Enquiry Quotes - Page 4

• Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error... They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only... If [free enquiry] be restrained now, the present corruptions will be protected, and new ones encouraged.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Truth, Errors, Political

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• Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, Diversity, Uniforms

  Albert Einstein (2011). “Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words”, p.178, Open Road Media

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• We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledge

  George Will

  Knowledge, Science, Civilization

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• For you teach very clearly by your behaviour how slowly and how meagerly our senses proceed in the investigation of ever inexhaustible nature.

  Giovanni Battista Beccaria

  Nature, Science, Behaviour

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• A page from a journal of modern experimental physics will be as mysterious to the uninitiated as a Tibetan mandala. Both are records of enquiries into the nature of the universe.

  Fritjof Capra

  Nature, Science, Records

  "The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism". Book by Fritjof Capra, 1975.

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• With respect to Committees as you would perceive I am very jealous of their formation. I mean working committees. I think business is always better done by few than by many.

  Michael Faraday

  Hard Work, Jealous, Mean

  "The Correspondence of Michael Faraday: 1832-December 1840, Letters 525-1333".

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• The natural sciences are sometimes said to have no concern with values, nor to seek morality and goodness, and therefore belong to an inferior order of things. Counter-claims are made that they are the only living and dynamic studies... Both contentions are wrong. Language, Literature and Philosophy express, reflect and contemplate the world. But it is a world in which men will never be content to stay at rest, and so these disciplines cannot be cut off from the great searching into the nature of things without being deprived of life-blood.

  Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

  Philosophy, Cutting, Science

  Presidential Address to Classical Association, 1959.

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• If the maintenance of public credit, then, be truly important, the next enquiry which suggests itself is, by what means it is to be effected? The ready answer to which question is, by good faith, by a punctual performance of contracts. States, like individuals, who observe their engagements, are respected and trusted: while the reverse is the fate of those who pursue an opposite conduct.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Mean, Fate, Opposites

  Nancy Spannaus, Christopher White, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas More, Henry VIII (2015). “The Political Economy of the American Revolution”, p.346, Executive Intelligence Review

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• The woman who purposely destroys her unborn child is guilty of murder. With us there is no nice enquiry as to its being formed or unformed.

  Saint Basil

  Children, Nice, Unborn Child

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• Painting is a science pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature...Observation is considered the key to natural science.

  Bridget Riley

  Keys, Law, Painting

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• [No one will be able to] deter the scientific mind from probing into the unknown any more than Canute could command the tides.

  Warren E. Burger

  Life, Science, Mind

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• I rejoice in a belief that intellectual light will spring up in the dark corners of the earth; that freedom of enquiry will produce liberality of conduct; that mankind will reverse the absurd position that the many were, made for the few; and that they will not continue slaves in one part of the globe, when they can become freemen in another.

  George Washington

  Spring, War, Dark

  George Washington, Dorothy Twohig, William Wright Abbot (1987). “The Papers of George Washington: April-June 1789”

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• Every disastrous accident alarms us, and sets us on enquiries concerning the principles whence it arose: Apprehensions spring up with regard to futurity: And the mind, sunk into diffidence, terror, and melancholy, has recourse to every method of appeasing those secret intelligent powers, on whom our fortune is supposed entirely to depend.

  David Hume

  Spring, Intelligent, Secret

  David Hume (1788). “An inquiry concerning human understanding. A dissertation on the passions. An inquiry concerning the principles of morals. The natural history of religion”, p.374

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• A man, doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor, is not much disposed to abstracted meditation, or remote enquiries.

  Samuel Johnson

  Food, Men, Meditation

  'The Lives of the English Poets' (1779-81) 'Collins'

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• The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.

  James Hutton

  Ends, Results

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• The rest of our enquiry is made easy because this God-Creator is openly called Father. Psycho-analysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child.

  Sigmund Freud

  Children, Father, Atheism

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• It is not therefore the business of philosophy, in our present situation in the universe, to attempt to take in at once, in one view, the whole scheme of nature; but to extend, with great care and circumspection, our knowledge, by just steps, from sensible things, as far as our observations or reasonings from them will carry us, in our enquiries concerning either the greater motions and operations of nature, or her more subtile and hidden works. In this way Sir Isaac Newton proceeded in his discoveries.

  Colin Maclaurin

  Philosophy, Knowledge, Science

  Colin Maclaurin (1750). “An Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries. 2. Ed”, p.20

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