Question Quotes

"I don't believe he had a responsibility to even answer that question - you have no responsibility to answer personal questions that people have no right to ask you"

Chris Matthews, Journalist

"I don't know why his lawyers didn't tell him, 'You don't have to answer any questions about your private life, Mr. President. Let them sue you. Take the heat. You don't have to answer.'"

Chris Matthews, Journalist

"To be or not to be. That's not really a question"

Jean-Luc Godard, Director

"I don't mind doing interviews. I don't mind answering thoughtful questions. But I'm not thrilled about answering questions like, 'If you were being mugged, and you had a lightsaber in one pocket and a whip in the other, which would you use?'"

Harrison Ford, Actor

"Anybody can decide a question if only a single principle is in controversy"

Felix Frankfurter, Judge

"Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one"

Felix Frankfurter, Judge

"In my professional work with the Agency, by the late '70s, I had come to question the value of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the intelligence agency's impact on American policy"

Aldrich Ames, Criminal

"If journalists ask you again and again about the same bands, you'll end up saying you hate them just because you're so fed up with being asked all those stupid questions"

Billie Joe Armstrong, Musician

"By the late '70s I had come to question the point of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the CIA's overall charter"

Aldrich Ames, Criminal

"In the light of our culture, these are not unreasonable questions and tactics, but if once again, we try to see the lens through which we look, we can see that there is far too great an emphasis placed on the future"

Alan Dundes, Educator

"Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions - Why am I doing it, What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead"

Chanakya, Politician

"I never learn anything talking. I only learn things when I ask questions"

Lou Holtz, Coach

"I like to help women help themselves, as that is, in my opinion, the best way to settle the woman question. Whatever we can do and do well we have a right to, and I don't think any one will deny us"

Louisa May Alcott, Novelist

"It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide"

Friedrich August von Hayek, Economist

"If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because, consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own capacity to do this"

Friedrich August von Hayek, Economist

"I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions"

Friedrich August von Hayek, Economist

"If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?"

Scott Adams, Cartoonist

"Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'"

Henry Miller, Writer

"It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into"

Georg C. Lichtenberg, Scientist

"Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it"

Max Planck, Scientist

"The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?"

David Attenborough, Journalist

"It's a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species"

David Attenborough, Journalist

"Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience"

Jonas Salk, Scientist

"In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?"

Carl Rogers, Psychologist

"The questions don't do the damage. Only the answers do"

Sam Donaldson, Journalist

"Professional managers, coaches, and players have a right to question an umpire's decision if they do it in a professional manner. When they become personal, profane, or violent, they have crossed the line and must be dealt with accordingly"

Jim Evans, Athlete

"Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slavetrade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years"

Robert Toombs, Politician

"Is there any wonder why we are in such big trouble? Any question why the people don't trust their government anymore, and demand a change?"

Chris Christie, Politician

"But as you say, the fundamental stumbling block is the question of the future of the economy. And it's not just the sort of economic laboratory question, of what kind of system would best generate growth, which is the way it's presented"

Joe Slovo, Politician

"If you read my books, especially the Star Trek books and the Quest for Tomorrow books, you'll see in them the core theme of the basic humanistic questions that Star Trek asked"

William Shatner, Actor

"Science goes from question to question; big questions, and little, tentative answers. The questions as they age grow ever broader, the answers are seen to be more limited"

George Wald, Scientist

"I tell my students to try to know molecules, so well that when they have some question involving molecules, they can ask themselves, What would I do if I were that molecule?"

George Wald, Scientist

"So the tough questions that have been asked of Sarah Palin thus far just have been about the fact that she doesn't know anything and isn't ready to be vice president. That's fair game and it has nothing to do with her gender"

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Politician

"When we ask American men and women in uniform to fight for this country and to defend this country's interest and then to send them overseas, there is no question we have an obligation to protect them and provide for their safety"

Byron Dorgan, Politician

"During a political campaign everyone is concerned with what a candidate will do on this or that question if he is elected except the candidate; he's too busy wondering what he'll do if he isn't elected"

Everett Dirksen, Politician

"Dance with a girl three times, and if you like the light of her eye and the tone of voice with which she, breathless, answers your little questions about horseflesh and music about affairs masculine and feminine, then take the leap in the dark"

Anthony Trollope, Author

"The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it"

Robert Fitzgerald, Author

"If I leave my computer, I'm probably not going to get back for hours. If I take a few minutes to answer questions and go web surfing, then guilt kicks in and I get back to work"

Raymond E. Feist, Author

"As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss"

Noam Chomsky, Activist

"Asking the right questions takes as much skill as giving the right answers"

Robert Half, Businessman

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