Top 55 Inquiry Quotes

The fundamental essence of science, which I think we’ve lost in our education system, is poking something with a stick and seeing what happens. Embrace that process of inquiry.

Science and policy-making thrive on challenge and questioning; they are vital to the health of inquiry and democracy.

The British Museum was founded with a civic purpose: to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free society and are still among the greatest threats to our liberty.

For some reason, there are political forces that somehow feel threatened by honest inquiry. How can you be threatened by wanting to know the facts?

The general statement that the mental faculties are class concepts, belonging to descriptive psychology, relieves us of the necessity of discussing them and their significance at the present stage of our inquiry.

As one may bring himself to believe almost anything he is inclined to believe, it makes all the difference whether we begin or end with the inquiry, ‘What is truth?’

In winter, the stars seem to have rekindled their fires, the moon achieves a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of a more exalted simplicity. Summer is more wooing and seductive, more versatile and human, appeals to the affections and the sentiments, and fosters inquiry and the art impulse.

I always assumed scientists were free to ask any question, pursue any line of inquiry without fear or reprisal.

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.

The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food.

They have shrunk from inquiry, though they have strained after punishment. I have in every shape dared the one, that I might, so far as lay in my power, be able to secure the other.

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

Faith is a personal matter, and should never be a cudgel to stifle inquiry. We tried that approach about 1,200 years ago. The experiment was called the Dark Ages.

If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures.

Anna Katherine Green wrote about a female inquiry agent, and there were a scattering of female investigators in the 1970s, authored by men, who just didn’t ring true. So I thought, ‘Well, there’s an opening here for something.’

The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.

What, of course, we want in a university is for people to learn the skills they’re going to need outside the classroom. So, having a system that had more emphasis on inquiry and exploration but also on learning and practising specific skills would fit much better with how we know people learn.

I shall endeavour still further to prosecute this inquiry, an inquiry I trust not merely speculative, but of sufficient moment to inspire the pleasing hope of its becoming essentially beneficial to mankind.

A university’s essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism – a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.

Sometimes an ethnographic inquiry will lead to new ways to use an existing technology or will generate new technologies.

Perhaps ‘photography’ has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps ‘photography,’ as a meaningful cultural trope, is over.

If one has curiosity, then one stands the chance of attain a high level of scientific inquiry.

Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system.

The scientist’s inquiry into the causes of things is providing an ever more extensive understanding of nature.

Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.

And today more than ever, knowing about that society involves first of all choosing what approach the inquiry will take, and that necessarily means choosing how society can answer.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

The most all penetrating spirit before which will open the possibility of tilting not tables, but planets, is the spirit of free human inquiry. Believe only in that.

I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.

What’s unique about the Mormon Church is that it encourages inquiry. I really do think my research and religion are all on the same page. I never could have come up with the notion of disruptive innovations, which went against a lot of conventional wisdom, if I hadn’t been raised to always be asking questions.

The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.

Time and again, we have found the ‘idle’ truths arrived at through the process of inquiry to be of the greatest moment for practical human affairs.

It’s my approach as a filmmaker always to go in, not with a thesis or preconceived notion, but with curiosity and questions and inquiry. So in some way, I’m always surprised. I’m always finding paths of engagement.

There’s different ways to approach music for sleeping. Things like white noise are functional, like a lullaby. This is more like an inquiry, a question about how music and sleep fit together.

The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people. In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.

I had no lasting physical trauma nor a psychological one. Yet, it was hard to return to the old path. I found myself asking big questions: Why was my life spared? What is my purpose here? And it led me to a life of inquiry.

National languages are all huge systems of vested interests which sullenly resist critical inquiry.

True science is never speculative; it employs hypotheses as suggesting points for inquiry, but it never adopts the hypotheses as though they were demonstrated propositions.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

That though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility, there still remains the possibility of our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry.

Our mandate expects that we will build on the Joint Inquiry’s investigation and we will not be re-inventing the wheel. But we go to places which the Joint Inquiry was not permitted to explore.

Something very worrying has been going on at Scotland Yard. We now know that in dealing with the phone-hacking affair at the ‘News of the World,’ they cut short their original inquiry; suppressed evidence; misled the public and the press; concealed information and broke the law. Why?

In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children.

At the heart of the best documentaries, there is a journey of inquiry – someone who travels out into the world, comes back with a story, and who then finds meaning in it, and intrigue; someone who tells you about something you never quite knew before, or in a way you hadn’t quite thought about.

It is my idea that the public needs to be better educated about the nature of scientific inquiry and how the scientific process works. I firmly believe that this is the only effective way forward to combat the widespread distrust in facts and science.

I’ve never done too much inquiry into angels.

Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human.

By definition, a hearing is an inquiry into many sides of an issue with testimony from various points of views. But mark this: The Republicans did not have a single woman to testify in support of the contraception mandate. That is not a hearing; that is a sham.

Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.

Doubt comes in at the window when inquiry is denied at the door.

To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.

We will that all men know we blame not all the lords, nor all those that are about the king’s person, nor all gentlemen nor yeomen, nor all men of law, nor all bishops, nor all priests, but all such as may be found guilty by just and true inquiry and by the law.