Inquiry Quotes - page 4
Most professors know that American higher education in the humanities is in a deplorable state. Yet many remain silent, perhaps through prudent self-preservation, which is starting to look a lot like moral cowardice. They have put loyalty to their colleagues before loyalty to their students, ostensibly the raison d'être for educational institutions. How many more minds must be distorted or destroyed before the faculty decides to defend the Western intellectual values of free inquiry and orderly acquisition of knowledge?
Camille Paglia
Father-dominated people who form father-dominated cultures have father-religions: a male deity, an authoritative scripture, a strong central government, an intolerance for inquiry and research, a repressive sexual attitude, a deep conservatism (for one does not change what Father built), a rigid demarcation, in dress and conduct, between the sexes, and a profound horror of homosexuality.
Mother-dominated people who form mother-dominated cultures have mother religions: a female deity served by priestesses, a liberal government-one which feeds the masses and succors the helpless-a great tolerance for experimental thought, a permissive attitude toward sex, a hazy boundary between the insignes of the sexes, and a dread of incest.
Theodore Sturgeon
I wish that objections to questions as leading, might be a little better considered before they are made. It is necessary, to a certain extent, to lead the mind of the witness to the subject of inquiry. If questions are asked, to which the answer "Yes" or "No" would be conclusive, they would certainly be objectionable, but in general no objections are more frivolous than those which are made to questions as leading ones.
Edward Law, 1st Baron Ellenborough
Francis Bacon, who died in the seventeenth century, argued strongly that philosophy and theology should be kept separate, and that we should concentrate our studies on the local problems and the interconnections between material and efficient causes. Final-cause analysis was just a distraction: ‘Inquiry into final causes is sterile, and, like a virgin consecrated to God, produces nothing.
Stephen Baxter
In the last centuries of the empire, educational standards and literacy had fallen. In the dulled heads of the masses, distracted by cheap food and the barbaric spectacles of the coliseums, the values on which Rome had been founded and the ancient rationalism of the Greeks had been replaced by mysticism and superstition. It was-Honorius had explained to his pupil-as if a whole culture was losing its mind. People were forgetting how to think, and soon they would forget they had forgotten. And, to Honorius's thinking, Christianity only exacerbated that problem.
"You know, Augustine warned us that belief in the old myths was fading-even a century and a half ago, as the dogma of the Christians took root. And with the loss of the myths, so vanishes the learning of a thousand years, which are codified in those myths, and the monolithic dogmas of the Church will snuff out rational inquiry for ten more centuries. The light is fading, Athalric.”.
Stephen Baxter
We have no reason to fear lest a habit of conscientious inquiry should paralyse the actions of our daily life.
But because it is not enough to say, "It is wrong to believe on unworthy evidence," without saying also what evidence is worthy, we shall now go on to inquire under what circumstances it is lawful to believe on the testimony of others; and then, further, we shall inquire more generally when and why we may believe that which goes beyond our own experience, or even beyond the experience of mankind.
William Kingdon Clifford
Yet even though that picture is dark and darkening, there is one factor which has not yet been injected. I do not know whether it will be tomorrow, or next year, or in five years; but it will come. That factor is firearms and explosives. With communities which are so divided nothing can prevent the injection of explosives which we know perfectly well from experience in other parts of the United Kingdom and the world. At first there will be horrified astonishment, and inquiry as to what we have done wrong that such things should be happening. Then there will be feverish endeavour to find methods to allay the supposed grievances which lie behind the violence. Then follows exploitation by those who use violence of the ascendancy they have thus gained over the majority and over authority. The thing goes forward, acting and reacting, until a position is reached in which-I shall dare say it-compared with those areas, Belfast today will seem an enviable place.
Enoch Powell
Philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science - problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science.
Will Durant
As we divided natural philosophy in general into the inquiry of causes, and productions of effects: so that part which concerneth the inquiry of causes we do subdivide according to the received and sound division of causes. The one part, which is physic, inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; and the other, which is metaphysic, handleth the formal and final causes.
Francis Bacon
It is astonishing in the face of such transparent evasions that this religion has any adherents at all. But religions are tough. Either they make no contentions which are subject to disproof or they quickly redesign doctrine after disproof. The fact that religions can be so shamelessly dishonest, so contemptuous of the intelligence of their adherents, and still flourish does not speak very well for the tough-mindedness of the believers. But it does indicate, if a demonstration were needed, that near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry.
Carl Sagan
All inquiries carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions. But I do not see how we can deal with the universe-both the outside and the inside universe-without studying it. The best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations. In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. If science is considered a closed priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern-if both its delights and its social consequences are discussed regularly and competently in the schools, the press, and at the dinner table-we have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the world really is and for improving both it and us.
Carl Sagan
