Scrutiny

Scrutiny is a careful examination or inquiry.

Quotes

• As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.
  • Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press. 1984. p. 36. ISBN 978-0-89594-142-8. 

• For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us.
  • Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press. 1984. p. 43. ISBN 978-0-89594-142-8. 

• If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it.
  • Bertrand Russell, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918), Ch. VI: International relations, p. 97

• Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
  • Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain (1979), Introduction, p. xii, from the October 1980 mass market paperback edition published by Ballantine Books ISBN 0-345-33689-5 (28th printing)

• No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.
  • H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898), Book I, Ch. 1: The Eve of the War