Adults tell students that it gets better, that the world changes after school, that being 'different' will pay off sometime after graduation. But no one explains to them why.

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

God may exist, but science can explain the universe without the need for a creator.

One of the least arduous but most productive of gardening jobs, the magic of deadheading never fails to delight me. It was a revelation when the principle was explained to me: that flowers are the attempt by the plant to reproduce itself. So if you cut the heads off before the flower turns into seeds, the plant will continue to flower.

The past explains how I got here, but the future is up to me - and I love to live life at full throttle.

I'm used to explaining to people why my jokes were funny.

I don't feel that I'm explaining the world or teaching people anything. And I'm not trying to be a mirror, showing them what's really going on the world. All I'm trying to do is think of stuff that's funny, just like when I'm kidding around with my friends.

Those who knew Lincoln described him as an extraordinarily funny man. Humor was an essential aspect of his temperament. He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep.

Sausages are just funny. I don't know why. I can't explain it.

Friendship is inexplicable, it should not be explained if one doesn't want to kill it.

Never explain - your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.

I had the honor to meet Nelson Mandela, and I heard him explain his forgiveness of his captors of 27 years by saying hatred and bitterness is destructive - the power is in love and forgiveness.

It's incredible what happens when you explain to kids what good food is - they get so excited! They go home and tell their parents... and they're excited to cook the recipes themselves in class.

As a public official, when I take a position, I stand up to explain and defend it. I file annual financial disclosures, campaign finance reports, and have to face the scrutiny of public opinion.

It's very difficult to explain to a normal working citizen the implications of what $18 trillion in debt means and what it means when the Federal Reserve buys the U.S. Treasury bonds to finance our loss every month.

On the whole, the accommodationist position has been dominant in U.S. law and public culture ?"? ever since George Washington wrote a famous letter to the Quakers explaining that he would not require them to serve in the military because the 'conscientious scruples of all men' deserve the greatest 'delicacy and tenderness.'

It's funny, when bands or younger musicians ask me: 'So, what does it take to make it?' Well, first explain to me what you mean by 'making it': Do you want to be a rock star or do you want music to be your livelihood?

There's a song called 'Live Blogging the Himmel Family Bris.' I kind of went for it here in terms of - it was really fun to be explaining ritual circumcision in Nashville - a lot of brises are done in hospitals, but many are done in people's homes, and there's a lot of food, and a lot of leftovers.

I think it is impossible to explain faith. It is like trying to explain air, which one cannot do by dividing it into its component parts and labeling them scientifically. It must be breathed to be understood.

I keep wondering how to explain the experience of child abuse from the inside. I'm going to try to explain what my world was like when I was sexually abused. The thing you have to remember is that this was the thinking of a child.

In my late 20s, I realized that I had a very clear social conscience and strong opinions about things like diversity, equality, and education, and while I tried to become more politically literate, I just couldn't catch on. It felt like I had walked into a movie that had already started, and no one would explain what had happened.

I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me.

In articulating all my feelings about marriage equality, I almost don't know where to begin. And perhaps that's part of the problem. Why do we have to explain ourselves when it comes to issues of fairness and equality? Why is common sense not enough?