Quotes about answer
page 24

“A prating barber asked Archelaus how he would be trimmed. He answered, "In silence."”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

33 Archelaus
Apophthegms of Kings and Great Commanders

“So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

Interview "Milton Friedman Responds" in Chemtech (February 1974) p. 72.

Money, Law, Question, Business

“And what sort of country shall you build upon that watchword, General?" Lord Lyons asked. "You cannot be left entirely alone; you are become, as I said, a member of the family of nations. Further, this war has been hard on you. Much of your land has been ravaged or overrun, and in those places where the Federal army has been, slavery lies dying. Shall you restore it there at the point of a bayonet? Gladstone said October before last, perhaps a bit prematurely, that your Jefferson Davis had made an army, the beginnings of a navy, and, more important than either, a nation. You Southerners may have made the Confederacy into a nation, General Lee, but what sort of nation shall it be?" Lee did not answer for most of a minute. This pudgy little man in his comfortable chair had put into a nutshell his own worries and fears. He'd had scant time to dwell on them, not with the war always uppermost in his thoughts. But the war had not invalidated any of the British minister's questions- some of which Lincoln had also asked- only put off the time at which they would have to be answered. Now that time drew near. Now that the Confederacy was a nation, what sort of nation would it be? At last he said, "Your excellency, at this precise instant I cannot fully answer you, save to say that, whatever sort of nation we become, it shall be one of our own choosing.”

Harry Turtledove book The Guns of the South

It was a good answer. Lord Lyons nodded, as if in thoughtful approval. Then Lee remembered the Rivington men. They too had their ideas on what the Confederate States of America should become.
Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 183

Men, War, Fear, Family

“I was never interested in playing him with a big red S on his chest. I’m much more attracted to the underbelly stuff. Gibbs is a loner, with emotional scars a mile deep that run in a million different directions. At work, he’s a leader. But who is he if you take away his job? I play him, and even I don’t know the answer to that.”

Mark Harmon (1951) actor from the United States

TV Insider interview (2017)

“It will rightly be asked: What is the synthetic principle on which this obviously highly important product of y-methylcyclopentenophenanthrene is built up in nature, and why is it that this particular type which, as founda tion of many substances indispensable to life and of extreme physiological and biological importance, plays such a vital role in the vegetable and animal kingdoms? However, the time has not yet come when we can give an answer to questions so fundamental and so important to an understanding of the workings of Nature. But I am firmly convinced that this problem - like all others - will eventually be solved.”

Otto Diels (1876–1954) German chemist

"Description and Importance of the Aromatic Basic Skeleton of the Steroids" (Nobel Lecture), 1950.

Life, Understanding, Question, Nature

“One of the century’s most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Reading this for the first time I was puzzled and continued to be throughout much of the essay, since despite the work’s persuasive logic and eloquence there was a lot that eluded me, and I always came back to grapple vainly with the initial hypothesis, unable to deal with the premise that anyone should come close to wishing to kill himself in the first place. A later short novel, The Fall, I admired with reservations; the guilt and self-condemnation of the lawyer-narrator, gloomily spinning out his monologue in an Amsterdam bar, seemed a touch clamorous and excessive, but at the time of my reading I was unable to perceive that the lawyer was behaving very much like a man in the throes of clinical depression. Such was my innocence of the very existence of this disease.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), II

Life, Disease, Question, Problem

“The usual and basic Keynesian answer to recessions is a monetary expansion. But Keynes worried that even this might sometimes not be enough, particularly if a recession had been allowed to get out of hand and become a true depression. Once the economy is deeply depressed, households and especially firms may be unwilling to increase spending no matter how much cash they have, they may simply add any monetary expansion to their board. Such a situation, in which monetary policy has become ineffective, has come to be known as a "liquidity trap"; Keynes believed that the British and American economies had entered such a trap by the mid-1930s, and some economists believed that the United States was on the edge of such a tap in 1992.
The Keynesian answer to a liquidity trap is for the government to do what the private sector will not: spend. When monetary expansion is ineffective, fiscal expansion—such as public works programs financed by borrowing—must take its place. Such a fiscal expansion can break the vicious circle of low spending and low incomes, "priming the pump: and getting the economy moving again. But remember that this is not by any means an all-purpose policy recommendation; it is essentially a strategy of desperation, a dangerous drug to be prescribed only when the usual over-the-counter remedy of monetary policy has failed.”

Paul Krugman book Peddling Prosperity

Source: Peddling Prosperity (1994), Ch. 1 : The Attack on Keynes

“Spare me four things– and say after that what thou pleasest– do not lie to me for liars have no judgment, and do not answer me regarding what I don not ask thee for it is a distraction from what I do ask thee, and do not be extravagant in my praise for I know myself better then thou, and do not incite me against my subjects for verily clemency unto them is more needful for me.”

Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (646–705) 5th Umayyad caliph

History of The Caliphs, p. 224

Lie

“I remember being asked at various stages last season "Would you take 17th place now?". Come the last game of the season, the answer was definitely yes. At the start of the season, then the answer was probably yes. But looking back at the season as a whole, then the answer is probably between yes and no.”

Phil Brown (footballer) (1959) English association football player and manager

Jul-2009, City Magazine
Yo?

Game, Season

“From of old, a thousand thoughts, in his pilgrimings and wanderings, had been in this man: What am I? What is this unfathomable Thing I live in, which men name Universe? What is Life; what is Death? What am I to believe? What am I to do? The grim rocks of Mount Hara, of Mount Sinai, the stern sandy solitudes answered not. The great Heaven rolling silent overhead, with its blue-glancing stars, answered not. There was no answer. The man's own soul, and what of God's inspiration dwelt there, had to answer!”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Life, Death, Men, God

“[Danny] laughed once and said, 'That man is such an ignoramus, Father.' I was angry. 'Look into his soul,' I said. 'Stand inside his soul and see the world through his eyes. You will know the pain he feels because of his ignorance, and you will not laugh.' He was bewildered and hurt. The nightmares he began to have…. But he learned to find answers for himself. He suffered and learned to listen to the suffering of others. In the silence between us, he began to hear the world crying.”

Chaim Potok book The Chosen

Reb Saunders to Reuven Malter when talking about when Daniel was younger (p. 286)
The Chosen (1967)

Pain, World, Feeling, Soul

“The old theory that [the Great Pyramid] was built as a vault or tomb for an Egyptian king is unworthy of credence; for, as we shall see, it required more than the wisdom of the present day, to say nothing of that of Egypt four thousand years ago, to design such a structure. Besides, it contains nothing in the way of a casket, mummy or inscription. It was not until we had come into the time called in Daniel's prophecy "the Time of the End", when knowledge should be increased, and the wise should understand God's plan (Dan. 12:4, 9, 10), that the secrets of the Great Pyramid began to be understood, and our questions began to have a reasonable answer.”

Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916) Founder of the Bible Student Movement

Source: Milennial Dawn, Vol. III: Thy Kingdom Come (1891), p. 319.

Wisdom, God, Secret, Way

“Some still ask of us: what do you want? We answer with three words that summon up our entire program. Here they are…Italy, Republic, Socialization... Socialization is no other than the implantation of Italian Socialism…”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Speech given by Mussolini to a group of Milanese Fascist veterans (October 14, 1944), quoted in Revolutionary Fascism, Erik Norling, Lisbon, Finis Mundi Press (2011) pp.119-120.
1940s

“Like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. "Who are the best musicians for these songs?" "Am I recording in the right studio?" "Is this song in the right key?" Some things never change, even in 400 years. Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?" So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.”

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

Nobel Banquet Speech

Life, Literature, Question, Change

“I am often asked if I would have liked to have been involved with Jurassic Park. The plain answer is no. Although excellent, it is not with all its dollars what I would have wished to do with my career. I was always a loner and worked best that way. Since the very beginning I fought and struggled under constant pressure to keep the design and final result within my hands. As time moved on this became more difficult, until I was forced to bow to the fact that my method of working, in the financial sense, was no longer practical. Model animation has been relegated to a reflection, or a starting point for creature computer effects that has reached a high few could have anticipated. However, for all the wonderful achievements of the computer, the process creates creatures that are too realistic and for me that makes them unreal because they have lost one vital element - a dream quality. Fantasy, for me, is realizing strange beings that are so removed from the 21st century. These beings would include not only dinosaurs, because no matter what the scientists say, we still don't know how dinosaurs looked or moved, but also creatures of the mind. Fantastical creatures where the unreal quality becomes even more vital. Stop-motion supplies the perfect breath of life for them, offering a look of pure fantasy because their movements are beyond anything we know.”

Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013) American animator

Ray Harryhausen & Tony Dalton (2003), An Animated Life, Aurum Press, p. 8

Life, Dreams, Way, Sense

“I am SO tired of this trope. It may indeed be the case that we can’t justify a priori via philosophical lucubrations that we arrive at the truth about nature only by using the methods of science. My answer to that is increasingly becoming, “So bloody what?” The use of science is justified because it works, not because we can justify it philosophically. If we are interested in finding out what causes malaria, no amount of appeal to a deity, philosophical rumination, listening to music, reading novels, or waiting for a revelation will answer that question. We have to use scientific methods, which, of course, is how causes of disease are found.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" A belated reply from Francis Spufford, who defends his faith http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/a-belated-reply-from-francis-spufford-who-defends-his-faith/" October 2, 2012

Truth, Disease, Music, Question

“I have meddled in so many matters under your Highness that I am not able to answer them all…but hard it is for me or any other meddling as I have done to live under your grace and your laws but we must daily offend.”

Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex (1485–1540) English statesman and chief minister to King Henry VIII of England

Source: Letter to Henry VIII whilst imprisoned in the Tower of London. (Merriman, ii. p. 266.)

Law

“Now they know who we are. We’re counted in their surveys, we’re numbered in their watchfulness, we’re powered in their press. We’re courted, polled, placated. Now they know that we’re teachers and doctors and lawyers and priests and mothers and babies. Now they see us everywhere. Hospitals, theatres, classrooms. Obituaries. Now when they tell lies about us, we answer back. We found our voices. We know who we are. They know who we are. And they know that we care what they think.”

Harvey Fierstein (1954) actor from the United States

This Is Not Going to Be Pretty, Live at the Bottom Line (1995), Safe Sex

Thinking, Teachers, Baby

“Croton River was the only place I could find suitable to the purpose, all circumstances being taken into consideration. I wrote your Excellency what I had done, and where I was, that if you had any thing in charge I might receive your orders. I wrote you the reasons for my not waiting upon you in person were, I had many letters to answer, and many matters to regulate in my department, which prevented me from returning. Besides which, it was almost half a day's ride, the weather exceeding hot, and myself not a little fatigued. And here I must observe, that neither my constitution nor strength is equal to constant exercise.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (July 1778)

Exercises, Waiting, Personality, Weather

“When I return-as soon I will-to those who sent me here, and shall be asked of what I had seen at Washington-and what it was that most engaged the attention of the Representatives of a great people, and what of good had been done for the country, the answer must be, so far as our action is concerned, that day by day, week after week, and month after month before the election, the chief business of all parties was the creation of political capital upon which to draw in the then coming presidential campaign; and that after the election, there seemed to be no greater object of interest than the establishment of the fact, that if not cheated in sending us here, the people were green enough to be swindled afterwards. Yes, sir; the whole of them, Democrats, Republicans, and Know-Nothings.”

John M. Sandidge (1817–1890) American politician

Congressional Globe, House of Representatives, 34th Congress, 3rd Session, Page 128 (1857-01-07))

People, Business, Drawing, Cheating

“As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2010s, 2011, Are we alone in the universe? (2011)

Search, Thinking, Silence, Universe

“If you, or Colonel Dalrymple under you, have the power to remove one regiment you have the power to remove both. It is at your peril if you refuse. The meeting is composed of three thousand people. They have become impatient. A thousand men are already arrived from the neighborhood, and the whole country is in motion. Night is approaching. An immediate answer is expected. Both regiments or none!”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Address to acting governor Thomas Hutchinson, 6 March 1770, the day following the Boston Massacre. Hutchinson had offered to remove one of the two British regiments stationed in Boston. http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0395825105&id=EQriRekKKPMC&pg=PA68&lpg=PA68&dq=%22Night+is+approaching.+An+immediate+answer+is+expected.+Both+regiments+or+none%22&sig=P3liJRs37lVSpjUrLHv7bPdEuXk

Men, People, Night, Country

“When reproached for spending too much time with books and clerks, Charles answered, “As long as knowledge is honored in this country, so long will it prosper.””

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 239

Books, Knowledge, Time, Country

“The founders of the English laws have with excellent forecast contrived, that no man should be called to answer to the king for any capital crime, unless upon the preparatory accusation of twelve or more of his fellow subjects, the grand jury: and that the truth of every accusation, whether preferred in the shape of indictment, information, or appeal, should afterwards be confirmed by the unanimous suffrage of twelve of his equals and neighbours, indifferently chosen, and superior to all suspicion. So that the liberties of England cannot but subsist, so long as this palladium remains sacred and inviolate, not only from all open attacks, (which none will be so hardy as to make) but also from all secret machinations, which may sap and undermine it; by introducing new and arbitrary methods of trial, by justices of the peace, commissioners of the revenue, and courts of conscience. And however convenient these may appear at first, (as doubtless all arbitrary powers, well executed, are the most convenient) yet let it be again remembered, that delays, and little inconveniences in the forms of justice, are the price that all free nations must pay for their liberty in more substantial matters; that these inroads upon this sacred bulwark of the nation are fundamentally opposite to the spirit of our constitution; and that, though begun in trifles, the precedent may gradually increase and spread, to the utter disuse of juries in questions of the most momentous concern.”

William Blackstone book Commentaries on the Laws of England

Book IV, ch. 27 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk4ch27.asp: Of Trial, And Conviction. Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769)

Truth, Secret, Peace, Justice

“I get paid to ask questions I don't know the answers to and to complain about the things that bother me.”

Jack Cafferty (1942) American journalist

[It's Getting Ugly Out There: The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America, Wiley, 9780470144794].
2008

Question

“The manchildren, the mortals, have many ideas of what happens after they die, and wrangle about who is right and who is wrong. These disagreements often come to bloodshed, as if they wished to dispatch messengers who could discover the answer to their dispute. Such messengers, as far as I know of mortal philosophy, never return to give their brethren the taste of truth they yearn for.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Stone of Farewell (1990), Chapter 28, “Sparks” (p. 707).

Truth, Idea

“There's no such word, though there should be, as "adeism" or as being an "adeist", but if there was one I would say that's what I was. I don't believe that we are here as the result of a design or that by following the appropriate rituals we can overcome death. If there was such a force, if there was an entity that was responsible for the beginning of the cosmos, and that also happened to be busily engineering the very laborious production of life on our little planet, it still wouldn't prove that this entity cared about us; answered prayers; cared what church we went to, or whether we went to one at all; cared who we had sex with or in what position or by what means; cared what we ate or on what day; cared whether we lived or died. There's no reason at all why this entity isn't completely indifferent to us. You cannot get from deism to theism - except by a series of extraordinarily generous (to yourself) assumptions. The deist has all his work still ahead of him to show that it leads to revelation; to redemption; to salvation; or to suspensions of the natural order.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Christopher Hitchens vs. William Lane Craig, 04/04/2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBx4vvlbZ8&t=42m38s 2000s, 2009

Life, Death, Sex, Nature

“Putin’s proxy army was almost certainly guilty of killing the passengers on the Malaysia Airlines jet that came down in eastern Ukraine. He has questions to answer about the death of Alexander Litvinenko, pitilessly poisoned in a London restaurant. As for his reign in Moscow, he is allegedly the linchpin of a vast post-Soviet gangster kleptocracy, and is personally said to be the richest man on the planet. Journalists who oppose him get shot. His rivals find themselves locked up. Despite looking a bit like Dobby the House Elf, he is a ruthless and manipulative tyrant.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

"Let’s deal with the Devil: we should work with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad in Syria" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/12036184/Lets-deal-with-the-Devil-we-should-work-with-Vladimir-Putin-and-Bashar-al-Assad-in-Syria.html, The Telegraph (05 Dec 2015) 2010s, 2015

Death, Question, Housing, Personality

“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.”

Clive Staples Lewis book A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed (1961)

God, Peace, Understanding, Question

“A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 2, p. 68

Kiss

“Do you enjoy your work? Are you happy to get out of bed each morning and dress for the office? If you answered ‘no’ to either of these questions, you are not alone. In a 2014 Conference Board survey, 52 per cent of Americans claimed to be unhappy at work and in a recent CIPD study 23 per cent of Britons claimed to be looking for a new job. In the same survey only about one-third claim to feel engaged with their work. You can see the effects of this in absence, stress and depression. In fact, you can see it in the rush hour in the tired and sad-looking faces of so many commuters.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

Happiness, Sadness, Feeling, Question

“The Work is merely four questions; it's not even a thing. It has no motive, no strings. It's nothing without your answers. These four questions will join any program you've got and enhance it. Any religion you have - they'll enhance it. If you have no religion, they will bring you joy. And they'll burn up anything that isn't true for you. They'll burn through to the reality that has always been waiting.”

Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer

Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life (2002)

Religion, Motivation, Question, Reality

“There is poetry and there is beauty in real sympathy; but there is more — there is action. The noblest and most powerful form of sympathy is not merely the responsive tear, the echoed sigh, the answering look; it is the embodiment of the sentiment in actual help.”

Octavius Winslow (1808–1878) English theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 574.

Beauty, Tear, Help

“Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God — the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. Where are these responsible people?”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Letters and Papers from Prison (1967; 1997), Who Stands Fast?, p. 5.

Life, God, People, Faith

“There are some who feel like that, uh, if they, attack us? That we may decide to leave prematurely. They don't understand what they're talking about, if that's the case. Let me finish. Uh, there are some who uh feels like that the conditions are such that they they can attack us there. My answer is, bring 'em on. We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation. Of course, we want other countries to help us. Great Britain is there, Poland is there.”

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

Press conference http://listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=uKdbZWNqF00#President_George_W._Bush_Says__Bring__em_on_, discussing the then-incipient insurgency in Iraq; press conference, July 2, 2003. 2000s, 2003

Feeling, Understanding, Help, Country

“She brightened. "Last week I ran a personal ad in the Guardian. I answered a few too. I'm not looking for sex; I feel too vulnerable for that. I just want somebody to hurt me and humiliate me."”

Mary Gaitskill (1954) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

"The Wrong Thing: Stuff" in Because They Wanted To, p. 244, Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Sex, Feeling, Hurt, Personality

“My only source of instruction has always been the study of works, whether of the past or contemporary artists, which can offer us an answer to our questions if we formulate these properly... I would never be of much use as a guide or instructor, nor have I ever wanted to be one, even when I have been asked to undertake the job [still, Morandi was art professor - etchings - at the Art Academy of Bologna for many years].”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

the text of this interview was later examined by Morandi and approved in the English translation
interview with Edouard Roditi, in 'Dialogues in Art', 1960; as quoted in Morandi 1894 – 1964, published by Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, ed: M. C. Bandera & R. Miracco - 2008; p. 250
1945 - 1964

Art, Question, Study, Past

“Bobbio’s theoretical defence of the distinction between Left and Right, for all its eloquence, may thus be more vulnerable than it appears. If we ask why this should be so, the answer surely lies in the difficulty of constructing an axiology of political values without coherent reference to the empirical social world. Bobbio often writes as if he could separate his ideal taxonomy from contemporary history, but of course he cannot. In practice he admits the political scenery of the present into his account selectively, for the purposes of his argument. But it is in that present that the deeper reasons and limits of his intervention lie.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 6. "Plotting Values, Norberto Bobbio" (1998)

Lie, World, History, Appearance

“Remember that an answer to a difficulty resides at a higher level than our usual thinking, so seek this loftier level.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

Inspire Yourself

Thinking

“I watched his interview with her, though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' 'What was her answer?' I wonder. 'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.”

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

During the Larry King-Karla Faye Tucker exchange, Tucker never actually asked to be spared.
1990s
Source: "Devil May Care" by Tucker Carlson, Talk Magazine, September 1999, p. 106.

Question

“Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical textbook might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer”

Richard Dawkins book Viruses of the Mind

arbitrarily assumed to be male
Viruses of the Mind (1993)

Suffering, Chance, Success

“The assurance that we have no means of answering [final] questions is no valid excuse for callousness towards them. The more deeply should we feel, down to the roots of our being, their pressure and their sting. Whose hunger has ever been [sated] with the knowledge that he could not eat?”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

Source: History as a System (1962), p. 15

Hunger, Feeling, Question, Knowledge

““What about spatial relationships?” the investigator inquired, as I was looking at the books. It was difficult to answer. True, the perspective looked rather odd, and the walls of the room no longer seemed to meet in right angles. But these were not the really important facts. The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as Where?—How far?—How situated in relation to what? In the mescalin experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its Perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern. I saw the books, but was not at all concerned with their positions in space. What I noticed, what impressed itself upon my mind was the fact that all of them glowed with living light and that in some the glory was more manifest than in others. In this context position and the three dimensions were beside the point. Not, of course, that the category of space had been abolished. When I got up and walked about, I could do so quite normally, without misjudging the whereabouts of objects. Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

describing his experiment with mescaline, pp. 19-20
Source: The Doors of Perception (1954)

Books, World, Question, Problem

“His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doesn't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect — why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities — yet he has none of them! They have made him what he is, they have set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He'll always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context — nothing is, to him, what it is: everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a super-whole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is — some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him.”

Robert Musil book The Man Without Qualities

The Man Without Qualities (1930–1942)

Sadness, Feeling, Question, Thinking

“I have thought it relevant to include here an exemplum found in the answer which Richard, King of the English, made to Fulk, a virtuous and holy man…This saintly man had been talking to the King for some time. "You have three daughters," he said, "and, as long as they remain with you, you will never receive the grace of God. Their names are Superbia, Luxuria nd Cupiditas." For a moment the King did not know what to answer. Then he replied: "I have already given these daughters of mine away in marriage. Pride I gave to the Templars, Lechery I gave to the Black Monks and Covetousness to the White Monks."”
Exemplum autem de responso Ricardi regis Anglorum, facto magistro Fulconi viro bono et sancto…et hic interserere praeter rem non putavi. Cum inter cetera vir ille sanctus regi dixisset; "Tres filias habetis, quae quamdiu penes vos fuerint, nunquam Dei gratiam habere poteritis, superbiam scilicet, luxuriam, et cupiditatem." Cui rex, post modicam quasi pausationem, "Jam," inquit, "maritavi filias istas, et nuptui dedi; Templariis superbiam, nigris monachis luxuriam, albis vero cupiditatem."

Gerald of Wales (1146) Medieval clergyman and historian

Exemplum autem de responso Ricardi regis Anglorum, facto magistro Fulconi viro bono et sancto…et hic interserere praeter rem non putavi. Cum inter cetera vir ille sanctus regi dixisset; "Tres filias habetis, quae quamdiu penes vos fuerint, nunquam Dei gratiam habere poteritis, superbiam scilicet, luxuriam, et cupiditatem."
Cui rex, post modicam quasi pausationem, "Jam," inquit, "maritavi filias istas, et nuptui dedi; Templariis superbiam, nigris monachis luxuriam, albis vero cupiditatem."
Book 1, chapter 3, pp. 104-5.
Itinerarium Cambriae (The Journey Through Wales) (1191)

God, Marriage, Time, Daughters

“Philosophers of ancient Greece and India sought an answer to this question [What is matter made of] centuries before Christ.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

Source: Understanding Chemistry (1999), p. 7

Question, Christ

“I think my appointment is the example and answer for those who accuse Israel of being an apartheid state. It shows minorities have equal rights and we are part of the government, the state and the parliament.”

Majalli Wahabi (1954) Israeli politician

http://www.librariansforfairness.org/news_post.asp?NPI=160

Thinking, Parting

“I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "Would he had blotted a thousand."”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

The Works of Ben Jonson, Second Folio (1640), Timber: or Discoveries

“God had answered her prayer, not with the thing she asked for, but rather the thing she wanted most in her heart.”

Orson Scott Card book Stone Tables

Stone Tables (1997)

God, Heart

“Wolf Blitzer: Donald, you're beginning to sound a little ridiculous, I have to tell you.
Donald Trump: No I think you are, Wolf. Now let me tell you something, I think you sound ridiculous, and if you'd ask me a question and let me answer it —
Blitzer: Here's the question, did the conspiracy start in 1961 where the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser contemporaneously published announcements that he was born in Hawaii?
Trump: That's right. That's right. And many people put those announcements in because they wanted to get the benefit because of getting so-called born in this country. Many people did it. It was something that was done by many people even though they weren't born in the country. You know and so do I… And so do a lot of your viewers. Although you don't have too many viewers.”

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

2010s, 2012

People, Star, Question, Thinking

“Fans are really important for me. And if they take pains to write me, it's the minimum that I answer myself.”

Daniel Radcliffe (1989) English actor

Pain

“The first one has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions — that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions — then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn't know the answer, if he is an honest man.”

Richard Feynman book The Meaning of It All

lecture III: "This Unscientific Age"
The Meaning of It All (1999)

Intelligence, Question, Personality

“I have discovered in the Hebrew Bible teachings of righteousness, humaneness, and human dignity—at the source of my parents' teachings of mentschlichkeit—undreamt of in my prior philosophizing. In the idea that human beings are equally God-like, equally created in the image of the divine, I have seen the core principle of a humanistic and democratic politics, respectful of each and every human being, and a necessary correction to the uninstructed human penchant for worshiping brute nature or venerating mighty or clever men. In the Sabbath injunction to desist regularly from work and the flux of getting and spending, I have discovered an invitation to each human being, no matter how lowly, to step outside of time, in imitatio Dei, to contemplate the beauty of the world and to feel gratitude for its—and our—existence. In the injunction to honor your father and your mother, I have seen the foundation of a dignified family life, for each of us the nursery of our humanization and the first vehicle of cultural transmission. I have satisfied myself that there is no conflict between the Bible, rightly read, and modern science, and that the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis offers "not words of information but words of appreciation," as Abraham Joshua Heschel put it: "not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world's having come into being"—the recognition of which glory, I would add, is ample proof of the text's claim that we human beings stand highest among the creatures. And thanks to my Biblical studies, I have been moved to new attitudes of gratitude, awe, and attention. For just as the world as created is a world summoned into existence under command, so to be a human being in that world—to be a mentsch—is to live in search of our summons. It is to recognize that we are here not by choice or on account of merit, but as an undeserved gift from powers not at our disposal. It is to feel the need to justify that gift, to make something out of our indebtedness for the opportunity of existence. It is to stand in the world not only in awe of its and our existence but under an obligation to answer a call to a worthy life, a life that does honor to the special powers and possibilities—the divine-likeness—with which our otherwise animal existence has been, no thanks to us, endowed.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Looking for an Honest Man (2009)

Life, Men, God, World

“The movement of withdrawal and renunciation is a necessary element in every Christian life. … It is an inevitable answer; but it is also inadequate. … It is inadequate, for one thing, because it affirms in words what it denies in action; namely, the possibility of sole dependence on Jesus Christ to the exclusion of culture. Christ claims no man purely as a natural being, but always as one who has become human in a culture; who is not only in culture, but into whom culture has penetrated.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: Christ and Culture (1951), pp. 68-69

Life, Nature, Christ, Dependency

“At the end of a life spent in the pursuit of knowledge Faust has to confess: "I now see that we can nothing know." That is the answer to a sum, it is the outcome of a long experience. But as Kierkegaard observed, it is quite a different thing when a freshman comes up to the university and uses the same sentiment to justify his indolence. As the answer to a sum it is perfectly true, but as the initial data it is a piece of self-deception.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

translated as The Cost of Discipleship (1959), p. 51.
Discipleship (1937), Costly Grace

Life, Knowledge, Universe

“That life is long which answers life's great end.”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night V, Line 773.

Life

“Thus it is with all pictures, there are many layers, and with good reason an analysis nearly always deals with the last [layer]. The last layer in a superficial sense. But how then can one talk of what one cannot see, the overpainted or wiped-off layers, how to go about for example, photographs that are like slates with layers which no longer exist. The answer is that they exists nevertheless, taken up into the visible layer by a rubbing-off, but the problem, on the whole, is how one deals with the visible layer. The angle-sure, viewpoint seeking and in the worse sense 'analytic' intercourse with the picture.”

Per Kirkeby (1938–2018) Danish artist

1965 - 1995, Bravura', Per Kirkeby, (1982)

Problem, Sense

“Knowing when you don’t know the answer and being honest about it is one of the greatest skills you can have. If you aim to be perfect, you’ll only end up disappointed. When you admit your blind spots, people will flock to support you.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

People, Disappointment, Support, Perfection

“The answer is to let Israel say it will recognize a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, release the prisoners, and recognize the rights of the refugees to return to Palestine. Hamas will have a position if this occurs.”

Ismail Haniyeh (1963) Palestinian politician

Interview with Washington Post. "We Do Not Wish to Throw Them Into the Sea" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/24/AR2006022402317_pf.html. Washington Post. February 26, 2006

“When any good attitude or concept or system worked well, we hung onto it. We preserved representative democracy, intended for a time when only a few could get to the capital to speak for the many. Modern finance was designed in the 17th century. Literacy as a test of intelligence came in the 15th century. The idea of progress is 19th century. And yet, all of those things are part of our mental furniture today, because when the answer to a question -- a solution to a problem -- suits us, we kind of institutionalize it, so that it won't change even when we do. The business of questioning, itself, has been institutionalized like that, in the kind of place that Jodrell Bank telescope belongs to: a university.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

The Day the Universe Changed (1985), 1 - The Way We Are

Democracy, Intelligence, Idea, Question

“The concept of ideographic writing is a most seductive notion. There is great appeal in the concept of written symbols conveying their message directly to our minds, thus bypassing the restrictive intermediary of speech. And it seems so plausible. Surely ideas immediately pop into our minds when we see a road sign, a death's head label on a bottle of medicine, a number on a clock. Aren't Chinese characters a sophisticated system of symbols that similarly convey meaning without regard to sound? Aren't they an ideographic system of writing? The answer to these questions is no. Chinese characters are a phonetic, not an ideographic, system of writing… Here I would go further: There never has been, and never can be, such a thing as an ideographic system of writing.”

John DeFrancis book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984, p. 133) http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984)

Death, Idea, Question

““Why are you always so full of answers?”
“Because life’s so full of questions.””

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Eye of the Heron

Source: The Eye of the Heron (1978), Chapter 2 (p. 26)

Life, Question

“So we keep asking, over and over,
Until a handful of earth
Stops our mouths —
But is that an answer?”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

Lazarus, I (1854)

“Academic questions are interlopers in a world where so few of the real ones have been answered.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 94

World, Question

“Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round inferior race. Is that any reason why we should propose to preserve it for ever…? Whether there is a race so inferior I do not know, but certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle’s plea for slavery, that there are “natural slaves,” lies in the fact that there are no “natural” masters… The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, and that is to exterminate it. Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, and most of them are cruel. You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to “race suicide,” as the British administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a moment, that there is an all-round inferior race… If any of the race did, after all, prove to be fit to survive, they would survive—they would be picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the over-ready condemnation of all their kind. Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian white may think. These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving “black-fellows” are there. Every one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity…Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of their own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in the great synthesis of the future.”

H. G. Wells book A Modern Utopia

Source: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 10, sect. 3

Death, Women, World, Education

“At one time, I was an actor in the conduct of foreign policy. I became convinced that I was accomplishing nothing in that capacity, that the problems were deeper, that the answer lay in a direct approach to the public and in an effort to explain to the public what it was really about. Today, even that seems futile. Myths and errors are being established in the public mind more rapidly than they can be broken down. The mass media are too much for us. There is nothing that can be done about it. To correct this, you would have to educate the educators. I must say that I have lost all confidence in the freedom of the mass media. The fact of the matter is that in this country McCarthyism has already won, in the sense of making impossible the conduct of an intelligent foreign policy.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

April 17, 1951
The Kennan Diaries

Education, Error, Confidence, Intelligence

“Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: 'Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?' And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: 'What kind of evidence is there for that?' And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Good and Bad Reasons for Believing" [open letter to his daughter]
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

People, Hope, Thinking, Time

“My answer to that [i. e. the question of whether Ruth hoped to set a new single-season HR record] was "No." I don't believe I can ever better my 60 mark that I made in 1927. And, frankly, I don't believe anyone else will beat it for a long time either.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

In "Babe Ruth Says: I Would Like to Better Mark"

Hope, Question, Time, Season

“When facing “scientific” arguments for God like these, ask yourself three questions. First, what’s more likely: that these are puzzles only because we refuse to see God as an answer, or simply because science hasn’t yet provided a naturalistic answer? In other words, is the religious explanation so compelling that we can tell scientists to stop working on the evolution and mechanics of consciousness, or on the origin of life, because there can never be a naturalistic explanation? Given the remarkable ability of science to solve problems once considered intractable, and the number of scientific phenomena that weren’t even known a hundred years ago, it’s probably more judicious to admit ignorance than to tout divinity.
Second, if invoking God seems more appealing than admitting scientific ignorance, ask yourself if religious explanations do anything more than rationalize our ignorance. That is, does the God hypothesis provide independent and novel predictions or clarify things once seen as puzzling—as truly scientific hypotheses do? Or are religious explanations simply stop-gaps that lead nowhere?…Does invoking God to explain the fine-tuning of the universe explain anything else about the universe? If not, then that brand of natural theology isn’t really science, but special pleading.
Finally, even if you attribute scientifically unexplained phenomena to God, ask yourself if the explanation gives evidence for your God—the God who undergirds your religion and your morality. If we do find evidence for, say, a supernatural origin of morality, can it be ascribed to the Christian God, or to Allah, Brahma, or any one god among the thousands worshipped on Earth? I’ve never seen advocates of natural theology address this question.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), pp. 156-157

Life, God, Religion, Question

“The fact is, there aren't just two sides to any issue, there's almost always a range of responses, and "it depends" is almost always the right answer in any big question.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Linus' blog: Black and white, 2008-11-02, Torvalds, Linus, 2008-11-02 http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html, 2000s, 2008

Question, Dependency

“It has been asserted on this floor that the Republican Party is answerable for the existing state of affairs in the south. I am here to deny this, and to illustrate, I will say that in the State of South Carolina there is no disturbance of an alarming character in any one of the counties in which the Republicans have a majority. The troubles are usually in those sections in which the Democrats have a predominance in power, and, not content with this, desire to be supreme.”

Joseph Hayne Rainey (1832–1887) politician

1871, Speech on the the Ku Klux Klan Bill of 1871 (1 April 1871)

“Recently I asked three corporate executives what decisions they had made in the last year that they would not have made were it not for their corporate plans. All had difficulty in identifying one such decision. Since each of their plans were marked 'secret' or 'confidential', I asked them how their competitors might benefit from the possession of their plans. Each answered with embarrassment that their competitors would not benefit. Yet these executives were strong advocates of corporate planning.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1960s, A concept of corporate planning, 1969, p. 1 as cited in: Henry Mintzberg (1994) Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. p. 98.

Secret, Decision, Strong

“I think Londoners find it bizarre that ten weeks after the allegations in the Evening Standard, you haven't questioned Lee [Jasper]. All these questions about Lee — he can come down from his office now and answer them, and you sanctimonious hypocrites are dragging this out so the lies can carry on in the Standard, you're not talking about Lee coming here 'till March. Bring him here today. Ask him your questions. Let Londoners see the answers. You're dragging this out for electoral purposes. Sanctimonious hypocrites, every one of you.”

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

Remarks at the London Assembly meeting, criticising the Assembly's approach to allegations against Mayoral adviser Lee Jasper (13 February 2008)

Question, Thinking

“Ed walked away from the program feeling fortified and stapled. His brain was buzzing, the way it always did just after Jeopardy! He loaded up the microbus with Atlases and poseidons and headed for Pope County. "I've had it," he sang. "I've had it with puns, alliteration, Russian literature, Italian neorealism, meaningless cross-references, and laundry lists of nonsense. I shall drive without a license, without clothing, without direction, and if I make it to Arkansas, fine, and if I'm running late, if I'm running a numbers game, it doesn't matter, I shall keep on running. Yes, this is the answer. This is the ending. I shall keep on running, because a body in motion tends to stay emotional, and it's better to feel. Pain is better than emptiness, emptiness is better than nothing, and nothing is better than this."”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

"Ed"
Lyrics, Happy Hour (1992)

Pain, Way, Feeling, Game

“Nature has a million answers. Even as I observe tree trunks, roots, branches, idling in some corner, to be burnt down as wood, it affords an excellent laboratory to the mind. It is exciting, sensuous and intoxicating. If one submits oneself to the form and the raw energy of the tree even when it can no longer bear fruit and leaves, one can see great poetry and lyricism in its intertwining branches and roots. The functional sculptures and paintings are a result of this experiment. The process takes over thereafter, but it is just an ode to nature's beauty.”

Manav Gupta (1967) Indian artist

As quoted in "Indian Design and Interiors" IDI Magazine (October 2006)
2000s

Beauty, Nature, Tree, Painting

“When Rome fell, the Christian answer was, "Create our own communities."”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Communication

“No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: "No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into."”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

As quoted in "Notable & Quotable: The Victims of Socialism" https://web.archive.org/web/20160217064704/http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-the-victims-of-socialism-1455667462 (17 February 2016), The Wall Street Journal, A13 2000s, Can There Be an "After Socialism"? (2003)

History, Problem, Suicide, Dead

“Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" in Farming: A Hand Book (1970).
Poems

Question

“Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Money, Effort, Evil

“VIII. On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the Rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause are preposterous and futile--that the Rebellion, if crushed out tomorrow, would be renewed within a year if Slavery were left in full vigor--that Army officers who remain to this day devoted to Slavery can at best be but half-way loyal to the Union--and that every hour of deference to Slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union, I appeal to the testimony of your Ambassadors in Europe. It is freely at your service, not at mine. Ask them to tell you candidly whether the seeming subserviency of your policy to the slaveholding, slavery-upholding interest, is not the perplexity, the despair of statesmen of all parties, and be admonished by the general answer.”

Horace Greeley (1811–1872) American politician and publisher

1860s, The Prayer of the Twenty Millions (1862)

Way, Feeling, Intelligence, Time

“[G]iven our inability over the past two decades to deal with an unbreakable chain of unemployment, debt, inflation and no real growth, we have drifted farther and farther out into a cold, unfriendly, confusing sea. The new certitude of those in positions of authority — those out of the water — is that the certain answer is to cut away the life preservers.”

John Ralston Saul book The Unconscious Civilization

The Unconscious Civilization (1995)

Life, Water, Past, Sea

“In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1780s, Letter to Peter Carr (1787)

Decision, Personality

“My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

Source: Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966), Ch. 2: A Couple of Deaths and Exits.

Life, Question, Waiting

“I was surprised as anyone when T-shirts, jeans and leather jackets suddenly became symbols of rebellion. In the film there was a scene in which somebody asked my character, Johnny, what I was rebelling against, and I answered 'Whaddya got?' But none of us involved in the picture ever imagined that it would instigate or encourage youthful rebellion.”

Marlon Brando (1924–2004) American screen and stage actor

Speaking about the film The Wild One (1953) in Songs My Mother Taught Me (1994)

Youth, Imagination

“To the governors who recommended burdensome taxes for his provinces, he [Tiberius] wrote in answer that it was the part of a good shepherd to shear his flock, not skin it.”
Praesidibus onerandas tributo provincias suadentibus rescripsit boni pastoris esse tondere pecus non deglubere.

Tiberius (-42–37 BC) 2nd Emperor of Ancient Rome, member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty

From Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, III. Tiberius, Ch. 32; translation by J. C. Rolfe
Latter component of the quotation often paraphrased as Boni pastoris est tondere pecus non deglubere.
Indirect quotations

Parting

“If you want to know what you think of yourself, then ask yourself what you think of others, and you will find your answer.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 340, Page 25
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 8

Thinking

“The media challenged me. `You're not going to bring atheists into the government? How dare you maintain that those who believe the Judeo-Christian values are better qualified to govern America than Hindus and Muslims?' My simple answer is, `Yes, they are.”

Pat Robertson (1930) American media mogul, executive chairman, and a former Southern Baptist minister

http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/pat_quotes/hindus.htm

“Civilisation may perish as the result of war: it would certainly perish as the result of Nazi-ism triumphant beyond the borders of the country of its birth… And now we know that should the challenge come, we shall be there. In Luther's words “we can no other.” We were there when the Spanish galleons made for Plymouth: we were on those bloody fields in the Netherlands when Louis XIV aimed at the domination of Europe: we were on duty when Napoleon bestrode the world like a demi-god, and we answered the roll call, as you did, in August, 1914. We can no other. So help us, God.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the University of Toronto (April 1939), quoted in An Interpreter of England. The Falconer Lectures (1939), pp. 117-118.
1939

God, War, World, Birth

“So we had about 80 or 90 Germans there disarmed, and had another line of Germans to go through to get out. So I called for my men, and one of them answered from behind a big oak tree, and the others were on my right in the brush.
So I said, "Let's get these Germans out of here."
One of my men said, "it is impossible."”

Alvin C. York (1887–1964) United States Army Medal of Honor recipient

So I said, "No; let's get them out."
Account of 8 October 1918.
Diary of Alvin York

Men, Tree

“Simply ask & answer: if we were being wildly successful in fulfilling our purpose, what would it look, sound, & feel like? #SmallBizChat”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

3 June 2010 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/15286917857 Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

Feeling, Success

“Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Preface, A vii
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Fate, Question, Nature, Knowledge

“A great and gentle radiance has left our scene with the death of Rabbi Maurice Davis. He was one of the people who first brought me into the circle of those devoted to helping cult victims. His compassion and vision were inspiring. He saw clearly the dangers which awaited those who lost their free will to totalism. I remember vividly one of my early contacts with Rabbi Davis, when an attorney for a destructive group was trying to get him to explain what he had said to a member of that group when she returned briefly to her family and agreed to speak with him. "I prayed with her," he said. "I prayed that she remember the teachings of her youth and her love for her family." The lawyer for the group was taken aback. "Is that all you did?", he said. "Was that all it was.'?…. Yes," Rabbi Davis answered, "the rest was up to her." It was that blend of hope, vision, and respect for the judgment of others that became the cornerstone of the American Family Foundation's ideals. We owe much to Rabbi Davis and we honor him with our continued commitment.”

Maurice Davis (1921–1993) American rabbi

In Memoriam - Rabbi Maurice Davis: Human Rights Champion http://www.whyaretheydead.net/misc/Factnet/CO0194.TXT, The Cult Observer, Vol. 11 No. 1 1994., Herbert L. Rosedale, President, American Family Foundation. About

Love, Death, People, Youth

“Mr. Lincoln simply contented himself at the outset by saying, that he was not in favor of social and political equality between the white man and the negro, and did not desire the law so changed as to make the latter voters or eligible to office. I am glad that I have at last succeeded in getting an answer out of him upon this question of negro citizenship and eligibility to office, for I have been trying to bring him to the point on it ever since this canvass commenced.”

Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861) American politician

Fourth Lincoln-Douglass Debate http://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate4.htm (September 1858) 1850s

Law, Question, Change

“A lady once asked him how he came to define 'pastern', the knee of a horse: instead of making an elaborate defence, as might be expected, he at once answered, "Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance."”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

1755, p. 82
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I

Horse

“I think I’m starting to resolve a puzzle that’s been bugging me for awhile.
Pop economists (or, at least, pop micro-economists) are often making one of two arguments:1. People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist.
2. People are irrational and they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational and efficient.
Argument 1 is associated with “why do they do that?” sorts of puzzles. Why do they charge so much for candy at the movie theater, why are airline ticket prices such a mess, why are people drug addicts, etc. The usual answer is that there’s some rational reason for what seems like silly or self-destructive behavior.
Argument 2 is associated with “we can do better” claims such as why we should fire 80% of public-schools teachers or Moneyball-style stories about how some clever entrepreneur has made a zillion dollars by exploiting some inefficiency in the market.
The trick is knowing whether you’re gonna get 1 or 2 above. They’re complete opposites!”

Andrew Gelman (1965) American mathematician

“One of the easiest ways to differentiate an economist from almost anyone else in society” http://andrewgelman.com/2011/07/19/one_of_the_easi/ (19 July 2011)

People, School, Behavior, Thinking