„You had better — all you people at the South — prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me very easily, — I am nearly disposed by now; but this question is still to be settled, — this nigger question I mean; the end of that is not yet.“
Provisional Constitution and Ordinances (1858), Prison interview (1859)
John Brown2
US-amerikanischer Abolitionist 1800 - 1859Ähnliche Zitate
„I had to prepare the mind of the country, and to educate…our party. … I had to prepare the mind of Parliament and the country on this question of Reform.“
— Benjamin Disraeli British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister 1804 - 1881
Quelle: Speech on Reform Bill of 1867, Edinburgh, Scotland (29 October 1867), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume II. 1860–1881 (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 289.
„Who am I to talk? That’s a fair question, and one which deserves a better answer than I can give you.“
— Gracie Allen American actress and comedienne 1902 - 1964
Quelle: How to Become President (1940), Ch. 1 : Government jobs pay big money
Kontext: Who am I to talk? That’s a fair question, and one which deserves a better answer than I can give you. … Come to think of it, who are you? Whoever you are, I sympathize with you. I sympathize with everybody; that’s what I get for being a candidate myself. Let them call us nonentities. Who cares? A nonenitiy can be just as famous as anybody else if enough people know about him.
But let’s leave personalities out of this and just talk about me.
„It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.“
— Joseph Joubert French moralist and essayist 1754 - 1824
„There were a significant number of questions I had asked myself and, as you know, when you really ask yourself the questions, you give better answers than if we merely read the conventional answers.“
— Albert Messiah French physicist 1921 - 2013
Il y avait un nombre important de questions que je m'étais posées et, comme vous le savez, lorsqu'on se pose vraiment les questions, on donne de meilleures réponses que si l'on se contente de lire les réponses convenues.
explaining how he came to write his textbook on quantum mechanics, in Descente au coeur de la matière, an interview edited by [Stéphane Deligeorges, Le monde quantique, Editions du Seuil, Sciences et Avenir, 1984, 2020089084, 111]
„Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.“
— T.S. Eliot 20th century English author 1888 - 1965
Choruses from The Rock (1934)
„You may have power, position, but at the end of it — what? Please, this is a serious question that you must ask yourself. Another cannot answer this question for you.“
— Jiddu Krishnamurti Indian spiritual philosopher 1895 - 1986
Quelle: 1980s, That Benediction is Where You Are (1985), p. 63
Kontext: Are we wasting our lives? By that word “wasting” we mean dissipating our energy in various ways, dissipating it in specialized professions. Are we wasting our whole existence, our life? If you are rich, you may say, “Yes, I have accumulated a lot of money, it has been a great pleasure.” Or if you have a certain talent, that talent is a danger to a religious life. Talent is a gift, a faculty, an aptitude in a particular direction, which is specialization. Specialization is a fragmentary process. So you must ask yourself whether you are wasting your life. You may be rich, you may have all kinds of faculties, you may be a specialist, a great scientist or a businessman, but at the end of your life has all that been a waste? All the travail, all the sorrow, all the tremendous anxiety, insecurity, the foolish illusions that man has collected, all his gods, all his saints and so on — have all that been a waste? You may have power, position, but at the end of it — what? Please, this is a serious question that you must ask yourself. Another cannot answer this question for you.
„My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.“
— Tom Stoppard British playwright 1937
Quelle: Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966), Ch. 2: A Couple of Deaths and Exits.
„The question is not whether humans will become extinct, but rather when they will. If the anti-natalist arguments are correct, it would be better, all things being equal, if this happened sooner rather than later for, the sooner it happens, the more suffering and misfortune will be avoided.“
— David Benatar South African philosopher 1966
" Kids? Just say no: You don’t have to dislike children to see the harms done by having them. There is a moral case against procreation https://aeon.co/essays/having-children-is-not-life-affirming-its-immoral", Aeon (2017)
„You are in the courtroom of world opinion…. All right, sir, let me ask you one simple question: Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the U. S. S. R. has placed and is placing medium- and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no — don't wait for the translation — yes or no?" [The Soviet representative refuses to answer. ] "You can answer yes or no. You have denied they exist. I want to know if I understood you correctly. I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over, if that's your decision. And I am also prepared to present the evidence in this room.“
— Adlai Stevenson mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN 1900 - 1965
To Soviet U.N. Ambassador Valerian A. Zorin in the United Nations Security Council during the Cuban missile crisis (25 October 1962)
„There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?'
If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.“
— Sam Keen author, professor, and philosopher 1931
Quelle: Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man
„Were we to still be circumcising the hood of the female clitoris, we would not have difficulty considering this a continuation of our tradition to keep girls sexually repressed. America’s reflexive continuation of [male] circumcision-without-research reflects the continuation of our tradition to desensitize boys to feelings of pain, to prepare them to question the disposability of their bodies no more than they would question the disposability of their foreskins.“
— Warren Farrell, buch The Myth of Male Power
Quelle: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 223.
„There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands,
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.“
— T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
„Really, Ischomachus, I am disposed to ask: "Does teaching consist in putting questions?" Indeed, the secret of your system has just this instant dawned upon me. I seem to see the principle in which you put your questions. You lead me through the field of my own knowledge, and then by pointing out analogies to what I know, persuade me that I really know some things which hitherto, as I believed, I had no knowledge of.“
— Socrates classical Greek Athenian philosopher -470 - -399 v.Chr
Oeconomicus (The Economist) XIX.15 (as translated by H. G. Dakyns)
Xenophon
Original: (el) ἆρα, ἔφην, ὦ Ἰσχόμαχε, ἡ ἐρώτησις διδασκαλία ἐστίν; ἄρτι γὰρ δή, ἔφην ἐγώ, καταμανθάνω ᾗ με ἐπηρώτησας ἕκαστα: ἄγων γάρ με δι᾽ ὧν ἐγὼ ἐπίσταμαι, ὅμοια τούτοις ἐπιδεικνὺς ἃ οὐκ ἐνόμιζον ἐπίστασθαι ἀναπείθεις, οἶμαι, ὡς καὶ ταῦτα ἐπίσταμαι.
„My advice to all students is to question everything! You never know where a "silly question" may lead you.“
— Derek Abbott Physicist, engineer 1960
Statement in his Introductory profile at The University of Adelaide http://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/people/profiles/academic.html#abbott.
„People have said, if you leave, you may never come back. Or they may not even let you leave. So this is always a cost you may have to pay. But I don’t want to restrict myself: When it happens, it happens. I have to deal with it, but not to prepare for it, because it is a kind of stupidity. If you prepare for it too much, you become a part of it.“
— Ai Weiwei Chinese concept artist 1957
2010-, I have to speak for people who are afraid, 2010
„There's a moment in everybody's life...where you have more past than future, and then you better start organizing your time. So I thought maybe this is the time to do this. I'm not keen on people following me and recording my life and asking personal questions and what-not, but I figured I had to do it.“
— Rubén Blades Panamanian musician, singer, composer, actor, activist, and politician 1948
Quelle: On the documentary Ruben Blades Is Not My Name in "Inside Ruben Blades: New Documentary Showcases the Man Behind the Music" https://afropop.org/articles/inside-ruben-blades-new-documentary-showcases-the-man-behind-the-music in Afropop Worldwide (2018 Apr 10)