Evan Esar Quotes

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.

If we go on explaining we shall cease to understand one another.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

I'm always telling my students that if they can't explain what they are doing, to their grandmothers, then they probably don't understand it themselves.

I cannot be understood in three minutes.

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it.

Facts are often complicated.

As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.

Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear.

Explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it.

Help the man-in-the-street make sense of the bewildering.

The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.

There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes.

I am a firm believer that if you can explain it to a kid, you're on the right track.

It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.

Let me explain what I do here. I don't want to confuse you any more than absolutely necessary.

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

Complex things, if you don't understand them, it seems complicated. If you understand them, and we know how to handle it, it became simple.

The fact that something is actually understandable and relatable doesn't mean that it's unsophisticated or banal. It just means that it's crystal-clear. And if you can't explain it, that doesn't necessarily mean it's so brilliant that ordinary mortals can't fathom it. It might just mean that it makes no sense.

Transparency doesn't mean much if the consumer doesn't understand what they're looking at.

I love the challenge of taking these really complicated subjects and trying to humanise them.

I don't feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything.