Quotes About Good Explanations

#1. The Enlightenment (The beginning of) a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority.

David Deutsch

#2. Good explanations are like bathing suits, darling; they are meant to reveal everything by covering only what is necessary.

E.L. Konigsburg

#3. Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.

David Deutsch

#4. That's the way of all good explanations. The better they are, the more questions they raise.

John Brockman

#5. He even obsessively contemplates the fact that he obsessively contemplates.

William Shakespeare

#6. How could she smile when she felt like she'd been run over by a truck at Mach 1 and all she wanted to do was strip his combat pants from his delectable body and screw him until he begged for mercy?

Mina Carter

#7. O lust, thou infernal fire, whose fuel is gluttony; whose flame is pride, whose sparkles are wanton words; whose smoke is infamy; whose ashes are uncleanness; whose end is hell.

Francis Quarles

#8. Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.

Pablo Picasso

#9. Unfortunately, in the field of evolution most explanations are not good. As a matter of fact, they hardly qualify as explanations at all; they are suggestions, hunches, pipe dreams, hardly worthy of being called hypotheses.

Norman Macbeth

#10. Even good excuses, really good ones, don't help very much.
Explanations, on the other hand, are both scarce and useful.
And accurate forecasts and insightful intuition are priceless.

Seth Godin

#11. The stories a society tells about itself are a measure of how it values itself, the ideals of democracy, and its future.

Henry Giroux

#12. Genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any more than do explanations that appeal to upbringing.

Steven Pinker

#13. When DEATH stares in our faces..
We can just 'stare' back at it!
'All' falls flat in the deathly moments!
No explanations, no reasons, no justifications sound good enough!! Acceptance alone stands out as the truth!

Abha Maryada Banerjee

#14. We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

Frank Herbert

#15. It cannot be doubted that in most countries today women, in comparison to men, still remain underprivileged.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#16. Even evolutionary explanations of the traditional division of labor by sex do not imply that it is unchangeable, "natural" in the sense of good, or something that should be forced on individual women or men who don't want it.

Steven Pinker

#17. Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.

David Deutsch

#18. We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility. We may be relatively deficient, however, in evaluating and testing our ideas once they are formed

Thomas Gilovich

#19. Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if ... a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity, that's all to the good.

Georges Braque

#20. I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.

Norton Juster

#21. Your explanation is good, but your herring doesn't fry, as we say in Ramaldah, he exploded.

Andrew Ashling

#22. If we were a primitive society, movie stars would be gods.

Sydney Pollack

#23. We do not live in a world that mainly suffers bad policies due to lack of ideas about better ones, or lack of elegant explanations supporting good policies, but one that suffers bad policies due to system and meta-system level incentives.

Patri Friedman

#24. One of the things I found is that the things we want to say for well-intentioned motives often cause more harm than good. People don't need our words. They mainly need our presence, they need our love. And if you come in too quickly with explanations, you may do more harm than good.

Philip Yancey

#25. I'm not very good at giving people orderly explanations of things.

Haruki Murakami

#26. Good metaphors are "generative."13 The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate "new perceptions, explanations, and inventions." Many

Chip Heath

#27. Sorting out what's good and bad is the province of ethics. It is also what keeps priests, pundits, and parents busy. Unfortunately, what keeps children and philosophers busy is asking the priests, pundits and parents, Why?

Thomas Cathcart

#28. I know a lot of the Annapolis breed.

Gore Vidal

#29. I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success.

Paulo Coelho

#30. Science usually operates in sort of three modes, things that are well established, we know what we're talking about, more highly confident. There are competing explanations, we have a pretty good idea, but we're not sure. And then things are speculative.

Stephen Schneider

#31. Afterlife is no less implausible than anything else,' I said. 'All explanations of existence are equally incredible.' 'So you might as well believe something that makes you feel good as not,

Robert B. Parker

#32. now and it mustn't be broken under any circumstance. There was so much yet to be said, but it would all come in good time. So many meaningless apologies. So many strained explanations. Promises

Stefan Ahnhem

#33. Now, I'm not against sex before marriage, but two minutes before? When the organist played "Here Comes the Bride" ...

Joan Rivers

#34. 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.

Eben Alexander

#35. You have to like everything that you're painting. Maybe on a narrative level it seems harsh ... but I like everything in all my paintings. It's as if you need to be less intelligent at that level.

John Currin

#36. The only race I know is the human one.

Albert Einstein