Stephen Sondheim Quotes

I'm a pretty analytical guy, all right?

I am naturally a very curious person.

I am a linear thinker in a lot of ways.

I see myself as an avatar of curiosity and doubt.

I'm a naturally curious person.

We have too many intellectuals who are afraid to use the pistol of common sense.

I've always been really curious about things and slightly confused by the world, and I think someone who feels that way is in a good position to be the one asking questions.

Since I was a child, I started to ask very difficult questions; even my family was telling me all the time, 'You're a very difficult person, and we were having trouble answering your questions. Why are you asking so many questions?'

Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an engineer's approach to problem-solving.

Rational beliefs bring us closer to getting good results in the real world.

Scientists often have a naive faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a compelling and true solution.

My party trick is that I ask everybody questions. I'm just nosey.

A third ideal that has made its way in the modern world is reliance on reason, especially reason disciplined and enriched by modern science. An eternal basis of human intercommunication is reason.

I'm a bit of a freak for evidence-based analysis. I strongly believe in data.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

I'm not an analyzer. I've got a son that analyzes everything and everybody. But I don't analyze people.

I'm very curious, I guess, as a human being.

Once you start looking at the world rationally, it becomes much more exciting.

I cannot look at a question and not try to find the answer, even if I don't know it.

The more one listens to ordinary conversations the more apparent it becomes that the reasoning faculties of the brain take little part in the direction of the vocal organs.

An ideal reader is someone who doesn't know what on Earth you've been doing, who will look at it with absolute freshness and go, 'Oh, so that's what you've been up to.'

I was an observant but dreamy child. I had a lazy eye and wild curls.

Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.

Neither table pounding nor dreamy euphoria can be permitted to substitute for plausible argument. If impatience is not to be allowed to short-circuit argument with unsupported assertions, reason must be honored above the crude and noisy enthusiasms and antipathies.

Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.