Explaining Quotes - Page 4

• Thanks to the central bank, most "monetary experts" and "leading macro-economists" can, by putting them on the payroll, be turned into government propagandists "explaining," like alchemists, how stones (paper) can be turned into bread (wealth).

  Hans-Hermann Hoppe

  Government, Alchemist, Experts

  "Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe on the Impracticality of One-World Government and the Failure of Western-style Democracy". Interview with Anthony Wile, www.thedailybell.com. March 27, 2011.

  37 Copy quote

  Show source

• A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like 'arraigned,' 'curried' and 'exculpate' meant, and explaining who Job was.   In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today's expensively under-educated generation.

  Thomas Sowell

  Jobs, School, Men

  Thomas Sowell (2006). “Ever Wonder Why? and Other Controversial Essays”, Hoover Inst Press

  99 Copy quote

  Show source

• Jesus almost never talked in terms of explaining. He was always using enigmatic stories and difficult metaphors. He was always pulling people into some kind of participation.

  Eugene H. Peterson

  Jesus, Art, People

  17 Copy quote

• The notion of getting under the hood and explaining how something works, that's fairly familiar territory to me.

  Scott McCloud

  Territory, Hood, Familiar

  4 Copy quote

• I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair.[Explaining his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial.]

  John T. Scopes

  Roles, Trials, Body

  45 Copy quote

• I went around to the little schoolhouses, talking like a professor, explaining our platform. We were lucky if the collection gave us enough for gas to get to the next place. We encouraged questions, and people asked us if it was true we were going to take their farms, like the Soviets in Russia, and did we believe in God.

  Tommy Douglas

  Believe, Russia, Talking

  "Tommy Douglas". Book by Doris French Shackleton, 1983.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• A garden full of sweet odours is a garden full of charm, a most precious kind of charm not to be implanted by mere skill in horticulture or power of purse, and which is beyond explaining. It is born of sensitive and very personal preferences yet its appeal is almost universal.

  Louise Wilder

  Sweet, Nature, Power

  Louise Beebe Wilder (1990). “The fragrant path”, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Use, Pseudo, Brilliant

  "Culture and Value" by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Peter Winch, (p. 55e), 1980.

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

  Donald Kagan

  Stories, Way, Historian

  Interview with Bruce Cole, www.neh.gov. May/June 2005.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was reminding myself of the one basic rule for experts on females: confine yourself absolutely to explaining why she did what she has already done because that will save the trouble of explaining why she didn't do what you said she would.

  Rex Stout

  Women, Experts, Female

  Rex Stout (2011). “GAMBIT”, p.81, Bantam

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The difficulty of explaining ‘why I am a Catholic’ is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Catholic, Reason, Difficulty

  20 Copy quote

• There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?

  Willa Cather

  Attitude, Numbers, Mind

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.45, U of Nebraska Press

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• It hardly needs explaining at length, I think, how much authority or beauty is added to style by the timely use of proverbs. In the first place who does not see what dignity they confer on style by their antiquity alone?... And so to interweave adages deftly and appropriately is to make the language as a whole glitter with sparkles from Antiquity, please us with the colours of the art of rhetoric, gleam with jewel-like words of wisdom, and charm us with titbits of wit and humour.

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Art, Thinking, Jewels

  4 Copy quote

• A writer is not interested in explaining reality, he’s only interested in capturing it.

  Brendan Kennelly

  Reality, Not Interested

  16 Copy quote

• What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

  R. D. Laing

  Understanding, Defining, Description

  4 Copy quote

• People are self-centered to a nauseous degree. They will keep on about themselves while I'm explaining me.

  Piet Pieterszoon Hein

  Self, People, Degrees

  4 Copy quote

• Explaining why he was forced to cut a utility player: You just got caught in a position where you have no position.

  Sparky Anderson

  Cutting, Player, Justice

  12 Copy quote

• I can conceive few human states more enviable than that of the man to whom, panting in the foul laboratory, or watching for his life under the tropic forest, Isis shall for a moment lift her sacred veil, and show him, once and for ever, the thing he dreamed not of; some law, or even mere hint of a law, explaining one fact; but explaining with it a thousand more, connecting them all with each other and with the mighty whole, till order and meaning shoots through some old Chaos of scattered observations.

  Charles Kingsley

  Science, Men, Isis

  Charles Kingsley (1873). “Selections from Some of the Writings of the Rev. C. Kingsley, M.A.”, p.336

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

  Jason Mraz

  Dream, Song, Writing

  "Jason Mraz Goes to School". Christina Fuoco, Rolling Stone, September 2, 2007.

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• I remember my father explaining, "A capitalist system is a dog-eat-dog system."

  Frances Fox Piven

  Dog, Father, Remember

  Frances Fox Piven (2013). “Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven?: The Essential Writings of the Professor Glenn Beck Loves to Hate”, p.64, The New Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't want to spend my life explaining myself. You either get it, or you don't.

  Frank Zappa

  Want

  11 Copy quote

• Barack Obama was speaking to a Jewish group, and he told them that his name Barack is the same as the Jewish word 'baruch,' which means one who's blessed. That's what he said, yeah. Obama had a harder time explaining his middle name, Hussein. Things got quiet there.

  Conan O'Brien

  Blessed, Mean, Names

  5 Copy quote

• I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.

  Van Jones

  Fighting, Past, Hands

  Van Jones (2013). “Rebuild the Dream”, p.36, Nation Books

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.

  Stanley Fish

  Writing, Practice, Forever

  "How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One". Book by Stanley Fish, 2011.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide. I have been inundated with calls - from across the political spectrum -- urging me to 'stay and fight.' But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.

  Van Jones

  Lying, Fighting, Past

  "Glenn Beck Gets First Scalp: Van Jones Resigns". www.huffingtonpost.com. October 21, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source