Assumption Quotes - Page 37

beware the Lure of a handsome Face, the all too ready Assumption that the lovely Façade must needs have lovely Chambers within; for as 'tis with Great Houses, so, too, with Great Men.

Erica Jong

Beauty, Men, House

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The assumption that men and woman are essentially alike in all respects, or even in the most important ones, is a damaging one, as damaging as the assumption that they are different in ways in which they aren't different, perhaps more so.

Margaret Mead

Men, Important, Different

Margaret Mead, Margaret Mary Caffrey, Patricia A. Francis (2006). “To Cherish the Life of the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead”, p.35, Basic Books

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The assumption that men were created equal, with an equal ability to make an effort and win an earthly reward, although denied every day by experience, is maintained every day by our folklore and our daydreams.

Margaret Mead

Winning, Men, Effort

Margaret Mead (2000). “And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America”, p.125, Berghahn Books

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There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who 'fail' at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right.

Kay Redfield Jamison

Suicide, Successful, Dying

Kay Redfield Jamison (2014). “An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness”, p.72, Pan Macmillan

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No one has ever explained why it is that parents and guardians consider dull people such safe matrimonial investments for their young charges. Even granting the unsound assumption that dull people are more apt to be content with their own matrimonial fetters, they are certainly more apt to be the cause of discontent in others.

Alice Duer Miller

People, Parent, Causes

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America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.

Susan Sontag

Order, White, America

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Although most of us are complacent in our assumption that science is gaining on the unknown, scientists are acknowledging that man's own brain is complex beyond any hope of complete understanding.

Marilyn Ferguson

Men, Understanding, Brain

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Perhaps I may record here my protest against the efforts, so often made, to shield children and young people from all that has to do with death and sorrow, to give them a good time at all hazards on the assumption that the ills of life will come soon enough. Young people themselves often resent this attitude on the part of their elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if they were denied the common human experiences.

Jane Addams

Children, Attitude, Soon Enough

Jane Addams (2012). “Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes”, p.14, Courier Corporation

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We [MIT Smart Cities research group] try to identify the fundamental underlying design assumptions that everybody takes as a sort of given and unchallengeable when you think about solving these problems. And we try to challenge those assumptions.

William J. Mitchell

Smart, Thinking, Cities

Source: bigthink.com

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The paradox is that we have this amazing capacity in our minds and hearts to learn and gain insights and then to build a kind of personal storehouse of knowledge. The underside is that those insights harden and fill the spaces in our hearts and minds. They become assumptions, conclusions and judgments.

Mark Nepo

Heart, Space, Mind

Mark Nepo (2013). “Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred”, p.284, Simon and Schuster

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when we travel, most of us take too much. I always work on the assumption that I'm going to take everything with me because I don't want the second wife to have anything if the plane crashes.

Virginia Graham

Travel, Wife, Want

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Changes in the structure of society are not brought about solely by massive engines of doctrine. The first flash of insight which persuades human beings to change their basic assumptions is usually contained in a few phrases.

Kenneth Clark

Doctrine, Phrases, Firsts

John Ruskin, Kenneth Clark (1991). “Selected writings”, Penguin Group USA

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I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.

John Hawkes

Writing, Character, Thinking

John Hawkes, Anthony C. Santore, Michael N. Pocalyko (1977). “A John Hawkes symposium: design and debris”, New Directions Publishing Corporation

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Never stop asking yourself whether you can do things better. Keep testing every aspect of your business to the nth degree, and challenge every one of your assumptions. The tougher you are on yourself now, the tougher your business will be out there in the real world.

James Caan

Real, Challenges, Degrees

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It certainly seems too simple to say what I am going to say, yet it is almost as if you would be better off turning the entire rational approach upside down, taking it for granted that all of its assumptions were false, for they are indeed more false than true.

Seth

Simple, Would Be, Upside Down

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Go for long walks,
indulge in hot baths,
Question your assumptions,
be kind to yourself,
live for the moment,
loosen up, scream,
curse the world,
count your blessings,
Just let go,
Just be.

Carol Shields

Letting Go, Blessing, Long Walks

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Fundamental assumptions in general and scientific assumptions in particular are so hard to overturn because they are based on belief. Beliefs are so hard to overcome because they are irrational and therefore do not yield to logical argument.

Thomas Campbell

Yield, Logical Arguments, Overcoming

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It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow.

Walter Kaufmann

Two, Suffering, Facts

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Dialogue is a space where we may see the assumptions which lay beneath the surface of our thoughts, assumptions which drive us, assumptions around which we build organizations, create economies, form nations and religions. These assumptions become habitual, mental habits that drive us, confuse us and prevent our responding intelligently to the challenges we face every day.

David Bohm

Organization, Space, Empathy

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Good intentions will always be pleaded, for every assumption of power; but they cannot justify it ... It is hardly too strong to say, that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intention, real or pretended.

Daniel Webster

Strong, Real, Gun

Daniel Webster (1854). “The speeches of Daniel Webster and his master-pieces”, p.282

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But the doctors in the past, as the review of the evidence showed, branded Jenner, Semmelweis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Pasteur, Lister, Koch and Keen as charlatans...Napoleon said that war is too important to be left to the generals. We go on the assumption in the Senate that foreign relations are too important to be left to the diplomats...this question (on a novel cancer cure) is too important to leave purely to doctors.

Paul Douglas

War, Cancer, Dark

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There's always been an assumption that ocean shipping coming in and out of the Great Lakes is critical to the economy. It isn't.

John Taylor

Ocean, Lakes, Shipping

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Our universe cannot even be stated symbolically. And this touches us all more directly than one might suppose. For example, artists, who have been very little influenced by social systems, have always responded instinctively to latent assumptions about the shape of the universe. The incomprehensibility of our new cosmos seems to me, ultimately, to be the reason for the chaos of modern art.

Kenneth Clark

Art, Shapes, Littles

"Civilisation" by Kenneth Clark, (Ch. 13), 1969.

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From the outset, however, this whole controversy has been plagued by tacit assumptions, very often of a philosophical rather than a physical character.

David Bohm

Philosophical, Character, Science

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The treatment of the indeterminacy principle as absolute and final can then be criticized as constituting an arbitrary restriction on scientific theories, since it does not follow from the quantum theory as such, but rather from the assumption of the unlimited validity of certain of its features, an assumption that can in no way ever be subjected to experimental proof.

David Bohm

Science, Principles, Doe

David Bohm (2004). “Causality and Chance in Modern Physics”, p.47, Routledge

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