Explanation Quotes - Page 19

• Bigotry has always been the poison of America, and we oughta do everything to eradicate it with no excuses or explanations.

  Charles Schumer

  America, Poison, No Excuses

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• The existence of mysterious relations between all these different domains is the most striking and delightful feature of mathematics (having no rational explanation).

  Vladimir Arnold

  Different, Mysterious, Mathematics

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• God doesn't owe us an explanation for everything and actually what I've found is that explanations don't comfort. What comforts is the presence of God, not the explanation of God.

  Rick Warren

  Comfort, Found, Presence Of God

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• The most effective executive branch officials try to help legislators develop explanations for the votes they are being asked to take.

  Robert Zoellick

  Trying, Branches, Helping

  "Robert Zoellick: “Getting Stuff Done” at the World Bank and Beyond" by Mark V. Vlasic, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 5, 2012.

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• In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves.

  Douglas Coupland

  Dream, Mean, Self

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• The first rule of world-building is available physics, which basically means that if you want it to feel real, it has to follow the same rules as this world, from gravity to how human behaviour works. If you have a fantasy element that doesnt obey the laws of physics, make sure that it has a fantasy explanation.

  Trudi Canavan

  Real, Mean, Law

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• Life is bigger than our explanations of it. To be in touch with life, go beyond your explanations.

  Julio Olalla

  Life Is, Bigger

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• Either over neither, both over either/or, live-and-let-live over stand-or die, high spirits over low, energy over apathy, wit over dullness, jokes over homilies, good humor over jokes, good nature over bad, feeling over sentiment, truth over poetry, consciousness over explanations, tragedy over pathos, comedy over tragedy, entertainment over art, private over public, generosity over meanness, charity over murder, love over charity, irreplaceable over interchangeable, divergence over concurrence, principle over interest, people over principle.

  Marvin Mudrick

  Art, People, Generosity

  Marvin Mudrick (1981). “Nobody Here But Us Chickens”

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• Visit Cape Town and history is never far from your grasp. It lingers in the air, a scent on the breezy, an explanation of circumstance that shaped the Rainbow People. Stroll around the old downtown and it's impossible not to be affected by the trials and tribulations of the struggle. But, in many ways, it is the sense of triumph in the face of such adversity that makes the experience all the more poignant.

  Tahir Shah

  Struggle, Adversity, Air

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• In short-to overstate the point only slightly-because people don't really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable as anyone else's, and in many circumstances actually less so.

  Kwame

  People, Giving, Behavior

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• The argument from design is ultimately an appeal to miraculous causes, i.e., causes that do not, and cannot, occur in the natural course of events. This is why an explanation via design is not a legitimate alternative to scientific and other naturalistic modes of explanation. To refer to a miraculous cause is to refer to something that is inherently unknowable, and this sanctuary of ignorance explains nothing at all. However much it may soothe the imagination of the ignorant, it does nothing to satisfy the understanding of a rational person.

  George H. Smith

  Ignorance, Imagination, Design

  George H. Smith (2000). “Why Atheism?”, Pyr Books

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• Define self-awareness and tell me what it is about it that requires something more than a material explanation. I do not accept the burden of explaining all phenomena, real or imagined. If you think more than matter is required for this thing you call self-awareness, which you have not defined, then you have the burden of showing why.

  Victor J. Stenger

  Real, Thinking, Self

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• The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticism of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from it's indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Christian, Plato, Order

  Thomas Jefferson, Joyce Appleby, Terence Ball (1999). “Jefferson: Political Writings”, p.43, Cambridge University Press

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• An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one. I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

  Richard Dawkins

  Atheist, Design, Waiting

  "The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design". Book by Richard Dawkins, September 28, 2015.

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• I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world, and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do.

  Richard Dawkins

  Simple, Thinking, Complicated World

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• On the Cross the Jesus of the Four Gospels, who was God, cried out My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? God cannot forsake himself, Jesus was God himself. Yet God forsook Jesus, and the latter cried out to know why he was forsaken. Any able divine will explain that of course he knew, and that he was not forsaken. The explanation renders it difficult to believe the dying cry, and the passage becomes one of the mysteries of the holy Christian religion, which, unless a man rightly believe, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.

  Charles Bradlaugh

  Christian, Jesus, Believe

  Charles Bradlaugh (2016). “Why do Men Starve? Who Was Jesus Christ? Poverty: Its Effects on the Political Condition of the People and other Essays”, p.16, Library of Alexandria

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• What we call creation science makes no reference to the Bible. It says there are two possible explanations for the origin of the universe and living things: theistic, supernatural creation by an intelligent being, or nontheistic, mechanistic evolutionary theory that posits no goal and no purpose in the evolutionary process. We just happen to be here.

  Duane Gish

  Intelligent, Two, Goal

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• We stand at the end of the Age of Reason. A new era of the magical explanation of the world is rising.

  Adolf Hitler

  Scary, Age, Rising

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• Take care to make things turn out well. Some people scruple more over pointing things in the right direction than over successfully reaching their goals. The disgrace of failure outweighs the diligence they showed. A winner is never asked for explanations.

  Baltasar Gracian

  Success, Goal, People

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• As I write, there is a craze for what is called psychoanalysis, or the cure of diseases by explaining to the patient what is the matter with him: an excellent plan if you happen to know what is the matter with him, especially when the explanation is that there is nothing the matter with him.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Writing, Disease, Matter

  George Bernard Shaw (2016). “The Critical Shaw: On Literature”, p.48, RosettaBooks

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• The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education.

  John Dewey

  Education, Successful, Government

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education: Top American Authors”, p.66, 谷月社

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• Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation forthe existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

  Richard Dawkins

  Selfish, Eye, Sight

  The Blind Watchmaker ch. 1 (1986) See Paley 3

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• The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Mean, Law, Narrative

  Elizabeth Bowen (1959). “Stories”

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• Passion impels our deeds; ideology supplies the explanations.

  Mason Cooley

  Passion, Deeds, Ideology

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• Human nature is a scoundrel's favorite explanation.

  Mason Cooley

  Humanity, Human Nature, Scoundrels

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