Explanation Quotes - Page 11

• ...if you ask me whether or not I'm an atheist, I wouldn't even answer. I would first want an explanation of what it is that I'm supposed not to believe in, and I've never seen an explanation.

  Noam Chomsky

  Atheist, Believe, Answers

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• Truth is truth, not the explanations of Truth. Truth is a living, moving process. Truth is constantly undulating and vibrating. You can become one with the Truth, but you cannot adequately explain it.

  Ilchi Lee

  Moving, Truth Is, Process

  FaceBook post by Ilchi Lee from May 28, 2014

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• For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.

  Carl Sagan

  Religious, Time, Long

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.194, Ballantine Books

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• God is in my head, but the devil is in my pants.

  Jonathan Winters

  Inspirational, Devil, Pants

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• He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Inspirational, Watches, Void

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• The pre-history of our species is hag-ridden with episodes of nightmarish ignorance and calamity, for which religion used to identify, not just the wrong explanation, but the wrong culprit. Human sacrifices were made preeminently in times of epidemics, useless prayers were uttered, bogus miracles attested to, and scapegoats - such as Jews or heretics or witches - hunted down and burned.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Prayer, Ignorance, Sacrifice

  Christopher Hitchens (2007). “The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever”, p.9, Da Capo Press

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• Any attempt at understanding humanity must include an explanation of the hold that supernatural belief continues to have on most of the human race.

  Victor J. Stenger

  Race, Understanding, Humanity

  Victor J. Stenger (1990). “Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses”

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• Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

  Nellie L. McClung

  Motivational, Apology, Criticism

  Nellie L. McClung (1915). “In Times Like These”, p.7, University of Toronto Press

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• The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

  Isaac Newton

  Philosophy, Science, Experience

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• Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well.

  Richard Dawkins

  Ignorance, Simple, Religion

  "Should Religion Impact Your Vote?" by Roy Speckhardt, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 7, 2011.

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• A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.

  Richard Dawkins

  Design, Religion, Atheism

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.136, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.

  Richard Dawkins

  Real, People, Religion

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• Understanding God is not attained by calling into session all arguments for and against Him, in order to debate whether He is a reality or a figment of the mind. God cannot be sensed as a second thought, as an explanation of the origin of the universe. He is either the first and the last, or just another concept.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Atheist, Reality, Understanding God

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1976). “God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism”, p.120, Macmillan

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• Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, religion no longer offers an explanation for anything important.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Religion, Atheism, Important

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• Since the most important element of any concept is that its originating question be appropriately framed, any theory demanding an explanation for homosexuality is a problematic one because it maintains our existence as a category of deviance. I mean, no one is running around trying to figure out why some people like sports, for example.

  Sarah Schulman

  Sports, Running, Mean

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• Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they're part of the crime.

  Olavo de Carvalho

  War, Corruption, Crime

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• Never complain. Never explain.

  Katharine Hepburn

  Positivity, Complaining, Complaints

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• Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Book, Reading, Suggestions

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• We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.

  Tom Stoppard

  Time, Moving, Taken

  Tom Stoppard (1991). “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead”, Grove/Atlantic

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• It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it (i.e. the Book of Revelations), and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherence of our own nightly dreams.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Dream, Religious, Book

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• It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.

  Richard Dawkins

  Crazy, Smell, Mad

  "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder". The Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC1 Television, 1996.

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• You know, it's cigarettes that killed Jerry Garcia. Everyone thinks it's heroin, but it wasn't. It was cigarettes.

  John Mellencamp

  Thinking, Smoking, Heroin

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• There are situations when all answers and explanations fade. When you fully accept that you do not know, you give up struggling to find answers with the limited thinking mind. That is when the greater intelligence can operate though you. Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Giving Up, Struggle, Mean

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• Listen. Don't explain or justify.

  Wayne Dyer

  Listening, Justify

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• Whatever the explanation, it's perfectly obvious that our educational system has nothing to do with education: it's a babysitting service designed to replicate the worst qualities of the parents.

  Stephen R. Donaldson

  Educational, School, Parent

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