I’ve been debating over the last few months whether or not to offer the following thoughts on the quality of our questions. It’s long and A Pause For Beauty should be short. But, I thought, if I’m ever going to offer these quotes, Labor Day is a good day to do it. If we ever have time to contemplate important questions at the hidden center of our lives, it is on a day when we have time to think.

First from a book by Fran Peavey, entitled “Heart Politics Revisited”, "a book which incorporates the experience of 25 years of activism."

Traditional schooling was based on asking questions to which the answers were already known: How many wives did Henry VIII have? What color is that car? What is four times five? We learned that questions have finite and "correct" answers, and that there is usually one answer for each question. The wrong answer is punished with a bad grade. The landscape of learning was divided into "right" and "wrong."
      What would it have been like if when the teacher asked, "What is four times five?" and we had said, "Twenty-nine," the teacher had not said "Wrong!" and left it at that, but she asked us to explain our thought process and how we got twenty-nine. We would have learned about ourselves and our thinking process and we might have discovered mathematics in an active way. The teacher might have learned something about increasing the effectiveness of her teaching methods.
      In families that don't encourage questioning, an adult rarely follows up an "I don't know" with a "How can we find out?" Often they are so absorbed by their embarrassment that they do not show the child how to find out.
      Suppose Sally is working on where she will live, and perhaps she has heard of some good real estate bargains in Sydney, and she's a bit stuck on what she should do next. I could say to her, "Why don't you just move to Sydney?" This question might be provocative, but is not very helpful. Really its a suggestion pretending to be a question. For my own reasons, I think she should move to Sydney. Whatever my reasons I'm leading her because I am asking a manipulative question, and it is likely that the more I pressure Sally, the less likely she is to consider the Sydney option.
            A more strategic question would be to ask Sally, "What type of place would you like to move to?" or "What is the meaning of this move in your life?" Sally is then encouraged to talk about the qualities she wants from her new home, to set new goals. You can then work with her to achieve these goals.
            For every individual, group, or society, some questions are taboo. And because those questions are taboo they wield tremendous power. A strategic question is often one of these "unaskable" questions. And it usually is unaskable because it challenges the values and assumption that the whole issues rests upon.
            ...Some unaskable questions might be: for the seriously ill person: "Do you want to live or die?" For those involved in sexual politics: "Is gender a myth?" For the workaholic: "What do you do for you?" For the tree activist: "How should we make building materials?" Or for the politician: "What do you like about the other party's platform?" or "How could both parties work together more closely?"
An important task of strategic questioning is to create an environment where people can see the solutions that are within themselves. You listen deep into the moving heart of the person opposite you. A strategic questioner listens for the latent solutions hidden within every problem. And this involves a special type of listening. You are not merely passively listening. You are creating an action path with your attention.

The forest manager wants the maximum board feet out of the forest because it guarantees a bigger budget and advances one's career. When challenged to practice more sustainable management, the manager may appear intractable and cold hearted. But maybe the bottom line is: "Will we have jobs if we try another way? Will my employees and their families be able to survive if we do things differently?"
In order to truly recognize the risks we are asking others to take, we need to get to the heart of the matter. "Would I be willing to give up my job to support the forest campaign?" If not, then I have to ask myself, do I have the right to ask the forest managers or others to risk their jobs. If we haven't truly embraced the concerns of the people involved, then we probably aren't really getting to the heart of the matter.

I hope I have the source of the above completely right. I know that it is mostly correct, but it comes from notes accumulated over a period of years and the last one includes the citation, “Politics Of The Heart News”, August 1997. 

More thoughts on the subject of questions:

...listening is the most powerful social-change tool around...the only dependable way to make permanent change was to build loving friendships with those we wanted as allies.
      Each time I called a senator's Washington office, I spent a few minutes feeling love for the person I was calling, then tried to maintain that feeling during the conversation. I also expressed appreciation to his staff for the time they spent answering questions, for the qualities I saw in them, and for how hard they had worked to arrive at the best solutions. With every interaction, I grew in self-confidence. It seemed that the more I opened my heart, the more courageous I became.
...Some lobbyists said I was unsophisticated and "unpolitical" in my thinking.
Yet what I saw was this: three deep friendships, and several arms control policies affected by my input. As a direct result of my meeting with the senator's staff, he became the crucial vote on legislation that eventually ended nuclear testing in this country.
     What caused these changes? I believe that it was not who I was but what I did: I treated the members of Congress and their staffs with respect and caring. I felt love for them in my heart. Yes, I was informed about the issues, but then so are most lobbyists. What was unique about my approach was that I asked important questions then listened carefully to their responses.
      - Carolyn Cottom, Love Changes Things: Even in the World of Politics

John Woolman (1720-1772) was an American Quaker who, almost singlehandedly, convinced members of The Society Of Friends to free their slaves, and he did this by the quality of his questions. He accomplished this before the American Revolution, a hundred years before the Civil War.

His method was unique.  He didn't raise a big storm about it or start a protest movement. His method was one of gentle but clear and persistent persuasion.             Although John Woolman was not a strong man physically, he accomplished his mission by journeys up and down the East Coast by foot or on horseback visiting slaveholders -- over a period of many years. The approach was not to censure the slaveholders in a way that drew their animosity. Rather the burden of his approach was to raise questions: What does the owning of slaves do to you as a moral person? What kind of an institution are you handing over to your children? Man by man, inch by inch, by persistently returning and revisiting and pressing his gentle argument over a period of thirty years, the scourge of slavery was eliminated from this Society, the first religious group in America to formally denounce and forbid slavery among its members. One wonders what would have been the result if there had been fifty John Woolmans, or even five, travelling the length and breadth of the Colonies in the eighteenth-century persuading people one by one with gentle, non-judgmental argument that a wrong should be righted by individual voluntary action. Perhaps we would not have had the war with its 600,000 casualties and the impoverishment of the South, and with the resultant vexing social problem that is at fever heat 100 years later with no end in sight.
- Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant As Leader. For more on Woolman, here’s a short video: Who Is John Woolman?

The important thing is not to stop questioning.
       - Albert Einstein