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.
I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person's heart
Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
Great hearts can only be made by great troubles. Great faith must have great trials.
The graveyard is the richest place on the surface of the earth because there you will see the books that were not published, ideas that were not harnessed, songs that were not sung, and drama pieces that were never acted.
I felt a trembling along my skin, a treaveling current that moved up my spine, down my arms, pulsing out from my fingertips. I was practically radiating. The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn't.
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