Explanation Quotes - Page 17

• Writing about race and crime was not new territory for me. But it can be treacherous. So here are my rules: No stereotypes. No generalizations. No explanations. No apologies. Just the facts, ma'am.

  Colin Flaherty

  Writing, Apology, Race

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• Work/Loaf Ratio”...I have spent fourteen years perfecting... I won't bore you with a long-winded explanation of the “W/LR” save to say that it is an algebraic formula of such complex numeric subtlety that it can be understood only by mathematicians and hobos.

  Gary Reilly

  Years, Bores You, Long

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• If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!

  Richard Dawkins

  Jobs, Offering, Engineering

  "The Blind Watchmaker". Book by Richard Dawkins, 1986.

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• Hopefully we are emerging from an era of fantasy explanations for real phenomena. The authors certainly have to face a community of therapists who are obsessionally committed to explanations for disease and for therapy unsupported by a scrap of evidence except for their claimed therapeutic success.

  Patrick David Wall

  Pain, Real, Community

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• On several occasions, we are informed that the professional ideal 'took steps', 'organised assaults', and 'selected social problems'. But this is anthropomorphic metaphor implausibly masquerading as historical explanation.

  David Cannadine

  Book, Historical, Steps

  David Cannadine (1998). “History in Our Time”, Penguin Group USA

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• If a large number of people who are convinced alien abductions are real are hypnotising even larger numbers of others who suspect they might be, then it is likely there will be many alien abduction narratives flying around, as, indeed, there are. Of course, this is not proof they are not true, but it does provide a persuasive context for a simple psychosocial explanation. Hypnotism is a technique that triggers a mass storytelling project in which all the stories are linked.

  Bryan Appleyard

  Real, Simple, Numbers

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• I have shown that those who deplore Artificial Intelligence are also those who deplore the evolutionary accounts of human mentality: if human minds are non-miraculous products of evolution, then they are, in the requisite sense, artifacts, and all their powers must have an ultimately mechanical explanation. We are descended from macros and made of macros, and nothing we can do is beyond the power of huge assemblies of macros.

  Daniel Dennett

  Mind, Evolution, Assembly

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• I was lucky to wander into evolutionary theory, one of the most exciting and important of all scientific fields. I had never heard of it when I started at a rather tender age; I was simply awed by dinosaurs. I thought paleontologists spent their lives digging up bones and putting them together, never venturing beyond the momentous issue of what connects to what. Then I discovered evolutionary theory. Ever since then, the duality of natural history-richness in particularities and potential union in underlying explanation-has propelled me.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Issues, Important, Atheism

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• Changing ideas is a strain not to be lightly incurred, particularly when these ideas are intimately related to one's self-esteem ... men have elaborated an explanation for their situation in life... Their rationales are endowed with moral qualities.

  Robert E Lane

  Self Esteem, Men, Ideas

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• Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.

  Steven Pinker

  Theory Of Evolution, Atheism, Would Be

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• Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science ... Interpretation is the logical channel of consilient explanation between science and the arts. The arts ... also nourish our craving for the mystical.

  E. O. Wilson

  Art, Blood, Intuition

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• Well, one thing that I like to do is treat the audience as if they're already kind of at the table - they're already a part of the conversation. They don't need the 101 explanation. It's as if bringing a stranger to the table to sit down with these people who are already acting as peers or friends and opening up and just sharing their stories.

  Rhys Ernst

  People, Acting, Kind

  Source: www.ew.com

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• If you want something done, ask. If you want something done quickly, ask, and then begin counting down from ten with no explanation.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Want Something, Done, Counting

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• As an explanation of the world materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has the quality of a madman's arguments; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Simplicity, Leaving, Insane

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.15, Simon and Schuster

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• But let the wise be warned against too great readiness to explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.

  George Eliot

  Wise, Mistake, Source

  George Eliot (2015). “Middlemarch: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.295, Penguin

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• It is a view of God that compensates every thing else, and enables the soul to rest in His bosom. How, when the child in the night screams with terror, hearing sounds that it knows not of, is that child comforted and put to rest? Is it by a philosophical explanation that the sounds were made by the rats in the partition? Is it by imparting entomological knowledge? No; it is by the mother taking the child in her lap, and singing sweetly to it, and rocking it. And the child thinks nothing of the explanation, but only of the mother.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Trust, Mother, Children

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• When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse.

  Honore de Balzac

  Horse, Heart, Intelligent

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• We injure mysteries, which are matters of faith, by any attempt at explanation in order to make them matters of reason. Could they be explained, they would cease to be mysteries; and it has been well said that a thing is not necessarily against reason because it happens to be above it.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Order, Matter, Mystery

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”

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• How we love to blame others for our misfortunes! Almost every individual who has lost money in stock speculation has on the tip of his tongue an explanation which he trots out to show that it wasn't his own fault at all.... Hardly one loser has the manliness to say frankly, "I was wrong.

  B. C. Forbes

  Tongue, Faults, Blame

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• every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.

  Virginia Woolf

  Hands, People, Soul

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.499, Wordsworth Editions

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• A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.

  Virginia Woolf

  Wine, Giving, Water

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.89, Lulu Press, Inc

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• a great man always knows better than to explain unless an explanation is demanded. To rush into explanations and excuses is always a sign of weakness.

  Agatha Christie

  Men, Weakness, Excuse

  Agatha Christie (1959). “Murder at the manor: The Seven dials mystery, Crooked House, Ordeal by innocence”

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• The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

  Agatha Christie

  Simplest

  Agatha Christie “Annotated The Mysterious Affairs at Styles with English Grammar Exercises: by Agatha Christie (Author), Robert Powell (Editor)”, Powell Publications, LLC

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• The problem for cookery-bookery writers like me is to understand the extent of our readers' experience. I hope have solved that riddle in my books by simply telling everything. The experienced cook will know to skip through the verbiage, but the explanations will be there for those who still need them.

  Julia Child

  Book, Cooking, Needs

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• When confronted with a demand that the universe have a cause, infidels have usually pointed out that God was not much of an explanation. This is true enough, but not really a positive argument. After mechanistic explanation became popular, infidels liked to restrict causality to the chain of causes in an eternal material universe, pointing out that no supernatural cause was then necessary. Plausible, but still rather defensive. Today's skeptic can do better. In all likelihood, the universe is uncaused. It is random. It just is.

  Taner Edis

  Religion, Demand, Causality

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