Quotes About Explanation

Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.

This is the real reason why no one tells us Africans anything. It is not because anyone wants to keep my continent in ignorance. It is because nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles. Or maybe you would like to, but you can't. Your culture has become sophisticated, like a computer, or a drug that you take for a headache. You can use it, but you cannot explain how it works.

What's the difference between a strike day and a normal day at an Italian post office? On a strike day they put a sign out front to explain why no one's working.

So, what was the reason for the number of biblical citations being so high? Well, it was that most of the biblical citations came from sermons, as Lutz clearly explained:

As long as the origin of life can't be explained in natural terms, the hypothesis of an instant divine creation of life cannot objectively be ruled out.

Une institution présente ne peut être expliquée par le simple fait qu'elle a existé dans le passé, même si ce passé est récent. Je ne nie pas que certains éléments du patriarcat d'aujourd'hui ressemblent à des éléments du « patriarcat » d'il y a cent ans : simplement cette durée - si tant est qu'il y ait durée, c'est-à-dire qu'il s'agisse bien de la même chose - ne constitue pas en elle-même un facteur explicatif. (p. 18)

Une connaissance qui prendrait pour point de départ l'oppression des femmes constituerait une révolution épistémologique, et non une nouvelle discipline ayant les femmes pour objet ou une explication ad hoc d'une oppression particulière.

Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues found that when the experimental subjects gestured during their explanation, they later remembered more from the word list than when they did not gesture. She noted that while people tend to think of gesturing as reflecting an individual's mental state, it appears that gesture contributes to shaping that state. In the case of her subjects, their gesturing somehow lightened the mental load, allowing them to devote more resources to memory.

The history of any scientific concept—energy, atom, gene, cancer, memory—is one of increased differentiation and sophistication until it can be explained in a quantitative and mechanistic manner at a lower, more elemental level.

there is but a single reality out there, and science is getting increasingly better at describing it.

You could reason out that adults did not have to explain to each other, but instinct was so often more accurate than reasoning.

What's the matter, Jess? Why are you sad?' And she'd have to explain that she wasn't sad, just tired, though how she could be so tired in the middle of the day with the sun shining and everything, she didn't know. It made her feel ashamed.

And because I didn't have the moral backbone to say, "I don't know," I explained the whole thing to her—off the top of my head.

The orthodox interpretation offers no explanation as to why everyday objects never assume quantum mechanical states that do not allow a classical interpretation.

What is that common cause? There is one sufficient cause that is common to all nations; and that is the appropriation as the property of some of that natural element on which and from which all must live. Take that fact I have spoken of, that appalling fact that, even now, it is harder to live than it was in the ages dark and rude five centuries ago—how do you explain it? There is no difficulty in finding the cause.

Every age has its leitmotif, a set of beliefs that explains the universe, that inspires or consoles the individual by providing an explanation for the multiplicity of events impinging on him. In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was nationalism combined with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the governing concepts of our age.

Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to pray – a place of bitterness and regret, where he must look for an explanation for his failures.

It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong.

We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand).

We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.

Anna took a knife and fork in her beautiful, white, ring-adorned hands and began to demonstrate. She obviously could see that her explanation could not make anything understood, but, knowing that her speech was pleasant and her hands were beautiful, she went on explaining.

You're fool enough at all times, and when you start explaining things in Italian you're a fool three times as foolish,

In nearly all instances of slave violence against their owners, whites tended to blame the Yankees, as did Emma Holmes, for having aroused "the foulest demoniac passions of the negro, hitherto so peaceful and happy." At least, such explanations preserved whites from what would have otherwise been a most excruciating self-examination.86

One hundred thirty-seven is the inverse of something called the fine-structure constant. ...The most remarkable thing about this remarkable number is that it is dimension-free. ...Werner Heisenberg once proclaimed that all the quandaries of quantum mechanics would shrivel up when 137 was finally explained.