Assumption Quotes - Page 40

• You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do or don't do.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Responsibility, Assuming

  Simone de Beauvoir (1968). “Les Belles Images”

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• The error is in the assumption that the General Government is a party to the constitutional compact. The States ... formed the compact, acting as sovereign and independent communities.

  John C. Calhoun

  Party, Independent, Errors

  JOHN C. CALHOUN (1855). “REPORTS AND PUBLIC LETTERS”, p.73

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• On entering a temple we assume all signs of reverence. How much more reverent then should we be before the heavenly bodies, the stars, the very nature of God!

  Seneca the Younger

  God, Nature, Stars

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• Artificial intelligence is based on the assumption that the mind can be described as some kind of formal system manipulating symbols that stand for things in the world. Thus it doesn't matter what the brain is made of, or what it uses for tokens in the great game of thinking. Using an equivalent set of tokens and rules, we can do thinking with a digital computer, just as we can play chess using cups, salt and pepper shakers, knives, forks, and spoons. Using the right software, one system (the mind) can be mapped onto the other (the computer).

  George Johnson

  Science, Thinking, Knives

  George Johnson (2011). “Machinery of the Mind”, p.450, Crown

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• I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.

  Henri Matisse

  Art, Taken, Expression

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• There are good reasons to believe in God, including the existence of mathematical principles and order in creation. They are positive reasons, based on knowledge, rather than default assumptions based on a temporary lack of knowledge.

  Francis Collins

  Believe, Order, Atheism

  Francis Collins (2008). “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief”, p.62, Simon and Schuster

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• Today the strategies of many companies in the real estate industry are premised on low interest rates, an assumption that has resulted in the rapid expansion of the real estate securitization business. This trend could be regarded as a risk factor, as it exposes the real estate sector to at least three potential problems: first, interest rate hikes; second, revisions to securitization business accounting standards; and third, overheating in the real estate market.

  Akira Mori

  Business, Real, Risk

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• After chiding the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.

  Loren Eiseley

  Taken, Past, Origin Of Life

  Loren Eiseley (2011). “The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature”, p.199, Vintage

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• The assumption of all education is that learning will be directed toward constructive ends and I'm convinced that colleges should support students in their determination to be useful, self-sufficient, and productive.

  Ernest L. Boyer

  Education, Determination, College

  Ernest L. Boyer (1997). “Ernest L. Boyer, Selected Speeches, 1979-1995”, Jossey-Bass

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• The man of culture is one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too unreal, no end is too unpractical for him.

  Frederic Harrison

  Cute, Simple, Men

  Frederic Harrison (1975). “Order and Progress”, p.150, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

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• Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Sleep, Idols, Tower Of Babel

  Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, Elena Lamberti, Dominique Scheffel-Dunand (2011). “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p.208, University of Toronto Press

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• Beware of assumptions that seem "obvious" in one decade. They may become quaint in the next.

  David Brin

  May, Next, Quaint

  David Brin (1990). “Earth”, Spectra

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• We cannot live in peace without Law. And though law cannot be perfect, it may be just if it is written in ignorance of the identity of the claimants and applied equally to all. Then it is a possession not only of the claimants but of the society, which may now base its actions upon a reasonable assumption of the law?s treatment.

  David Mamet

  Ignorance, Law, Perfect

  David Mamet (2011). “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture”, p.74, Penguin

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• When I ran for the U.S. Senate the assumption was that anyone's name that was close to "Osama" doesn't stand a chance. So if somebody thought that tacking on "Hussein" in there would be a killer, then I think they underestimate the American people and the seriousness of the problems we face.

  Barack Obama

  Thinking, Names, People

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• I believe that we should take every opportunity to challenge the assumption that our European allies are doing us a favor whenever they provide us with the necessary facilities from which to defend their own continent.

  Chester Bowles

  Believe, Opportunity, Challenges

  "Contracting States: Sovereign Transfers in International Relations". Book by Alexander Cooley and Hendrik Spruyt, Princeton University Press, p. 100, "The Azores", White House Memorandum to President John F. Kennedy, Washington, DC (June 4, 1962), 2009.

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• When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions -- that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Play, Know How

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.177, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq, [Bush's] assumptions and policies have been wrong. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Iraq, Issues, Arrogance

  "The Price Of Arrogance". www.newsweek.com. May 05, 2004.

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• Chomsky proceeds on the almost unthinkably subversive assumption that the United States should be judged by the same standards that it preaches (often at gunpoint) to other nations he is nearly the only person now writing who assumes a single standard of international morality not for rhetorical effect, but as a matter of habitual, practically instinctual conviction.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Writing, United States, Matter

  Christopher Hitchens (1994). “For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports”, p.220, Verso

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• Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.

  Northrop Frye

  Animal, Men, Body

  Northrop Frye (2014). “The Northrop Frye Quote Book”, p.329, Dundurn

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• Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud , also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology .

  Rollo May

  Men, Humanity, Understanding

  Rollo May (1994). “Existence”, p.36, Jason Aronson

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• One of the central assumptions of the concept of democracy, perhaps its most central assumption, is that by and large human beings are better judges of their own interests.... The operating maxim of the democratic ideology is, "Whoever wears the shoe knows best where it pinches.

  Sidney Hook

  Power, Shoes, Judging

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• Only on the assumption of belief in the validity of values is the attempt to espouse value-judgments meaningful. However, to judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith .

  Max Weber

  Meaningful, Judging, Matter

  Max Weber (2015). “On the Methodology of the Social Sciences”, p.81, Lulu Press, Inc

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• As I looked more carefully at the listening matrix I saw that during the past twenty years we had taken a magnifying glass to the first of these four quadrants, the female experience of powerlessness. I saw I was subconsciously making a false assumption: The more deeply I understood women's experience of powerlessness, the more I assumed men had the power women did not have. In fact, what I was understanding was the female experience of male power.

  Warren Farrell

  Taken, Past, Men

  "Why Men Are the Way They Are". Book by Warren Farrell, 1986.

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• Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most... are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so.

  James Fenton

  Regret, Believe, Reading

  "An Introduction to English Poetry". Book by James Fenton, 2002.

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• The conclusion to which I am ever more clearly coming is that the only hope of attaining a true system of economics is to fling aside,once and forever, the mazy and preposterous assumptions of the Ricardian school. Our English economists have been living in a fool's paradise. The truth is with the French school, and the sooner we recognize the fact, the better it will be for all the world, except perhaps the few writers who are far too committed to the old erroneous doctrines to allow for renunciation.

  William Stanley Jevons

  School, Forever, Fool

  William Stanley Jevons (1879). “Political Economy”

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