Explaining Quotes - Page 14

• A quote that I like very much comes close to explaining my attitude about taking photographs. ‘Chinese poetry rarely trespasses beyond the bounds of actuality the great Chinese poets accept the world exactly as they find it in all its terms and with profound simplicity they seldom talk about one thing in terms of another; but are able enough and sure enough as artists to make the ultimately exact terms become the beautiful terms.’

  Stephen Shore

  Beautiful, Attitude, Artist

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• But the individual butterfly or earthquake remains just the unique existence which it is. We forget in explaining its occurrence that it is only the occurrence that is explained, not the thing itself.

  John Dewey

  Butterfly, Unique, Earthquakes

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, R. W. Sleeper (2008). “The Later Works, 1925-1953: 1939-1941”, p.112, SIU Press

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• The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them. And one can debate long and profitably on the rule of Nobody, which is what the political form known as bureau-cracy truly is….we have become very much accustomed by modern psychology and sociology, not to speak of modern bureaucracy, to explaining away the responsibility of the doer for his deed in terms of this or that kind of determinism.

  Hannah Arendt

  Responsibility, Men, Essence

  "The Origins of Totalitarianism". Book by Hannah Arendt, progressive.org. 1951.

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• Ayn Rand more than anyone else did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism.

  Paul Ryan

  Jobs, Morality, Individualism

  "Does America Need Ayn Rand or Jesus?" By Onkar Ghate, www.foxnews.com. June 29, 2011.

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• Teamwork is wasting half of one's time explaining to others why they are wrong.

  Georges Wolinski

  Teamwork, Half, Recreation

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• You can never underestimate that moment of somebody explaining your life to you, something you thought was inexplicable, through music. That was the way out of loneliness.

  Carrie Brownstein

  Loneliness, Way, Underestimate

  "Stumptown Girl" by Margaret Talbot, www.newyorker.com. January 2, 2012.

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• It must have appeared almost as improbable to the earlier geologists, that the laws of earthquakes should one day throw light on the origin of mountains, as it must to the first astronomers, that the fall of an apple should assist in explaining the motions of the moon.

  Charles Lyell

  Fall, Science, Moon

  Charles Lyell (1833). “Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation”, p.5

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• There are a lot of things that I really question - the legality of the drone strikes, these NSA revelations. Jimmy Carter came out and said we don’t live in a democracy. That’s a little intense when an ex-president says that. So you know, he’s got some explaining to do, particularly for a constitutional law professor.

  Matt Damon

  Law, Nsa, Democracy

  "Matt Damon: Obama 'broke up with me'" by Caitlin Mcdevitt, www.politico.com. August 08, 2013.

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• If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.

  Alan Perlis

  Program, Listeners, Ifs

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• Rowing was not simple for me. I nodded whenever the instructor made a point, as if I understood, but I could as easily have assembled the space shuttle as have repeated the moves she was explaining.

  Barry S. Strauss

  Moving, Simple, Space

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• It is better to be devoured by lions than to be eaten by dogs. Explaining why his Northwestern teams played difficult schedules.

  Alex Agase

  Dog, Team, Schedules

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• The truly correct proof is one that strikes a harmonious balance between strength and flexibility. There are plenty of proofs that are technically correct but are messy and inelegant or counterintuitive. But it's not something you can put into words - explaining why a formula is beautiful is like trying to explain why the stars are beautiful.

  Yoko Ogawa

  Beautiful, Stars, Trying

  Yoko Ogawa (2009). “The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel”, p.16, Picador

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• When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.

  Steven Pinker

  Children, War, Thinking

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.14, Penguin

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• Symbols give us our identity, our self image, our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. Symbols in turn determine the kinds of stories we tell, and the stories we tell determine the kind of history we make and remake.

  Mary Robinson

  Writing, Self, Giving

  Fergus Finlay, Mary Robinson (1990). “Mary Robinson: A President With a Purpose”, O'Brien Pr

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• Explaining why President Bush wasn't following up on his campaign pledge that there would be no loss of wetlands: He didn't say that. He was reading what was given to him in a speech.

  Richard Darman

  Reading, Loss, President

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• The principles behind explaining and educating the product or the elected official is similar, even though the actual execution of it is very, very different.

  Frank Luntz

  Principles, Different, Execution

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• For Indians, images are a means of celebrating mystery and not a manner of explaining it

  Jamake Highwater

  Mean, Mystery, Celebrate

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• Joy Rains has a gift. A gift for explaining abstract concepts like meditation through clever analogies and metaphors. FOR THE FIRST TIME in my hectic, harried life I actually UNDERSTAND how meditation is supposed to work and WHY I should give it a TRY!

  Elisabeth Leamy

  Clever, Rain, Giving

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• Science is about explaining the world, and religion is about interpreting it. There shouldn't be any conflict.

  Paul Davies

  Spring, World, Conflict

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• I wrote a letter to Harvard, explaining that I was having difficulty deciding between it and the University of Pennsylvania. Could I come and visit? Years later, the dean of students at Harvard told me that my letter had been posted in the dean’s office for the amusement of the staff. Thus did I learn the measure of institutional arrogance.

  J. Michael Bishop

  Years, Office, Arrogance

  J. Michael BISHOP (2009). “How to Win the Nobel Prize”, p.43, Harvard University Press

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• The theory of ramification is one of pure colligation, for it takes no account of magnitude or position; geometrical lines are used, but these have no more real bearing on the matter than those employed in genealogical tables have in explaining the laws of procreation.

  James Joseph Sylvester

  Real, Math, Law

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• Some scientist needs to explain to spectators Einstein's relativity theory. Before his explanation, he says: 'I have to suffer a lot explaining something I don't understand myself.' This relates to my game: I didn't understand anything!

  Vassily Ivanchuk

  Games, Suffering, Needs

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• This is one of those times when explaining a feeling cannot measure up to actually having the feeling

  Adriana Trigiani

  Feelings

  Adriana Trigiani (2010). “Viola in Reel Life”, p.66, Simon and Schuster

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• It's perhaps not so much how your amygdala is tuned that makes you politically extreme, but that your intrinsic nervousness makes you more responsive to things that might seem to threaten your particular social world. Education probably plays an important role in dampening that response by allowing the brain's frontal lobes (where much of the brain's conscious work goes on) to counteract the emotional responses with a more considered view, so explaining why education is invariably the friend of liberal politics.

  Robin Dunbar

  Emotional, Views, Play

  Robin Dunbar (2011). “How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks”, p.170, Harvard University Press

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• For all the time schools devote to the teaching of mathematics, very little (if any) is spent trying to convey just what the subject is about. Instead, the focus is on learning and applying various procedures to solve math problems. That's a bit like explaining soccer by saying it is executing a series of maneuvers to get the ball into the goal. Both accurately describe various key features, but they miss the what and the why of the big picture.

  Keith Devlin

  Soccer, Teaching, School

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