Pertinent Questions Quotes

• Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Courage, Science, Asking Questions

  Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

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• The pertinent question: if Americans did not want these wars should they have been compelled to fight them?

  Frank Chodorov

  Peace, War, Fighting

  Frank Chodorov (1980). “Fugitive essays: selected writings of Frank Chodorov”, Liberty Fund Inc.

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• Of all questions, why? is the least pertinent. It begs the question; it assumes the larger part of its own response; to wit, that a sensible response exists.

  Jack Vance

  Assuming, Wit, Sensible

  Jack Vance (2000). “Rhialto the Marvellous”, p.720, Macmillan

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• Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant.

  Oscar Wilde

  May, Firsts, Realizing

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• Asking what the question is, and why the question is asked, is always asking a pertinent question.

  Raymond Geuss

  Asking, Pertinent

  Raymond Geuss (2008). “Philosophy and Real Politics”, p.17, Princeton University Press

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• I now say that the world has the technology - either available or well advanced in the research pipeline - to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called "organic" methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.

  Norman Borlaug

  Technology, People, Risk

  Norman Borlaug's 30th anniversary lecture at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo (September 8, 2000), as quoted in Ronald Bailey "Global Warming and Other Eco Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death" (p. 59), 2002.

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• It is frequently more rewarding merely to ask pertinent questions. It may get someone to go and look for an answer.

  Prince Philip

  Looks, Answers, May

  Speech at the World Wildlife Fund Congress, London, in 1970. "The Environmental Revolution: Speeches on Conservation, 1962-77", 1978.

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• in the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions- or refused to ask them under the pretext that they are meaningless, and in any case not the scientists concern.

  Arthur Koestler

  Society, Lasts, Dizzy

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• As America is transformed from a 90 percent European American nation, as it was in the 1960s, to one where we will soon be a minority, should we not ask some pertinent questions. Is this racial diversity enriching, or will it be damaging to our social fabric?

  David Duke

  Ku Klux Klan, America, Diversity

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• [I]nstead of the usual "Why can't we make movies more like real life?" I think a more pertinent question is "Why can't real life be more like the movies?"

  Ernie Pyle

  Real, Thinking, Usual

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• The Pertinent Question is NOT how to do things right - but how to find the right things to do, and to concentrate resources and efforts on them.

  Peter Drucker

  Motivational, Effort, Resources

  Peter Drucker (2013). “People and Performance”, p.102, Routledge

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• It seems to me the only pertinent question is: cui bono? It is clear that the size of the privileged strata as a percentage of the whole has grown significantly under historical capitalism. And for these people, the world they know is better on the whole than any their earlier counterparts knew.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  People, Historical, World

  Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.136, Verso

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• Measurement has too often been the leitmotif of many investigations rather than the experimental examination of hypotheses. Mounds of data are collected, which are statistically decorous and methodologically unimpeachable, but conclusions are often trivial and rarely useful in decision making. This results from an overly rigorous control of an insignificant variable and a widespread deficiency in the framing of pertinent questions. Investigators seem to have settled for what is measurable instead of measuring what they would really like to know.

  Edmund Pellegrino

  Knowledge, Science, Data

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• I read as much as I could, but really just spoke to Chris Chibnall and asked all the pertinent questions. That made me feel like we weren't going to do an off-the-peg Camelot, which has been touched upon in many films and TV series before. I really just picked his brain and, in doing so, I got fired up by tackling Merlin in a fresher angle.

  Joseph Fiennes

  Brain, Tvs, Film

  "Joseph Fiennes, Tamsin Egerton & Exec. Producer Chris Chibnall Interview CAMELOT". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. April 1, 2011.

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