Questioning Quotes

The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.

My mother was given to a typical question: "We have always done this. Why should we do anything else?" But my wife's typical question was "We have always done this. Why don't we do it another way or, better still, why not do something else?"

Fortunately, in her kindness and patience, Nature has never put the fatal question as to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of most people. And where no one asks, no one needs to answer.

So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.

It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

Who is he that shall control me? Why may not I act and speak and write and think with entire freedom? What am I to the universe, or, the unvierse, what is it to me? Who hath forged the chains of wrong and right, of Opinion and Custom? And must I wear them?

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others.

Well, it's not so easy to give an answer when you ask a stupid question!

Even a genius has his questions.

And what about you? You must be some kind of beardless dwarf?...You mean to say, that you're a daughter of Eve?...Y-yes, but, you are in fact... human?

Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things.

I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity.

Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? And If I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I want to see him.

The power to question is the basis of all human progress.

I happen to be kind of an inquisitive guy and when I see things I don't like, I start thinking, why do they have to be like this and how can I improve them?

Say, Not so, and you will out circle the philosophers.

i have never pondered over questions that are not questions.

Why should we rise because 'tis light? Did we lie down because t'was night?

Don’t just teach your children to read… Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.

Why will we be imposed on by antiquity?

He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.

When people asked Socrates, ‘What is wisdom?’ he always gave the same answer: ‘I don’t know’. In fact, Socrates never claimed to know much of anything except how to ask questions. And by asking questions, he would prove to other people that they didn’t know what they thought they knew.

The answers are all out there, we just need to ask the right questions.

I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY

Why are millions spent on the war each day, while not a penny is available for ... artists or the poor? Why do people have to starve when mountians of food are rotting away in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy?

What's [the Beatles'] I Am the Walrus all about?

It is the evening that questions thus from within me.

Are you happy?" she [Clarisse] said. "Am I what?" he [Montag] cried. But she was gone- running in the moonlight. Her front door shut gently.

Can you also, Lucullus, affirm that there is any power united with wisdom and prudence which has made, or, to use your own expression, manufactured man? What sort of a manufacture is that? Where is it exercised? when? why? how?

Children should be taught to question everything . . . everything they read and everything they hear.

All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.

Only once have I been made mute. It was when a man asked me, 'Who are you?'

Why should some people have such a hard time during their few years on this earth?

The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.

Whatever we think about and question a lot becomes questionable.