Quotes About Inquiry

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

You can ask me anything you like about my work, but I'll never talk about myself.

The journey from not knowing to knowing was his work. He was selling his desire to learn about a subject.

Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.

There's no term to the work of a scientist.

One of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask. Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy.

My university teacher and mentor Kenneth Arrow remembers me as a student who asked good questions. Although I had not previously thought of myself in that way, on reflection I think that Arrow was right.

Educationists should build the capacities of the spirit of inquiry, creativity, entrepreneurial and moral leadership among students and become their role model.

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?

Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

I want to be studied.

Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.

I am not a farmer; I am a researcher who studies the plants that come to your dinner table, which means that I ask questions for a living.

Once we get them in the studio, you interview a person the same way you would interview another. You ask them a question. You let them answer. You try to listen closely and then ask a follow-up.

Research such as ours is driven by the human imperative to understand where we are. It motivates the study of our positions in family, or in society, or on earth. The results may be termed geology, or sociology, or poetry.

If I were to do a movie about Apollo 13, I'd be at NASA studying what it took to go into space. It's part of your job to go deep, to interview the right people.

Never be afraid to ask when you don't understand. It sounds like a little thing, but awful things have happened, international incidents have flared, and markets have collapsed just because people couldn't make sense of what was being said. They didn't ask 'why?' because they thought it would make them look stupid.

Can we agree there are no stupid questions? Probably not. But let's try anyway.

Whomever you're going to interview, you have to be interested in what it is you want to know from them. You have to be interested in the subject.

I'll kind of get interested in a subject and I won't know why. It'll be in my head for many years and I'll say, 'Do I know enough here to research?'

In scientific subjects, the natural remedy for dogmatism has been found in research.

It is essential to the pure and peaceful administration of justice that all its officers keep carefully within the boundaries of their constitutional powers. Auxiliary to this, but not secondary in importance, is a due knowledge of the leading subjects for their inquiry and decision.

I subscribe to the school that there are no dumb questions.

To inquire into the origin of life is like seeking the origin of electrical machinery or the origin of music. Every increase in complexity of arrangement, of form, of substance, leads to new and often incalculable properties.