Quotes About Asking

Liberals love to say things like, "We're just asking everyone to pay their fair share." But government is not about asking. It is about telling. The difference is fundamental. It is the difference between making love and being raped, between working for a living and being a slave. The Internal Revenue service is not asking anybody to do anything. It confiscates your assets and puts you behind bars if you don't pay.

New Rule: Stop asking Miss USA contestants if they believe in evolution. It’s not their field. It’s like asking Stephen Hawking if he believes in hair scrunchies. Here’s what they know about: spray tans, fake boobs and baton twirling. Here’s what they don’t know about: everything else. If I cared about the uninformed opinions of some ditsy beauty queen, I’d join the Tea Party.

Yes. I was looking for Lettie. They were both very kind to me,” Percival said, “Even though they’d never seen me before. And Wizard Howl kept visiting to court Lettie. Lettie didn’t want him, and she asked me to bite him to get rid of him, until Howl suddenly began asking her about you and—“ “what?” he said, “ I know someone called sophie who looks a little like you.. And Lettie said, that’s my sister,’ without thinking,” Percival said. “ And she got terribly worried then, particularly as Howl went on asking about her sister.

Asking the government to help you for short periods of time is different than asking the government to take care of you for the rest of your life.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between asking to be permitted to keep a vegetative relative on costly machinery, and asking the taxpayers or society as a whole to pay for such machinery.

I started asking the big questions that I had asked in college, that my compatriots the Greek philosophers had asked, like 'what is a good life?' Socrates famously said that 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' I started asking these questions from the starting point of 'what is success?'

I think the role of the artist today is about being provocative. I don't mean shocking, but you have to provoke people into action. As an artist, you ask people for their time. It's the most precious thing anyone has. I'm asking audiences to come to my work and spend some time with it. What I'm really doing, of course, is asking people to take time for themselves.

By asking the question 'Am I happy?,' and via the answer setting out what I mean by happiness, there is a political route that can be taken, by asking another question - 'Can politics deliver happiness, and should it try?'

I think you're only post-racial when you stop asking if you're post-racial. When the Neanderthals finally stopped asking themselves if they were in a post-saber tooth society, that's when they were post-saber tooth.

Instead of asking what's wrong with rampant consumerism, we ought to be asking, 'What justifies it?' Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste.

When you are converted, you want to do what you didn't want to do before, and you don't want to do what you wanted to do before. There's a change in the heart; there's a cleaning up, a change in orientation, and holiness becomes attractive, instead of something you have to put up with to figure out what you can get away with. As long as young people are asking, 'Can I get away with this?' or 'Can I get away with that?' I wonder if they're regenerate. If they're asking, instead, 'How can I grow in holiness?' then I suspect they've begun to understand.

Prayer is not only asking, it is an attitude of heart that produces an atmosphere in which asking is perfectly natural, and Jesus says, "every one that asketh receiveth."

We have to design a health delivery system by actually talking to people and asking, 'What would make this service better for you?' As soon as you start asking, you get a flood of answers.

Vocal prayer . . . must be accompanied by reflection. A prayer in which a person is not aware of Whom he is speaking to, what he is asking, who it is who is asking and of Whom, I don't call prayer-however much the lips may move.

There were people asking 'Can women be funny?' People still ask that. It's like asking: 'Can women breathe in and out?'

Asking, ‘If there is no God, what is the purpose of life?’ is like asking, ‘If there is no master, whose slave will I be?’ If your purpose of life is to submit as a slave, then your meaning comes from flattering the ego of a person whom you should detest.

Asking the public health community to investigate the role of vaccines in the development of autism is like asking the tobacco industry to investigate the link between lung cancer and smoking.

Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

You cannot “catch” anything unless you think you can, and thinking you can is inviting it to you with your thought. You are also inviting illness if you are listening to people talking about their illness. As you listen, you are giving all your thought and focus to illness, and when you give all of your thought to something, you are asking for it.

People are always asking me why they don't make Westerns like they used to.

Additionally, I will be respectfully asking countries, such as Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, to pay more for the tremendous security we provide them.

I think I've been asked just about every question under the sun. I'm just really honored that people are even interested in asking me questions.

The task of asking nonliving matter to speak and the responsibility for interpreting its reply is that of physics.

Here in California, one candidate for governor is a 100-year-old woman. She's going door-to-door and asking one simple question - 'Do I live here?'

Don't make your audience play Jeopardy. Giving your answer before asking the question puts your audience at a disadvantage. It will also reveal your biases. Make it clear what question you are trying to answer first. Then allow your audience to engage in answering the question too.

A couple years ago, I felt like I was in a dead end, and I kept asking myself, "How do you get out of a dead end?" People would say the answer is, "You just turn around." But that was not the answer that I was going to accept. I realized, for me, that getting out of a dead end was literally the world turning upside down, and I had to fall out of the dead end. So you have to surrender, so I've really learned how to surrender, practice unconditional love. With my art, I've always put out things I love.

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

Film is a visceral experience so I think a good war movie is a valuable tool for making us understand what our military goes through, what the issues are, the good and bad sides of war and what we're asking our military to do.

People always ask, "Why jazz?" and I'm like "Why not?" It's kind of like asking Seurat, "Why so many dots?" I imagine if you asked Bjork, "Why the Tibetan bells?" She'd probably be like "That's just what I heard." It's the same thing. This is just the way I see music.

Social media is great because you can get information out there quick or you can use it as a ministry tool, but when you're on it all the time and you're not spending time with people and you're not sitting there looking at someone in the eyes and asking, "How are you doing?" that's when it's out of balance.

If you walk along the street you will encounter a number of scientific problems. Of these, about 80 per cent are insoluble, while 19½ per cent are trivial. There is then perhaps half a per cent where skill, persistence, courage, creativity and originality can make a difference. It is always the task of the academic to swim in that half a per cent, asking the questions through which some progress can be made.

When we're on tour, probably we don't go 24 hours without someone asking us where we came up with the name They Might Be Giants. Which, on one level, seems like a completely legitimate question. If I think of other bands, like The Beatles, it would explain to me that John Lennon had a proclivity for slightly cheap puns. But I'm not sure how much insight that would give me into what's actually good about The Beatles' music.

Ultimately, we are seeking a better understanding of what is means to be human. In this quest, progress is not made by finding the "right" answers, but by asking meaningful questions.

Oh, he was asking to have an open marriage and I refused.

I thought it was interesting when [Bill Clinton] said, I married my best friend, because people are always asking, what is the nature of their marriage.

I got a phone call from George Miller [the director] asking me to play this role. We sat down and he showed me on his computer a documentary-type montage sequence of real penguins swimming, in an Esther Williams synchronized sort of way, and doing things I have never seen them do. Then he explained his vision of the film, asked me to read the script and to voice the character. I was cast a little bit later, and he let me do the singing as well!

Whatever obstacles appear in your path, put your head down and get past them. Those obstacles aren't real. They're just God's way of testing you. He's asking you, 'Do you want to make it or not?'

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

He who wishes for anything but Christ, does not know what he wishes; he who asks for anything but Christ, does not know what he is asking; he who works, and not for Christ, does not know what he is doing.

Even when I interviewed bands, it was about asking them about writing songs, so it was more for me than anybody else.

You can experience play at work, not because you're messing around or wasting time or something, but because you're looking really deeply and seriously at things and asking what is possible, what can be done with them, what new ideas might emerge?

The only thing was, she didn't really want to see the future. What she wanted was to see something no one else could see or would see, and maybe that was asking for more magic that was in the world.

Nowadays, the media have to be there to keep you from asking too many questions, from getting together with other people who might want to do the Jeffersonian thing and call out the government.

Too much excitement, Your Majesty?” I asked. “He was standing too close.” “He was asking about Andrea.” “Too close. I didn’t like it.” Curran wrapped his arm around my shoulders and started walking, steering me away from the group. His Possessive Majesty in all of his glory.

They're asking women to do impossible things. I don't believe women can carry a pack, live in a foxhole, or go a week without a bath.

Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.

I could see that making judgments about people so that they are tried and sentenced in your head, without asking them for their perspective, is both unethical and unproductive. So I learned to love real integrity and to despise the lack of it.

There's still sexism in the world, so there's still sexism in publishing and in graduate school. But it is different. Now, it's more coded and harder to detect. It was more explicit when I was in school. There were no rules against male professors asking out female students. The reverse didn't happen since female professors were rare or nonexistent. Visiting writers came, 90% of them male, and some expected that a female student would materialize as his date for the visit.