-Balart: I'm not finished with my question.
Trump: No, no! You're finished!”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2015-07-23
Crowd Erupts in Applause at How Donald Trump Handles MSNBC Host at Presser: 'You're Finished!'
Oliver Darcy
TheBlaze
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/07/23/crowd-erupts-in-applause-at-how-donald-trump-handles-msnbc-host-at-presser-youre-finished/
2010s, 2015

People, Age, Feeling, Understanding

“It is still an open question as to whether mankind or insects shall ultimately inherit the earth. It is my opinion that mankind … has about a 50-50 chance….”

Henry Fountain Ashurst (1874–1962) United States Senator from Arizona

"The Silver-Tongued Sunbeam" http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,848048,00.html. Time (August 7, 1939)

Chance

“In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the exodus from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of freedom. Enslaved Africans discovered a suffering savior and found he was more like themselves than their masters. Enslaved Africans heard the ringing promises of the Declaration of Independence and asked the self-evident question, 'Then why not me?' In the era of America's founding, a man named Olaudah Equiano was taken in bondage to the New World. He witnessed all of slavery's cruelties, the ruthless and the petty. He also saw beyond the slave-holding piety of a time to a higher standard of humanity.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003, Hope and Conscience Will Not Be Silenced (July 2003)

World, Freedom, Suffering, Learning

“Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?—
Growth in everything.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

" The May Magnificat http://www.bartleby.com/122/18.html", stanza 4 Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Spring

“Some years ago, an American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, felt the same kind of instinctive revolt against the 'atmosphere' of Freudian psychology, with its emphasis on sickness and neurosis, and decided that he might obtain some equally interesting results if he studied extremely healthy people. He therefore looked around for the most cheerful and well-adjusted people he could find, and asked for their co-operation in his studies. He soon discovered and interesting fact: that most extremely healthy people frequently experience of intense affirmation and certainty; Maslow called these 'peak experiences.' No one had made this discovery before because it had never struck anyone that a science calling itself 'psychology' and professing to be a science of the human mind (not merely the sick mind), ought to form its estimate of human beings by taking into account healthy minds as well as sick ones. A sick man talks obsessively about his illness; a healthy man never talks about his health; for as Pirandello points out, we take happiness for granted, and only begin to question life when we are unhappy. Hence no psychologist ever made this simple and obvious discovery about peak experiences.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966), p. 15

Life, People, Health, Study

“Israel is invading Lebanon and has killed thirty times more Lebanese civilians than have died in Israel, so it’s you who should be justifying the evident bias which is written on every line on your face, and is in every nuance of your voice, and is loaded in every question that you ask.”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

Interview on Sky News http://news.sky.com/skynews/video/videoplayer/0,,31200-galloway_060806,00.html, August 6, 2006 Asked to justify supporting Hezbollah.

Time

“Newspaper men, therefore, endlessly discuss the question of what is news. I judge that they will go on discussing it as long as there are newspapers. It has seemed to me that quite obviously the news-giving function of a newspaper cannot possibly require that it give a photographic presentation of everything that happens in the community. That is an obvious impossibility. It seems fair to say that the proper presentation of the news bears about the same relation to the whole field of happenings that a painting does to a photograph. The photograph might give the more accurate presentation of details, but in doing so it might sacrifice the opportunity the more clearly to delineate character. My college professor was wont to tell us a good many years ago that if a painting of a tree was only the exact representation of the original, so that it looked just like the tree, there would be no reason for making it; we might as well look at the tree itself. But the painting, if it is of the right sort, gives something that neither a photograph nor a view of the tree conveys. It emphasizes something of character, quality, individuality. We are not lost in looking at thorns and defects; we catch a vision of the grandeur and beauty of a king of the forest.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Press Under a Free Government (1925)

Men, Beauty, Communication, Tree

“What is God? The telescope by which we hold converse with the stars, the microscope which unveils the secrets of nature, the crucible of the chemist, the knife of the anatomist, the reflective faculties of the philosopher, all the common instruments of science, avail not here. On the threshold of that impenetrable mystery, a voice arrests our steps. From out the clouds and darkness that are round about God's throne, the question comes, "Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?"”

Thomas Guthrie (1803–1873) British divine

Source: The Gospel in Ezekiel Illustrated in a Series of Discourses (1856), PP. 63-64 (Man Suffering).

God, Secret, Search, Star

“[S]ent this piece the other day to a few friends, I have decided to make it public in response to questions that journalists have been emailing me. Not that they will pay attention. Getting asked how Kim Jong Un is now going to sell denuclearization to the North Korean public — and asked in the tone of someone who expects it to happen — reminds me how futile it is to talk to a guild with no interest in ideological matters.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Portrait of the Ally as an Intermediary (March 2018)

“…the Indian tradition of non-violence and purity of motive and means, the tradition of ethical and religious approach to all political questions and noted that these had found a perfect embodiment in Mahatma Gandhi…One could draw up a whole declaration of human rights in terms of ahimsa. If individuals and nations are animated by such a belief in a beneficent Supreme Power; in truth and in human brotherhood, we can look forward to a future free from anxiety and fear and full of hope and promise of happiness.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

In another of his speeches on Indian tradition quoted in "Jayachamaraja Wodeyar – A Princely scholar".

Truth, Fear, Hope, Motivation

“I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about..”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

As quoted in An Enchanted Life : An Adept's Guide to Masterful Magick (2001) by Patricia Telesco, p. 135
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications

Thinking

“That certain women were ready to sell themselves caused no excessive disgust in Isabelle. It was inevitable that a number of both men and women should compromise the institution of marriage by marrying for money, and once that happened there could be no question of impressing on the toughly logical female mind the unique vileness of prostitution. She had sometimes wondered, too, whether the contempt men felt for women who market their favors did not in part proceed from from the sense of grievance eternally felt by buyers against vendors.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Source: The Thinking Reed (1936), Chapter VI

Women, Men, Money, Marriage

“In forming your plan for your future you need to distinguish three different questions: What is possible? What is likely to happen? What is desirable to have happen? In a sense the first is Science… The second is Engineering.. The third is ethics, morals, or… value judgements. …you will probably have an idea of how to alter things to make the more desirable future occur …having a vision is what tends to separate the leaders from the followers.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Idea, Sense, Science, Future

“It is important, of course, that controversies be settled right, but there are many civil questions which arise between individuals in which it is not so important the controversy be settled one way or another as that it be settled. Of course a settlement of a controversy on a fundamentally wrong principle of law is greatly to be deplored, but there must of necessity be many rules governing the relations between members of the same society that are more important in that their establishment creates a known rule of action than that they proceed on one principle or another. Delay works always for the man with the longest purse.”

William Howard Taft (1857–1930) American politician, 27th President of the United States (in office from 1909 to 1913)

"Adequate Machinery for Judicial Business," Journal of the American Bar Association, vol. 7, p. 454 (September 1921).

Law, Way

“On the subject of the left’s latest cause du jour, the “white phosphorus” fairy tale, Michael Moynihan asks a question to which LGF readers probably already know the answer: How Credible is Jeff Englehart?”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

November 09, 2005 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=18177&only

“On our present course, this may eventually stand as the ultimate achievement of Homo sapiens sapiens. We should take a bow. We are obviously planet killers. The question is, can we also be planet saviors? I'd say that seems unlikely. Happy Earth Day.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

(22 April 2004)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2004

Happiness

“No matter which comes first, the facts or the theory, the question to be addressed is the extent to which the theory is borne out by the facts. The strongest possible claim would be that the theory can be logically derived from the facts. That is, given the facts, the theory can be proven as a consequence of them. This strong claim cannot be substantiated.”

Alan Chalmers book What Is This Thing Called Science?

Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 4, Deriving theories from facts: induction, p. 41.

Strong

“Why do I think that Turing's paper "On computable numbers" is so important? Well, in my opinion it's a paper on epistemology, because we only understand something if we can program it, as I will explain in more detail later. And it's a paper on physics, because what we can actually compute depends on the laws of physics in our particular universe and distinguishes it from other possible universes. And it's a paper on ontology, because it shows that some real numbers are uncomputable, which I shall argue calls into question their very existence, their mathematical and physical existence.”

Gregory Chaitin (1947) Argentinian mathematician and computer scientist

"Epistemology as information theory: From Leibniz to Omega." https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0506552 arXiv preprint math/0506552 (2005). p. 3

Law, Mathematics, Understanding, Thinking

“We should ask three basic questions of any system we encounter. The first question is, “If I am perfect at this practice, what can I expect to achieve?” Once you have heard the answer to this question, you may decide that you do not care to proceed any further, or you may find that the goal is exactly what you have always wanted. The second question is, “What are the means for attaining the goal?” The answer to this question enables you to decide whether you are willing to pay the price to get there. The third question to ask is, “Who has already reached the goal and how do they live their lives?” We should carefully scrutinize those who have supposedly reached the goal to discover their true situation in life. If we feel aligned with the answers to all three questions, then we can “go for it.””

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

If we do not, then we should look somewhere else.
Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume III: Solace for the Heart in Difficult Times (Hari-Nama Press, 2000), Chapter 8 - How To Strengthen Ourselves

Life, Feeling, Perfection

“It was not a question of regressive old ideas versus enlightened new ideas, but of reasonable caution versus arrogant caprice.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 4 (p. 46)

Idea

“Listen, I'm no social scientist and haven't done a survey. I don't pretend to know what John Q citizen thinks about this. But I've lived in prison for a long time now and I've met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence just like me. And without exception, every one of them… was deeply involved in pornography. Without question, without exception. Deeply influenced and consumed by an addiction to pornography.”

Ted Bundy (1946–1989) American serial killer

1989 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LYL1PTrtXo with James Dobson

Men, Motivation, Thinking, Time

“Psychiatrist R. D. Laing, among others, has said that the growing incidence of mental illness these days may be explained in part by the fact that the world we call real and which we ask people to live within and understand is itself open to question. The environment we live in is no longer connected to the mix of planetary processes which brought us all into being. It is solely the product of human mental processes. It is real, but only in the way that a theatrical play or a fun house is real. Our artificial environment is there and we can experience it, yet it has been created on purpose by other humans. It is an interpretation of reality; it no longer reveals how nature works and it cannot provide much useful information to human beings who seek to see their own lives as part of some wider natural process. We are left with no frame of reference untouched by human interpretation.”

Jerry Mander (1936) American activist

Source: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), p. 87

People, World, Way, Understanding

“In fact, the whole idea of illusion seems to make sense only if we accept the reality of the illusory experience as an experience and question only what it seems to be telling us about the outside world. Optical illusions do really hapen. What they can’t do is provide accurate measurements of the outside world. The idea of having, so to speak, two successive layers of illusion here is unworkable.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Are You an Illusion (2014). 27.

World, Idea, Reality, Sense

“I venture to hope that…the Government will approach the question with a desire to deal in the most liberal manner they can with Ireland, and to give her, if need be, more than justice requires, in order that we may bring about peace. That would be good policy in the long run.”

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce (1838–1922) British academic, jurist, historian and Liberal politician

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1921/jun/16/the-government-of-ireland#column_635 in the House of Lords (16 June 1921) during the Irish War of Independence 1920s

Peace, Justice, Hope

“This monograph is about the current status of the faculty psychology program; not so much its evidential status (which I take to be, for the most part, an open question ) as what the program is and where it does, and doesn't, seem natural to try to apply it. Specifically I want to do the following things: (1) distinguish the general claim that there are psychological faculties from a particular version of that claim, which I shall call the modularity thesis; (2) enumerate some of the properties that modular cognitive systems are likely to exhibit in virtue of their modularity; and (3) consider whether it is possible to formulate any plausible hypothesis about which mental processes are likely to be the modular ones. Toward the end of the discussion, I'll also try to do something by way of (4) disentangling the faculty jmodularity issues from what I'll call the thesis of Epistemic Boundedness: the idea that there are endogenously determined constraints on the kinds of problems that human beings can solve, hence on the kinds of things that we can know.”

Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) American philosopher

Source: Modularity of Mind (1983), p. 1-2

Way, Idea, Nature, Problem

Quotes about doubt page 30

Quotes about doubt
page 30