Jarvis Cocker Quotes

...culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.

a question has the most power before we rush to answer it, when it is still making us think, still testing us.

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

It's very, very hard to affect culture. And you can get surprised thinking you're farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.

I want to write a book that makes people debate, and makes people think, interact with each other and exchange ideas... I write because I'm engaged in this big conversation.

One hopes that with a book or movie, the reader or the audience will emerge from it thinking. That's the most you can hope for: that you've raised questions that will be there for the audience to think about later.

As the generalization goes about the art industry, people can be really challenging and thought-provoking in their thinking and questioning the status quo, and it's really important that the status quo can be questioned and that there are people doing that.

I don't want your vote. I want something more important. I want your commitment to think. Because once you start thinking, I'll get your vote.

I think culture is a very challenging thing to reverse.

All I've ever wanted to do is move the needle on popular culture.

My father is someone who asks doubts, thereby triggering new thoughts.

As a culture, we've all agreed with the opinion that the world should be seen in a certain way, so at 'The Nightly Show,' our chief mission was to disagree with that premise. And to see the world in a way that may not make everybody comfortable. And to present it with a cast of people who don't always get to have a voice on that.

I enjoy a challenge or provocation, something to think about, to talk about after it's done.

Culture in America and everywhere else comes from the suffering, from those who don't want the old ways. They want to bring in the new, whether it's the ballet, when it started, or Shakespeare.

If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.

I'm asking people to think critically and not to be lazy in their thinking.

Asking a question is the simplest way of focusing thinking...asking the right question may be the most important part of thinking.

To me, the thing that sets us apart from so many other animal species is our ability to ask questions, investigate, gather information, come to our own conclusions, and sometimes depart from the pack, sometimes move away from the tribe. And I'm not seeing a lot of that right now among a sizable portion of American politics and American voters. I'm not seeing that kind of use of critical thinking, and it really, really freaks me out.

I think you need to have a healthy sense of doubt because I think doubt leads to inquiry.

The few have said, Think! The many have said, Believe! The first doubt was the womb and cradle of progress, and from the first doubt, man has continued to advance.

I think the appropriate kind of skepticism is this: you've got to be asking questions all the time, you've also got to make sure that you're doing so in the spirit of genuinely wanting to find the answers - and that also means being open. I battle with this: I know I tend to be very skeptical and as a result, I veer towards the dismissive. But being aware of the tendency, I like to challenge my own skepticism and make sure it's not just knee-jerk. You need to be skeptical towards yourself as well. When you're only skeptical outwards you've got an unbalanced skepticism.

If thinking minds, questioning minds, doubting minds, are talking about faith, their whole life will become fake.

I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew.

I began to realize that thinking itself is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions.

He who replies to words of doubt doth put the light of knowledge out.