Explanation Quotes - Page 18

• As a writer I'm not an explainer, really. I'm a narrator. I mistrust explanation.

  D. T. Max

  Narrators, Mistrust

  Interview with Samuel Cohen, logger.believermag.com. September 11, 2012.

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• there have been too many events in my life, and in the lives of my friends, which have defied any kind of scientific explanation. Science does not have appropriate tools for the dissection of the spirit.

  Jane Goodall

  Events, Doe, Tools

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• If you look through all the different cultures. Right from the earliest, earliest days with the animistic religions, we have sought to have some kind of explanation for our life, for our being, that is outside of our humanity.

  Jane Goodall

  Humanity, Different, Culture

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• In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of information, which he cannot divulge by phone. By the time the hero arrives at the place where they had arranged to meet, the caller is dead, or too near death to tell. There is never an explanation for the reluctance of the caller to impart his message in the first place.

  Renata Adler

  Hero, Phones, Calling

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.100, New York Review of Books

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• The chief point we must remember is that the great and rapid advance of the physical sciences took place in fields where it proved that explanation and prediction could be based on laws which accounted for the observed phenomena as functions of comparatively few variables - either particular facts or relative frequencies of events.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Law, Events, Variables

  Friedrich August von Hayek's Prize Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 11, 1974.

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• Medication without explanation is obscene.

  Toni Cade Bambara

  Health, Medication, Obscene

  Toni Cade Bambara (1982). “The Sea Birds are Still Alive: Stories”, Vintage

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• Every articulate family ... generates its own stories, explanations and myths to illuminate the differences in temperament and talent among its children, the lines of allegiance and influence between parent and child.

  Elizabeth Fishel

  Family, Children, Differences

  Elizabeth Fishel (1997). “Sisters: Shared Histories, Lifelong Ties”, Red Wheel

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• The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts... Seek simplicity and distrust it.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Simplicity, Statistics, Facts

  Alfred North Whitehead (2013). “The Concept of Nature”, p.163, Courier Corporation

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• the explanation of the ebb and flow of the women's movement ... is partly psychological. During those early post-war years when successes came thick and fast and were almost thrust upon us, the nation was still under the influence of the reconstruction spirit, when everything seemed possible ... A few years later the nation had reached the stage which follows a drinking bout. It was feeling ruefully in its empty pockets. It did not want to part with anything to anybody. Its head ached. Noble sentiments made it feel sick. It wanted only to be left alone.

  Eleanor Rathbone

  War, Drinking, Years

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• Reality is far more complex and messy than many of the grander themes and explanations would have us believe.

  Peter Dicken

  Believe, Reality, Theme

  Peter Dicken (2003). “Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the 21st Century”, p.14, SAGE

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• An ounce of convention is worth a pound of explanation.

  Ethel Mumford

  Pounds, Conventions

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• I live in the middle of nowhere and I'm an insomniac. I just make the time and I read and write really fast so that makes a lot possible for me. I wish I had an explanation for it. I'm grateful for it.

  Roxane Gay

  Grateful, Writing, Wish

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• Probably the best explanation for my success and other Internet writers, is that we're tapping a genre or a niche out there that needs to be filled and isn't.

  Tucker Max

  Needs, Niche, Internet

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• While political and cultural factors are important as explanations for differences in national technology policy and industrial practices, emergent trends in science, engineering and management are leading to new paradigms for high-technology innovation in both Japan and the United States.

  Lewis M. Branscomb

  Technology, Japan, Engineering

  Lewis M. Branscomb, Fumio Kodama (1993). “Japanese innovation strategy: technical support for business visions”, University Press of America

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• Neither the good nor the true is self-realizing, so it is not generally a sufficient explanation of why people believe that X is true, or of why people do Y that Y is good.

  Raymond Geuss

  Believe, Self, People

  "Philosophy and Real Politics". Book by Raymond Geuss, 2008.

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• The explanation avails nothing, which in leading us from one difficulty involves us in another.

  Horace

  Difficulty

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• Whenever you're faced with an explanation of what's going on in Washington, the choice between incompetence and conspiracy, always choose incompetence.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Choices, Conspiracy, Incompetence

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• The radicals...want speech regulated by codes that proscribe certain language. They see free speech as at best a delusion, at worst a threat to the welfare of minorities and women....The most obvious (and cynical) explanation for the switched positions is the switched situations. Protesting students became established professors and administrators. For outsiders, free speech is bread and butter; for insiders, indigestion. To the new academics, unregulated free speech spells trouble.

  Russell Jacoby

  Cynical, Want, Outsiders

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• We do not live in a world that mainly suffers bad policies due to lack of ideas about better ones, or lack of elegant explanations supporting good policies, but one that suffers bad policies due to system and meta-system level incentives.

  Patri Friedman

  Ideas, Suffering, Incentives

  "Public Choice Ignorance Everywhere". athousandnations.com. November 9, 2010.

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• Brilliant. A very funny and concise explanation of why we men are as we are. If you are male, you should read it and then make your partner read it, so they will no longer hate you but pity you instead.

  Harry Enfield

  Hate, Men, Males

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• The purpose of all our explanations is not to have you understand anything, but for you to snap from the understanding of the intellect to the understanding of pure spirit. All our explanations work backwards.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhist, Understanding, Purpose

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• And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.

  Chinua Achebe

  Fiction, Adequate, Helping

  Chinua Achebe (1989). “Hopes and impediments: selected essays”, Doubleday, [1989]

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• Beyond all explanations which a good brain can give, why do we choose the worse and not the better, why hate rather than love, why greed and not generosity, why self-centred activity and not open total action? Why be mean when there are soaring mountains and flashing streams? Why jealousy and not love? Why?

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Hate, Mean, Self

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (1984). “Krishnamurti's notebook”, Harper San Francisco

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• I loved Sherlock Holmes as a kid, but I remember being disappointed when he'd come up with these simple explanations for these complex mysteries.

  Peter Weir

  Kids, Simple, Remember

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.

  Bertrand Russell

  Believe, United States, Needs

  Bertrand Russell (2004). “Sceptical Essays”, p.146, Psychology Press

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