Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
Interpretation
Asking the right questions is essential to finding the correct answers.
This quote emphasizes the importance of formulating the right questions in order to derive meaningful answers. It suggests that if one approaches a situation with a misguided or incorrect question, they will likely miss the deeper issues at play, thereby hindering their understanding and learning process.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the importance of self-reflection.
Ultimately there can be no freedom for self unless it is vouchsafed for others; there can be no security where there is fear, and a democratic society presupposes confidence and candor in the relations of men with one another and eager collaboration for the larger ends of life instead of the pursuit of petty, selfish or vainglorious aims.
The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.
Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.
The words of the Constitution... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
The little things, I can obey. But the big things - how we think, what we value - those you must choose yourself. You can't let anyone - or any society - determine those for you.
All that happens when your dreams come true is a slow, melting realization that it wasn't what you thought.
We ought not to be embarrassed of appreciating the truth and of obtaining it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us. Nothing should be dearer to the seeker of truth than the truth itself, and there is no deterioration of the truth, nor belittling either of one who speaks it or conveys it
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.
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