Explanation Quotes - Page 21

• Science attempts to figure out laws and then uses it later. While the work of art reflects the cosmic order without asking for an explanation

  Alija Izetbegovic

  Art, Order, Law

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• Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.

  A. N. Wilson

  Mother, Space, Intellectual

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• I have no decision-making role at all in my job description. I would have liked an explanation as to why I was moved from first base coach to the ambassadorship, but none was ever given.

  Mookie Wilson

  Jobs, Decision, Roles

  Mookie Wilson, Erik Sherman (2014). “Mookie: Life, Baseball, and the '86 Mets”, p.134, Penguin

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• The publisher, Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately sixty percent of Americans now get the point, but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher.

  Robert Scheer

  Regret, Lying, Iraq

  "On Leaving the LA Times". www.huffingtonpost.com. May 25, 2011.

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• How good is Missouri quarterback Chase Daniel anyway? ... to me, Daniel's brilliance has nothing to do with the big numbers he puts up more or less every week. Howie Long once gave a great explanation of what it was like to get beat by quarterback legend Joe Montana. He said it was like getting knocked out in a pillow fight. You never felt the blow. And you were all kinds of mad afterward. That's as good as any description of Daniel. ... So what does Daniel do? Something right. On every play. In chess, grandmasters will tell you that it's the most innocuous-looking moves that are deadliest.

  Joe Posnanski

  Moving, Fighting, Blow

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• Feeling very happy - why? An explanation is needed. No, happiness needs no explanation, happiness is its own explanation. God is creating because that is the only way he can be happy, that is the only way he loves, that is the only way he sings, that's the only way he can be at all. Creation is his innermost nature, no why is needed.

  Rajneesh

  Happiness, Creating, Feelings

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• The main object of teaching is not to give explanations, but to knock at the doors of the mind.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Teaching, Past, Doors

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• But the stupidity which is common to all such "explanations" is, of course, simply that of proceeding as though the merits of a theory - such things as truth, or probability, or explanatory power - could not possibly be among the reasons for its currency.

  David Stove

  Stupidity, Libertarian, Merit

  David Stove (2013). “On Enlightenment”, p.17, Transaction Publishers

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• The general uncertainty about the prospects of medical treatment is socially handled by rigid entry requirements. These are designed to reduce the uncertainty in the mind of the consumer as to the quality insofar as this is possible. I think this explanation, which is perhaps the naive one, is much more tenable than any idea of a monopoly seeking to increase incomes.

  Kenneth Arrow

  Thinking, Ideas, Mind

  Kenneth Joseph Arrow (1983). “Collected Papers of Kenneth J. Arrow: Applied economics”, p.42, Harvard University Press

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• It isn't a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government's propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They'll fasten the chains to their own ankles. H.L. Mencken once said that the state doesn't just want to make you obey. It tries to make you want to obey. And that's one thing the government schools do very well.

  Llewellyn Rockwell

  Children, Growing Up, Real

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• In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.

  Tahir Shah

  Confusing, India

  FaceBook post by Tahir Shah from Apr 21, 2013

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• With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people’s satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings.

  Robert Farrar Capon

  Jesus, People, Understanding

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• Knowing something for oneself or for communication to an expert colleague is not the same as knowing it for explanation to a student.

  Hyman Bass

  Teacher, Communication, Teaching

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• Explanations comfort us by giving the impression that there is an order in things.

  Mason Cooley

  Order, Giving, Comfort

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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 can have little patience with those who oppose ... the theory of evolution or what are called "mechanistic" explanations of the phenomena of life because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irrelevant or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts , the conservative only weakens his own position.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Theory Of Evolution, Littles, Faces

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, 1960.

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• The explanation of types of structure in classes - as resulting from the will of the Deity, to create animals on certain plans - is no explanation. It has not the character of a physical law and is therefore utterly useless. It foretells nothing because we know nothing of the will of the Deity, how it acts and whether constant or inconstant like that of man.

  Charles Darwin

  Character, Men, Animal

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• With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. . . . The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause -- a cause that is comforting, liberating, and relieving.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Giving, Feelings, Comforting

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.307, Penguin

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• In the firm belief that the American public deserves a better explanation than that thus far given by the Air Force, I strongly recommend that there be a committee investigation of the UFO phenomena. I think we owe it to the people to establish credibility regarding UFOs, and to produce the greatest possible enlightenment of the subject.

  Gerald R. Ford

  Thinking, Air, People

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• Christian apologists who argue that a story about an empty tomb is convincing evidence of a resurrected body are likely unfamiliar with Occam’s razor, which states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. They assume that the most likely explanation is miraculous resurrection through some unproven divine connection, but more likely scenarios include a stolen body, a mismarked grave, a planned removal, faulty reports, creative storytelling, edited scriptures, etc. No magic required.

  David G. McAfee

  Christian, Convincing Evidence, Creative

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• I don't really have an explanation. I'm struggling myself to comprehend what has happened and find a reason for it.

  Paula Radcliffe

  Struggle, Reason, Happened

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• We must turn away from work that replaces experience and pleasure with explanation.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Experience, Pleasure, Turns

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• Artists of all sorts remain youthful for so long, and in many cases attain a grand old age. The explanation is that they live in an almost permanent condition of stimulation and excitement.

  Egon Friedell

  Artist, Long, Age

  Egon Friedell (2008). “A Cultural History of the Modern Age Vol. 1: Renaissance and Reformation”, p.60, Transaction Publishers

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• The body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one's flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure glow not explainable.

  John Muir

  Eye, Sunshine, Entering

  John Muir (1997). “Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, My First Summer in the Sierra, the Mountains of California, Stickeen, Selected Essays”, p.228, Library of America

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• ...contemporary physicists come in two varieties. Type 1 physicists are bothered by EPR and Bell's Theorem. Type 2 (the majority) are not, but one has to distinguish two subvarieties. Type 2a physicists explain why they are not bothered. Their explanations tend either to miss the point entirely (like Born's to Einstein) or to contain physical assertions that can be shown to be false. Type 2b are not bothered and refuse to explain why.

  David Mermin

  Science, Two, Missing

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