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"The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values."
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Exlpore more Inquiry quotes
"If you want to be sure of unusual thing such as aliens or UFOs, then you have to think about it from an unusual way of thinking."
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Personal Development
"It isn't what you don't know that's the problem. It is what you're unwilling to ask."
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Personal Development
"We may differ on many things, but what we respect is freeinquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement betweenProfessor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins,concerning "punctuated evolution and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shallresolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication."
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Personal Development
"Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final."
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Personal Development
"Try your hardest to combat atrophy and routine. To question The Obvious and the given is an essential element of the maxim 'de omnius dubitandum' [All is to be doubted]."
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Personal Development
"Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is 'nothing."
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Personal Development
"If God has the answer to every question, maybe my appreciation for God should be shaped more by the number of questions and less by the wisdom of the answers."
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Personal Development
"The simplest questions are the most difficult."
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Personal Development
"Willingness to be puzzled is a valuable trait to cultivate, from childhood to advanced inquiry."
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Personal Development
"I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that's a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy."
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Explore more quotes by Noam Chomsky
"Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists."
Quality
"You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it."
Argument
"States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions."
People
"In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival."
Survival
"Well before September 11, it was understood that with modern technology, the rich and powerful will lose their near monopoly of the means of violence and can expect to suffer atrocities on home soil."
History
"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."
Democracy
"Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle."
Power
"The other day I happened to be reading a careful, interesting account of the state of British higher education. The government is a kind of market-oriented government and they came out with an official paper, a 'White Paper' saying that it is not the responsibility of the state to support any institution that can't survive in the market. So, if Oxford is teaching philosophy, the arts, Greek history, medieval history, and so on, and they can't sell it on the market, why should they be supported? Because life consists only of what you can sell in the market and get back, nothing else. That is a real pathology."
Society
"The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!"
Technology
"I think maybe the classic formulation was by David Hume in "Of the First Principles of Government," where he pointed out that "Force is always on the side of the governed." Whether it's a military society, a partially free society, or what we - not he - would call a totalitarian state, it's the governed who have the power. And the rulers have to find ways to keep them from using their power. Force has its limits, so they have to use persuasion. They have to somehow find ways to convince people to accept authority. If they aren't able to do that, the whole thing is going to collapse."
Politics
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