“The physiology of orgasm and penile erection no more explain a culture's sexual schema than the auditory range of the human ear explains its music.”

— Carole Vance

"Social Construction Theory and Sexuality", quoted in Maus, Fred Everett (2004). "Sexual and Musical Categories", The Pleasure of Modernist Music, p.158. ISBN 1580461433

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Carole Vance1

anthropologist

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“The mammalian record thus confirms our statement that any animal which is not too strongly conditioned by some special sort of experience is capable of responding to any adequate stimulus. This is what we find in the more uninhibited segments of our human species, and this is what we find among young children who are not too rigorously restrained in their early sex play. Exclusive preferences and patterns of behavior, heterosexual or homosexual, come only with experience, or as a result of social pressures which tend to force an individual into an exclusive pattern of one or the other sort. Psychologists and psychiatrists, reflecting the mores of the culture in which they have been raised, have spent a good deal of time trying explain the origins of homosexual activity; but considering the physiology of sexual response and the mammalian backgrounds of human behavior, it is not so difficult to explain why a human animal does a particular thing sexually. It is more difficult to explain why each and every individual is not involved in every type of sexual activity.”

Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) American scientist (1894–1956)

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“No culture can be explained in terms of one or more leaders”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

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Context: We are in the habit of thinking in terms of great leaders largely because the leaders themselves want it that way. The pharaohs ordered that a record of their accomplishments be carved on stone; medieval nobles subsidized troubadours to sing their praises; today's world leaders have large staffs of public-relations consultants. No culture can be explained in terms of one or more leaders...<!-- p. 93

“Electric flesh-arrows traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

As quoted in French Writers of the Past (2000) by Carol A. Dingle, p. 126

“How to explain to the earth that it was more functional as a vegetable patch than a flower garden, just as factories were more functional than schools and boys were more functional as weapons than as humans.”

Kamila Shamsie book Burnt Shadows

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“So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?”

Leonard Bernstein The Unanswered Question

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“Tribal behavior is more deeply ingrained than are mere cultural prescriptions. Its longevity and stability point strongly to a genetic basis. This is hardly surprising, given that tribes are the default human social institution. The inbuilt nature of tribalism explains why it took so many thousands of years for East Asians and later Europeans to break free of its deadening embrace.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

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“It is necessary to protect oneself from over exaggeration; one must not suppose that there exists, even in the realm of partial memory, an absolutely pure auditory type; real life does not make such schemas… In reality, when one says that a person belongs to the auditory type… one wants to say simply that with regard to that person the auditory memory is preponderant.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Alfred Binet (1894). Psychologies des grands calculateurs et joueurs d’echecs. Paris: Hachette. p. 71; As cited in: John Carson, "Minding matter/mattering mind: Knowledge and the subject in nineteenth-century psychology." in: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C. 30.3 (1999): p. 363

“You really should be able to feel the higher power of music and be moved by it, rather than listening to me waffle on and having to explain it.”

Maynard James Keenan (1964) musician

Steve Morse ( November 15, 1996) "Sonic Evolution With the Use of Tool", Boston Globe, p. D14.

“Much of what now passes for social science is concerned not to explain human differences but to explain them away.”

John Hirst (1942–2016) Australian historian

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“During the 1960s and 1970s, when cartographers were embracing the communication model and a behavioral approach to empirical research, psychology was undergoing a revolution in its perspective on what to study and how to study it. Psychologists began to realize that stimulus-response laws do not explain human perception or behavior (any more than the gravity models used by geographers can explain spatial interaction).”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 7-8

“The physiology of orgasm and penile erection no more explain a culture's sexual schema than the auditory range of the human ear explains its music.”

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