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
For the better part of two centuries, outsiders have been offering explanations that range from racist to learned-sounding - the supposed inferiority of blacks, the heritage of slavery, overpopulation - for why Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Adam Hochschild
Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water.
Alison Gopnik
I don't believe in inspiration at all. We live in a world that demands explanation. And fiction has the capability to offer explanations for things.
Alvaro Enrigue
I'm generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life.
Amitava Kumar
I don't owe any explanations for anybody I'm fighting.
Andre Ward
It is not history, theology or mythology that interest me. It is the fact that history, theology or mythology could have alternative interpretations or explanations. I try to connect the dots between the past and the present.
Ashwin Sanghi
There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.
Benjamin Disraeli
Disagreement does not necessarily have to be overcome. It may remain an important and constitutive feature of our relations to others and also be seen as something that is merely to be expected in the light of the best explanations we have of how such disagreement arises.
Bernard Williams
I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm - not all - that religion used to fill.
Bill Gates
No one faith is necessarily superior to another. All explanations are valid and in some respects when it comes to the big mysteries of life.
Brad Anderson
We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.
Carl Jung
Anytime somebody loses a presidential election, there are lots of explanations.
Chris Murphy
Bigotry has always been the poison of America, and we oughta do everything to eradicate it with no excuses or explanations.
Chuck Schumer
What I don't like so much is to give explanations about people's behaviour... I'm not interested in making conclusions. I would never think about myself or anyone else, 'Well, this happened, this happened, this happened, so this must be the result.' It doesn't work like that with me.
Claire Denis
There's no need to go out in public and give explanations. As long as you know what's going on between two different individuals and what kind of relationship they share, I don't feel that the world really needs to know about it.
Daisy Shah
Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.
David Deutsch
The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.
Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.
The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.
And let me take one of the explanations most commonly given: Analysts were pressured to reach conclusions that would fit the political agenda of one or another administration. I deeply think that is a wrong explanation.
The more you know about Bob Dylan, the less you know. A truly enigmatic artist, Mr. Dylan's work and life offer vaporous handholds, explanations, and instructions. Attempt to grasp them, and they will only dissipate and re-form into another contexture or idea.
The Left has always sought single, non-values-based explanations for human behavior.
We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.
I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.
Nothing you'll read as breaking news will ever hold a candle to the sheer beauty of settled science. Textbook science has carefully phrased explanations for new students, math derived step by step, plenty of experiments as illustration, and test problems.
I touched the limits of our political system, which pushes one to last-minute compromises. Explanations are rarely given. It plays to people's fears because it hasn't built an ideological consensus. It produces flawed solutions and too often ignores reality.
I'm not satisfied with the explanations I get from tv or from school.
Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.
There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.
It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises-but only performance is reality.
You don't need an explanation for everything, Recognize that there are such things as miracles - events for which there are no ready explanations. Later knowledge may explain those events quite easily.
Everybody agrees that the brain is a remarkable machine. It's capable of generating an enormous number of phenomena, some of them very obvious and some of them less obvious. But I think that in the end there are going to be some very basic explanations for many things: emotions, awareness, consciousness, attention, perception, recognition.
Some of these people think the universe is five thousand years old, and they say it with a straight face. If somebody had an explanation saying why they thought the earth was five thousand years old, there's only two possible explanations: you're really stupid, or you're really cynical and trying to get really stupid people's votes.
Although a linguist, I was always interested in, and fascinated by, Stephen's explanations of his work and proud of his discoveries and achievements.
Myths are stories that explain a natural phenomenon. Before humans found scientific explanations for such things as the moon and the sun and rainbows, they tried to understand them by telling stories.
Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.
I think literary theory satisfied a deep love I have for big, encompassing narratives about the world and how it works - which are usually, in the end, more creative visions unto themselves than illuminating explanations.
There are no client conflicts, only bad explanations.
There are no explanations, there are no answers.
Many self-help books give you these neat, tidy formulas that are really illusions. They dupe people into thinking, 'Well if I can just do that, then everything's going to be okay.' My work differs in that I don't offer quick solutions and simple explanations.
It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof.
Apologetic explanations do not develop unless there is a reality that has to be explained and defended. Jesus was undeniably a figure of history.
I found that the recipes in most - in all - the books I had were really not adequate. They didn't tell you enough... I won't do anything unless I'm told why I'm doing it. So I felt that we needed fuller explanations so that if you followed one of those recipes, it should turn out exactly right.
I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make.
Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.
All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.
We should keep in mind that it is easy to concoct stories explaining the past or to become confident about dubious scenarios of the future. We should view both explanations and prophecies with skepticism.
Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted.
And the actual achievements of biology are explanations in terms of mechanisms founded on physics and chemistry, which is not the same thing as explanations in terms of physics and chemistry.
