Inquiry Quotes - Page 12

• Armstrong lives as he rides - surrounded by a cocoon of aides and helpers, his gimlet eyes focused on victory.... The self-described atheist has become a deity... but the inquiry's findings may cause the Armstrong faithful to ask, Was the miracle a mirage?

  Selena Roberts

  Atheist, Eye, Self

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• A science only advances with certainty, when the plan of inquiry and the object of our researches have been clearly defined; otherwise a small number of truths are loosely laid hold of, without their connexion being perceived, and numerous errors, without being enabled to detect their fallacy.

  Jean-Baptiste Say

  Numbers, Errors, Research

  Jean Baptiste Say, Charles Robert Prinsep (1857). “A Treatise on Political Economy; Or, The Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wealth”, p.15

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• Every politician, every member of the clerical profession, ought to incur the reasonable suspicion of being an interested supporter of false doctrines, who becomes angry at opposition, and endeavors to cast an odium on free inquiry. Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it.

  Thomas Cooper

  Truth, Religion, Doctrine

  Thomas Cooper (1829). “Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy ...”, p.375

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• There has never been a book like this. At once a poetics of place, a work of deep history, a bildungsroman, and an acute inquiry into the big subjects: love, family, other animals, the nature of creativity. It is sublime. It's also very funny. Haunting and haunted, Hold Still is the memoir of an artist that is art itself.

  Melissa Holbrook Pierson

  Art, Book, Creativity

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• At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Data, Skills, Roots

  "The Web of Belief". Book by Willard Van Orman Quine, 1970.

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• Free inquiry entails recognition of civil liberties as integral to its pursuit, that is, a free press, freedom of communication, the right to organize opposition parties and to join voluntary associations, and freedom to cultivate and publish the fruits of scientific, philosophical, artistic, literary, moral and religious freedom.

  Paul Kurtz

  Religious, Party, Communication

  Paul Kurtz (1983). “In defense of secular humanism”, Prometheus Books

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• It can scarcely be denied that the fundamental phenomena which first led mankind into chemical inquiries are those of combustion.

  William Crookes

  Fundamentals, Firsts, Chemicals

  Society for Psychical Research (Great Britain), Society for Psychical Research (London, England), Henry Sidgwick, Balfour Stewart, Arthur James Balfour Balfour (Earl of) (1912). “Presidential Addresses to the Society for Psychical Research, 1882-1911”

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• I began to make inquiries of the hundreds of successful men who collaborated with me in the organization of the science of success, and discovered that each of them had received guidance from unknown sources, although many of them were reluctant to admit this discovery.

  Napoleon Hill

  Successful, Men, Discovery

  Napoleon Hill (2011). “You Can Work Your Own Miracles”, p.46, Ballantine Books

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• The voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Daughter, Art, Mean

  Friedrich Schiller (2015). “The Works of Frederick Schiller: Top Classic of German”, p.3324, 谷月社

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• It is sufficiently humiliating to our nature to reflect that our knowledge is but as she rivulet, our ignorance as the sea. On points of the highest interest, the moment we quit the light of revelation we shall find that Platonism itself is intimately connected with Pyrrhonism, and the deepest inquiry with the darkest doubt.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Faith, Ignorance, Light

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• The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or the wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.

  Francis Bacon

  Love, Sovereign, Belief

  'Essays' (1625) 'Of Truth'

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• There have been many measures taken to try to turn the educational system towards more control, more indoctrination, more vocational training, imposing a debt, which traps students and young people into a life of conformity... That's the exact opposite of [what] traditionally comes out of The Enlightenment. And there's a constant struggle between those. In the colleges, in the schools, do you train for passing tests, or do you train for creative inquiry?

  Noam Chomsky

  Educational, Taken, Struggle

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• The scientist's inquiry into the causes of things is providing an ever more extensive understanding of nature.

  Kenneth G. Wilson

  Nature, Understanding, Causes

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• The acorn of honest inquiry has often sprouted and matured into a great oak of understanding.

  Dieter F. Uchtdorf

  Understanding, Acorns, Honest

  "Come, Join with Us". General Conference, www.lds.org. October 2013.

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• We avoid the gravest difficulties when, giving up the attempt to frame hypotheses concerning the constitution of matter, we pursue statistical inquiries as a branch of rational mechanics.

  J. Willard Gibbs

  Giving Up, Branches, Matter

  "Elementary Principles in Statististical Mechanics". Book by J. Willard Gibbs (Preface, p. 9), 1902.

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• In philosophical inquiry, the human spirit, imitating the movement of the stars, must follow a curve which brings it back to its point of departure. To conclude is to close a circle.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Stars, Philosophical, Thinking

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• The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes - that it leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere effects - this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could, science would explain the origin of life on earth at once - and there is every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow. To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled, not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Ignorance, Origin Of Life

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• A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.

  Charles Darwin

  Law, Direct Action, Growth

  Charles Darwin, James T. Costa (2009). “The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of Species”, p.486, Harvard University Press

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• The British Museum was founded with a civic purpose, to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free society and are still among the greatest threats to our liberty.

  Neil MacGregor

  Museums, Liberty, Citizens

  "The whole world in our hands" by Neil MacGregor, www.theguardian.com. July 23, 2004.

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• We need to reduce military budgets; raise living standards; engender respect for learning; support science, scholarship, invention, and industry; promote free inquiry; reduce domestic coercion; involve the workers more in managerial decisions; and promote genuine respect and understanding derived from an acknowledgement of our common humanity and our common jeopardy.

  Carl Sagan

  Military, Common Humanity, Decision

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium”, p.178, Ballantine Books

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• In every principle presented to us, our first inquiry should be, "Is it true?" "Does it emanate from God?" If he is its Author it can be sustained just as much as any other truth in natural philosophy; if false it should be opposed and exposed just as much as any other error.

  John Taylor

  Truth, Philosophy, Errors

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• Without wishing to damp the ardor of curiosity or influence the freedom of inquiry, I will hazard a prediction that, after the most industrious and impartial researchers, the longest liver of you all will find no principles, institutions or systems of education more fit in general to be transmitted to your posterity than those you have received from your ancestors.

  John Adams

  Voting, Curiosity, Wish

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• Society has recognized over time that certain kinds of scientific inquiry can endanger society as a whole and has applied either directly, or through scientific/ethical constraints, restrictions on the kind and amount of research that can be done in those areas.

  Bobby Ray Inman

  Done, Research, Kind

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• It is by losing ourselves in inquiry, creation & craft that we become something. Civilization is a continual gift of spirit: inventions, discoveries, insight, art. We are citizens, as Socrates would have said, & we have it available as our own.

  Paul Goodman

  Art, Discovery, Civilization

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• Time can take nothing from the BIBLE.  It is the living monitor.  Like the sun,  it is the same in its light and influence to man this day which it was years ago.  It can meet every present inquiry and console every present loss

  Richard Cecil

  Loss, Men, Years

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