Question Everything Quotes

“We awaken by asking the right questions. We awaken when we see knowledge being spread that goes against our own personal experiences. We awaken when we see popular opinion being wrong but accepted as being right, and what is right being pushed as being wrong. We awaken by seeking answers in corners that are not popular. And we awaken by turning on the light inside when everything outside feels dark.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty... not to reassure him, but to upset him.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“Most of the time, we see only what we want to see, or what others tell us to see, instead of really investigate to see what is really there. We embrace illusions only because we are presented with the illusion that they are embraced by the majority. When in truth, they only become popular because they are pounded at us by the media with such an intensity and high level of repetition that its mere force disguises lies and truths. And like obedient schoolchildren, we do not question their validity and swallow everything up like medicine. Why? Because since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“I follow and cultivate my own curiosity. I think curiosity is one of the top two or three human characteristics. It's something that I really like about myself. [...] I want to understand stuff! I want to understand people! Following my curiosity so frequently leads me to better life decisions and better business decisions but also - just feeling better! You're never going to feel bad about your whole life if you loved people and you were curious. I mean, that's kind of all I want!”
― Hank Green

“Ever felt tired? Like existentially tired? Where you lose the sense of identity, structures, language, reason, being and time. Where you can’t see a destination and you can’t find a return, where even when you return its not a return to yourself rather it is a turn to a realisation that you have lost yourself somewhere between ‘the you’ and ‘the self’ and this dichotomy of what you call ‘you’ cannot make you feel home anymore. You run and you keep running, not towards anything but away from everything; from people, from rules, from gods, from words, from love and from being you, for forever. So do you ever feel tired?”
― Huseyn Raza

“Attending to your own words and ideas as well as those of others is an admirable trait in any person, but a necessity in a leader.”
― Jennifer Frick-Ruppert, Spirit Quest

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
― Albert Einstein

“As artists, it is our job to question the rules and ask if they are relevant or outdated, necessary or arbitrary, helpful or oppressive.”
― Teresa R. Funke, Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life blog

“As you dig your teeth into your assumptions, your teeth become sharper. You can dig deeper. You become what the world needs simply by helping yourself. It’s not easy, but it is worth it. The truth, as they say, hurts. But they also say it sets you free.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“Questions open a space in your mind that allow better answers to breathe.”
― Richie Norton

“It's good to be cynical," he said. "That is, if you know when to stop. Most of the things that we're all taught to respect and reverence- they don't deserve anything but cynicism.”
― Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

“The moment a person loses the capacity to think, to question, Tanya considers them no longer human but a machine. And that is why the individual Tanya Degurechaff reveres thought, loves debate, and sneers at dogmatism from the bottom of her heart.”
― Carlo Zen, 幼女戦記 (1) Deus lo vult

“Whilst stay-at-home persons are searching for truth, the apple will stay on the tree.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“Unless you're steadily and unflaggingly cynical about the solemn twaddle that's talked by bishops and bankers and professors and politicians and all the rest of them, you're lost. Utterly lost. Doomed to personal imprisonment in your ego- doomed to be a personality in a world of personalities; and a world of personalities is this world, the world of greed and fear and hatred, of war and capitalism and dictatorship and slavery. Yes, you've got to be cynical, Pete. Specially cynical about all the actions and feelings you've been taught to suppose were good. Most of them are not good. They're merely evils which happen to be regarded as creditable. But unfortunately, creditable evil is just as bad as discreditable evil. Scribes and Pharises aren't any better, in the last analysis, than publicans and sinners. Indeed, they're often much worse.”
― Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

“Of everything we must first ask: is it real or not?”
― Mike Klepper

“Question everything, including yourself; then redefine it accordingly.”
― Omar Cherif

“Avoid blind compliance. Ask questions.”
― Mimi Ikonn

“Da den arvelige Synd blev forklaret for nogle, sagde de: Hvi lod GUD ikke Adam og Eva strax omkomme og skabte andre Mennesker i deres Sted, som kunde have forplantet reene Børn og Efterkommere? Videre, da dem blev sagt, at Dievelen forfører Mennesker til at overtræde GUds Bud, hvi GUd da ikke dræber eller indspærrer ham og derved befrier Menneskene fra Fristelser, som styrte dem udi evig U-lykke? Videre, naar dem siges, at de, som ikke kiende GUd og troe paa ham, blive fordømte, svare de, hvi haver da GUd tøvet saa længe med at forkynde os Troen?”
― Ludvig Holberg, Epistler

“Let what I here set down meet with correction or applause, it shall be of equal welcome and utility to me [...]And yet, always submitting to the authority of their
censure, which has an absolute power over me, I thus rashly venture at everything.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Possibly, if we saw ourselves as the rest of the world does, we would stop being taken in by another manufactured scare story designed to manipulate us, and we'd actually have a chance of making much needed change in our own country.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia

“Where certainty ceases, thinking begins; the knower sets off into uncertainty. Both traditional ideas and their inverse had to be abandoned as supports. As the life of Katznelson shows, to achieve such freedom there has to be first the ability to allow oneself to be confused by intrusive reality along with diagnostic and intellectual courage.”
― Marie Luise Knott, Unlearning with Hannah Arendt

“A surface desire is one that conflicts with our Knowing. We must ask our surface desires: What is the desire beneath this desire? Is it rest? Is it peace?

Our deep desires are wise, true, beautiful, and things we can grant ourselves without abandoning our Knowing. Following our deep desire always returns us to integrity.

If your desire feels wrong to you: Go deeper.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living / A Toolkit for Modern Life

“Questions are not an act of rebellion, but not questioning is an act of submissive conditioning.”
― Deanna L. Lawlis

“One of the reasons that the West continues to dance on the grave of the Soviet Union, and to downplay its achievements, is to make sure that, as the world-wide economy worsens, and as the suffering of working people around the world deepens, they don't get any notions in their heads to organize some new socialist revolution with such ideals.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia

“But you don't have to my word for it that Russia and Putin are being unfairly scapegoated. Even Nadezhda Tolokonnikova- the founder of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot, whose members were imprisoned in Russia in response to their anti-government protest at an Orthodox Church- recently expressed such an opinion. As Tolokonnikova explained in an interview with David Sirota in the International Business Times, "I'm not terrified of him {Putin} at all. I don't think you have to be terrified of him. He's just a guy who claims that he has power, but I claim to have power too and you have power....If you talk here about mainstream liberal media in America, which speak a lot about Putin, I think it's just a trick....They don't really want to talk about internal American problems....They're just looking for a scapegoat and, you know, for Trump it's Muslims and Mexican workers. And for liberal media in America it is Putin.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia

“To truly understand the US's policies, we need look no further than the US's own post-WW II policy statements, as well-articulated by George Kennan, serving as the State Department's Director of Policy Planning, in 1948:
"{W}e have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3 of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security....We need no deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction....
In the face of this situation we would be better off to...cease to talk about vague- and for the Far East- unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."
And the US's "straight power" plays since WW II have succeeded in allowing itself, with only 5% of the world's population, to monopolize about 25% of its resources. In other words, far from advancing the "lofty" and "benign" goals of freedom and democracy, as the New York Times's editorial would have us believe, the US has been waging war around the globe to protect its own unjust share of resources. However, the US has needed the perceived threat of the USSR, or other like enemy, to justify this. Keenan recognized this fact as well, when he said: "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.".”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia

“Our society is so hell-bent on expansion, power and effiency at all costs that the folks [who question things or suggest the way something's done is not right,] are inconvenient. We slow the world down. We're on the bow of the Titanic, pointing, crying out, "Iceberg! Iceberg!" while everyone else is below deck, yelling back, "We just want to keep dancing!" It is easier to call us broken and dismiss us than to consider that we are responding appropriately to a broken world.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living / Where the Crawdads Sing / Reasons to Stay Alive

“Naquele momento, você não sabia bem o que queria fazer. Na verdade, você estava perdido, porque, até ali, a vida não passava de um amontoado de obstáculos que você tinha de superar. Resistir fazia parte da sua vida e você nunca havia se questionado por que as coisas eram assim.”
― Jeferson Tenório, O Avesso da Pele

“I would rather have a set of questions that we haven't found the answers for, yet, than having a whole set of answers that I'm not even permitted to challenge, questions, dig in on.”
― Dr. Phil McGraw

“Questions are the heart of a functioning society.” She wondered if she’d read that somewhere or had just invented it. She rather liked it.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, The Spellshop