A Quote by Herbert A. Simon
Time and again, we have found the 'idle' truths arrived at through the process of inquiry to be of the greatest moment for practical human affairs.
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Real inquiry is a tremendous moral transforming force. It's not just questioning and looking for a quick answer or explanation, but the process of inquiry-of questioning, of opening-opens something in the human being which has not been touched in our culture. Everybody who is human has in themselves the potential of passionate inquiry after truth, and that's the transforming force.
Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become a child again, even now... You have gone wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.
It may be observed, that provinces amid the vicissitudes to which they are subject, pass from order into confusion, and afterward recur to a state of order again; for the nature of mundane affairs not allowing them to continue in an even course, when they have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline.
When the police arrived and found no lion, no broken wall, and no convicts, and the Head behaving like a lunatic, there was an inquiry into the whole thing. And in the inquiry all sorts of things about Experiment House came out, and about ten people got expelled. After that, the Head's friends saw that the Head was no use as a Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Heads. And when they found she wasn't much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after.
Samsara-the Wheel of Existence, literally, the "Perpetual Wandering"-is the name by which is designated the sea of life ever restlessly heaving up and down, the symbol of this continuous process of ever again and again being born, growing old, suffering, and dying. (It) is constantly changing from moment to moment, (as lives) follow continuously one upon the other through inconceivable periods of time. Of this Samsara, a single lifetime constitutes only a vanishingly tiny fraction.
That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. It is the ordinary state of affairs. Everything is in process. Everything - every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate - is always changing, moment to moment.
But in practical affairs, particularly in politics, men are needed who combine human experience and interest in human relations with a knowledge of science and technology.
You have to be again innocent, ignorant, not knowing anything, so that the questions can start arising again. Again the inquiry becomes alive, and with the inquiry becoming alive you cannot vegetate. Then life becomes an exploration, an adventure.
This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic-that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him.
I had forgotten: this is what it feels like to live in time. The lurching forward, the sensation of falling of a cliff into darkness, and then landing abruptly, surprised, confused, and then starting the whole process again in the next moment, doing that over and over again, falling into each instant of time and then climbing back up only to repeat the process.
There is always an element of realpolitik that has to be present in the conduct of any nation's national security affairs. At the same time, we have to also have a balance between realpolitik and Wilsonian principles of freedom and democracy and human rights. And maintaining that balance is the greatest challenge that we in the West, including the Federal Republic of Germany, have to face because it's many times a very difficult decision-making process.
An honorable human relationship ... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.
I've never had an 'I've arrived' moment. I don't like that word, 'arrived.' If you say you've arrived, then you've achieved your dream. You've done all you can. 'I'm the guy now.' I don't like that.
And this is the time. It is the time for this land to become again a witness to the world for what is noble and just in human affairs. It is the time to live more with faith and less with fear- with an abiding confidence that can sweep away the strongest barriers between us and teach us that we truly are brothers and sisters.
I shall endeavour still further to prosecute this inquiry, an inquiry I trust not merely speculative, but of sufficient moment to inspire the pleasing hope of its becoming essentially beneficial to mankind.
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