To be and not to be, that is the answer.

 

To be and not to be, that is the answer.
--
This witticism derived from William Shakespeare's line "To be or not to be; that is the question" in Hamlet, has sometimes been attributed to Hein, but also to many others. The earliest occurrence so far located in research for Wikiquote was published in A Calendar of Doubts and Faiths (1930) by William Marias Malisoff.

 

Piet Hein

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But when I talk to people who are Darwinists or evolutionists and say, 'Well, how did life begin' -- they're...they don't have an answer. I mean, they have an answer, but it's a BS answer. It's an answer that wouldn't make sense to a small child.

 

Ben Stein

 

I'm for mystery, not interpretive answers. ... The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

 

Ken Kesey

 

I just tell you and though I dont sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that’s the answer.

 

Gertrude Stein

 

The metric is what the person has to contribute, not the person's rank, age, or level of experience. If they have the answer, I want the answer. When I post a question on my blog, I expect the person with the answer to post back. I do not expect the person with the answer to run it through you, your OIC, the branch chief, the exec, the Division Chief and then get the garbled answer back before he or she posts it for me. The Napoleonic Code and Netcentric Collaboration cannot exist in the same space and time. It's YOUR job to make sure I get my answers and then if they get it wrong or they could have got it righter, then you guide them toward a better way... but do not get in their way.

 

James E. Cartwright

 

...Hunt asked me the question one week before the campaign, and basically it was, are you going to do something about Rumsfeld and the Vice President? And my answer was, they're going to stay on. And the reason why is I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer.

 

George W. Bush

 

"We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask--and to answer--the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer."

 

Matthew Stover