Inquiry Quotes - Page 8

• Academic freedom really means freedom of inquiry. To be able to probe according to one's own interest, knowledge and conscience is the most important freedom the scholar has, and part of that process is to state its results.

  Donald Kennedy

  Mean, Academic Freedom, Important

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• No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of debate must be regarded as a sacred right.

  William Borah

  Heart, Law, Brain

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• In questions of law or of fact conscience is very often confounded with opinion. No man's conscience can tell him the rights of another man; they must be known by rational investigation or historical inquiry.

  Samuel Johnson

  Wisdom, Men, Rights

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1832). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.587

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• Mathematics is of two kinds, Rigorous and Physical. The former is Narrow: the latter Bold and Broad. To have to stop to formulate rigorous demonstrations would put a stop to most physico-mathematical inquiries. Am I to refuse to eat because I do not fully understand the mechanism of digestion?

  Oliver Heaviside

  Two, Digestion, Kind

  "Oliver Heaviside (1850-1927) — Physical Mathematician" by D.A. Edge. Teaching mathematics and its applications: An International Journal of the IMA, Volume 2, Issue 2, pp. 55-61, 1983.

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• That a country, [England], eminently distinguished for its mechanical and manufacturing ingenuity, should be indifferent to the progress of inquiries which form the highest departments of that knowledge on whose more elementary truths its wealth and rank depend, is a fact which is well deserving the attention of those who shall inquire into the causes that influence the progress of nations.

  Charles Babbage

  Education, Country, Science

  Charles Babbage (1830). “Reflections on the Decline of Science in England: And on Some of Its Causes, by Charles Babbage (1830). To which is Added On the Alleged Decline of Science in England, by a Foreigner (Gerard Moll) with a Foreword by Michael Faraday (1831).”, p.1

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• I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.

  Toni Morrison

  Trying, Looks, Way

  Interview with Zia Jaffrey, Salon Magazine, February 2, 1998.

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• Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Stars, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1876). “Nature: Addresses, and Lectures”, p.152

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• Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Believe, Men, Order

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1849). “Nature”, p.2

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• What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.... [Instead] reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves?

  Thomas Jefferson

  Hypocrite, Errors, Support

  "Notes on the State of Virginia". Book by Thomas Jefferson, 1781-1783.

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• Becoming adept at the process of self inquiry and symbolic insight is a vital spiritual task that leads to the growth of faith in oneself.

  Caroline Myss

  Spiritual, Self, Growth

  Caroline Myss (2013). “Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing”, p.192, Harmony

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• Potluck Supper with Meeting to Follow is a marvel, deftly examining the connections between art and everyday life. Andy Sturdevant's lively, unique inquiries into trust fund kids, co-opted flags, gubernatorial portraits, art in second-tier cities, and Upper Midwestern esoterica, brim with both wit and humor.

  Joe Meno

  Art, Kids, Unique

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• The whole thrust of yogic philosophical and scientific inquiry has therefore been to examine the nature of being, with a view to learning to respond to the stresses of life without so many tremors and troubles.

  B.K.S. Iyengar

  Stress, Philosophical, Views

  B.K.S. Iyengar, John J. Evans, Douglas Abrams (2006). “Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom”, p.15, Rodale

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• Inquiry appears to be a process of thinking, but actually it's a way to undo thinking. Thoughts lose their power over us when we realize that they simply appear in the mind. They're not personal. Through The Work, instead of escaping or suppressing our
  thoughts, we learn to meet them with unconditional love and understanding.

  Byron Katie

  Unconditional Love, Thinking, Escaping

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• If the student truly absorbs the concept of free inquiry in the field of music, unimpeded by blind adherence to doctrine and tradition, he will bring something of this approach not only to other fields of knowledge but to the conduct of his daily life.

  William Howard Schuman

  Doctrine, Adherence, Fields

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• Opinion-sharing sessions are like junk food: they fill you up with starch and leave you feeling both sated and hungry. A sustained inquiry into the truth of a matter is an almost athletic experience; it may exhaust you, but it also improves you.

  Stanley Fish

  Athletic, Feelings, Junk

  Stanley Fish (2012). “Save the World on Your Own Time”, p.35, Oxford University Press

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• First, draw off your hearts, because Jesus Christ, the Head, is risen and ascended upon high, and there sits at the right hand of His Father; and if the Head is in heaven, where should the members be but where the Head is? Shall Christ our Head be in heaven, and shall our hearts, which are His members, lie groveling on the ground and panting after the dust of the earth, making all our inquiry and labor after these? 'If Christ our Head be risen, seek those things that are above, where Christ sits at God's right hand.'

  Christopher Love

  Jesus, Father, Lying

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• The notion of travelling to far places in order to study alien peoples and cultures, is unique to Western man; it springs from the predatory genius of the Greeks; no primitive peoples have ever come to study us. This is, on the one hand, a disinterested, intellectually inspired impulse. It is one of our glories. But it is, on the other, part and parcel of exploitation. [] The Western obsession with inquiry, with analysis, with the classification of all living forms, is itself a mode of subjugation, of psychological and technical mastery.

  George Steiner

  Spring, Unique, Men

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• Purity is a good mask for corruption because it discourages inquiry.

  Steven Levitt

  Corruption, Purity, Mask

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• Advocates of knowledge management as the next big thing have advanced the proposition that what companies need is more intellectual capital. While that is undeniably true, its only partly true. What those advocates are forgetting is that knowledge is only useful if you do something with it.

  Jeffrey Pfeffer

  Innovation, Intellectual, Needs

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• No foundation that I am aware of has hired ex-journalists to promote a thoroughgoing inquiry.

  Alexander Cockburn

  Foundation, Journalist, Exes

  Alexander Cockburn (1988). “Corruptions of Empire: Life Studies & the Reagan Era”, p.182, Verso

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• The public school system: "Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority." - Walter Karp, Editor Harper's Magazine
  The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, and we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Crush, Creativity, School

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• Adrienne Mayor's inquiry into the myth--and surprising reality--of Amazon women begins with the fierce Greek huntress Atalanta, but takes us deep into the past and as far afield as the Great Wall of China. With the restless curiosity and meticulous scholarship that have become her hallmark, the author once again has found a gap in my bookshelf and filled it, admirably.

  Steven Saylor

  Wall, Past, Reality

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  No one expects to attain to the height of learning, or arts, or power, or wealth, or military glory, without vigorous resolution, strenuous diligence, and steady perseverance. Yet we expect to be Christians without labour, study, or inquiry.

  William Wilberforce

  Christian, Perseverance, Art

  William Wilberforce (1834). “A practical view of the prevailing religious system of professed Christians, in the higher and middle classes in this country; contrasted with real Christianity. With a memoir, by T. Price”

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• Well, does he still have his fingernails? Making inquiries while negotiating the release of a US Army pilot from North Korea, in Time.

  Bill Richardson

  Time, Army, Korea

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• History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

  Jill Lepore

  Art, Writing, Past

  Jill Lepore (2012). “The Story of America: Essays on Origins”, p.15, Princeton University Press

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