Explanation Quotes - Page 8

• 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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• They [scientists of centuries past] call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Lonely, Religious, Science

  Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.353, W. W. Norton & Company

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• In evolution, as in all areas of science, our knowledge is incomplete. But the entire success of the scientific enterprise has depended on an insistence that these gaps be filled by natural explanations, logically derived from confirmable evidence. Because "intelligent design" theories are based on supernatural explanations, they can have nothing to do with science.

  Bruce Alberts

  Intelligent, Design, Gaps

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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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• 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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• We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space - how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Space, Atoms, Body

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2003). “A Nietzsche Reader”, p.77, Penguin UK

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• There's a time when you have to explain to your children why they're born, and it's a marvelous thing if you know the reason by then.

  Hazel Scott

  Family, Children, Reason

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• There's nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitive child.

  Frank A. Clark

  Children, Christian Inspirational, Trying

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• I'm not smart enough to lie

  Ronald Reagan

  Smart, Liars, Lying

  Ronald Reagan, Bill Adler (1981). “The Reagan wit”, Jameson Books

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• Personal history must be constantly renewed by telling parents, relatives, and friends everything one does. On the other hand, for the warrior who has no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with his acts. And above all, no one pins him down with their thoughts and their expectations.

  Carlos Castaneda

  Spiritual, Courage, Warrior

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