Explanation Quotes - Page 18

• Chicken exits are self-sabotage. They give you a false explanation for why you don't have something you want.

  Ali Vincent

  Self, Giving, Want

  Ali Vincent (2009). “Believe It, Be It: How Being the Biggest Loser Won Me Back My Life”, p.109, Rodale

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• 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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• Death is not regarded as a natural affair by primitive man. Death is believed to be due to the intervention of some malevolent or at least not well disposed power. Normally it should not take place. So we have all through history crude explanations of death, as e.g., the influence of the serpent, the devil, sin.

  Joseph Alexander Leighton

  Men, Primitive Man, Devil

  Joseph Alexander Leighton (1918). “The Field of Philosophy: An Outline of Lectures on Introduction to Philosophy”

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• It appears, from all that precedes, reasonably certain that if there be any relative motion between the earth and the luminiferous ether, it must be small; quite small enough entirely to refute Fresnel's explanation of aberration.

  Albert A. Michelson

  Aberration, Earth, Enough

  "On the Relative Motion of the Earth and the Luminiferous Ether". Article by by Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley. American Journal of Science, 1887, 34 (203), p. 341, en.wikisource.org. 1887.

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• Historically, labor unions arose when people had gotten a taste of a different lifestyle and were willing to pay a lot more for their basic livelihood and had gotten into a fix they couldn't get out of - because they had accepted the unacceptable to begin with. Accepting something you have to form a labor union to fight after the fact only tells me that people were acting against their own best (or even good) interests for a long time. I don't see any rational, coherent explanation for this sort of behavior in humans, but it's all over the place.

  Erik Naggum

  Fighting, Long, People

  "Source access vs dynamism". Usenet discussion groups, groups.google.com. August 28, 1999.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• The nature of Christ is, I grant it, from one end to another, a web of mysteries; but this mysteriousness does not correspond to the difficulties which all existence contains. Let it be rejected, and the whole world is an enigma; let it be accepted, and we possess a wonderful explanation of the history of man.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Men, Doe, World

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 423, 1895.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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