Assumption Quotes - Page 9

• Creationists often appeal to the facts of science to support their view, and evolutionists often appeal to philosophical assumptions from outside science.

  Jonathan Sarfati

  Philosophical, Views, Support

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• Assumptions are made and most assumptions are wrong.

  Albert Einstein

  Made

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• Test everything, including assumptions

  Jeffrey Zeldman

  Tests, Consciousness, Including

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• While society cannot provide employment for its members, the production/work/income nexus has to be abandoned as a justification for our present parsimony to the unemployed. An assumption cannot be used to justify making second-class citizens of those who are unfortunate enough to constitute living proof of the inaccuracy of that assumption.

  Bob Hawke

  Leadership, Class, Income

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• There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

  George Orwell

  Knowing, Police, Darkness

  George Orwell (2003). “1984”, Plume Books

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• A student brings something to discuss, saying, "I don't know whether this is really good, or whether I should throw it in the wastebasket." The assumption is that one or the other choice is the right move. No. Almost everything we say or think or do - or write - comes in that spacious human area bounded by something this side of the sublime and something above the unforgivable.

  William Stafford

  Moving, Teaching, Writing

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• The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Feminist, Feminism, Males

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

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• Ninety percent of the book variations have no great value, because either they contain mistakes or they are based on fallacious assumptions; just forget about the openings and spend all that time on the endings.

  Jose Raul Capablanca

  Mistake, Book, Variation

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• Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be.

  Garry Kasparov

  Views, Long, Might

  "World's Best Chess Players Deny Brilliance" by Benjamin Carlson, www.theatlantic.com. March 25, 2010.

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• Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Men, Democracy, Wiser

  Time Enough for Love "Intermission" (1973)

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• It is universally appreciated, I think, that theorists are able to tweak their assumptions in order to reach any conclusion they wish. The believability of the conclusion depends not only on the fact that it was reached but on how hard the theorist had to tweak the model to get there.

  David M. Kreps

  Thinking, Order, Wish

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• Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions.

  Wassily Leontief

  Arbitrary, Pages, Economics

  Wassily Leontief (1966). “Essays in Economics: Theories, Theorizing, Facts, and Policies”, p.10, Transaction Publishers

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• Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Real, Sight, Investing

  John Maynard Keynes (2006). “General Theory Of Employment , Interest And Money”, p.272, Atlantic Publishers & Dist

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• We move from more or less plausible but really arbitrary assumptions, to elegantly demonstrated but irrelevant conclusions.

  Wassily Leontief

  Moving, Arbitrary, Economics

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• Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.

  Mary Parker Follett

  Women, Majority Rule, Numbers

  Mary Parker Follett (1918). “The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government”, p.7, Penn State Press

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• The tendency of those committed to the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming to unquestioningly adopt the assumptions, at every stage, that maximise the expectation of calamity should alert us that groupthink is driving the movement.

  Peter Lilley

  Men, Expectations, Driving

  "Peter Lilley: 'I am a global lukewarmist' and other quotes" by Lauren Niland, www.theguardian.com. October 25, 2012.

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• Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Life, Forever, Soul

  "Tractatus Logico Philosophicus".

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• The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word understand.

  Werner Heisenberg

  Nature, Environmental, May

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• The 'environmental crisis' has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of 'raw materials,' and that we may safely possess those materials by taking them.... And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as 'environmental' problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them.

  Wendell Berry

  Inspiring, Simple, Years

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.178, Counterpoint Press

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• All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault.

  Carl Sagan

  Love, Embarrassing Questions, Keys

  Carl Sagan (2011). “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.297, Ballantine Books

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• Humans suffer from self-centred notions as to the nature of life. Humans assume that alien life forms should conform to standards that match our own, including logic and morality. Even among humans, morality is ignored when expedient. Why should we expect more from an alien life form than we demand from ourselves?

  Steve Perry

  Life, Nature, Self

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• A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest - but if devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

  Ayn Rand

  Cheating, Truth, Responsibility

  Ayn Rand (2005). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.961, Penguin

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• Tyranny has perhaps oftener grown out of the assumptions of power, called for, on pressing exigencies, by a defective constitution, than out of the full exercise of the largest constitutional authorities.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Exercise, Constitution, Authority

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (1831). “The Federalist on the New Constitution”, p.98

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• If they are incorporated into the Constitution, independent tribunals of justice will consider themselves in a peculiar manner the guardians of those rights; they will be an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive; they will be naturally led to resist every encroachment upon rights expressly stipulated for in the Constitution by the declaration of rights.

  James Madison

  Independent, Rights, Justice

  James Madison, Ralph Ketcham “Selected Writings of James Madison”, Hackett Publishing

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• If it be true that democracy is based upon the assumption that every man shall serve his fellow man, the organization of democracy should be gradually adapted to that assumption.

  Herbert Croly

  Men, Organization, Democracy

  Herbert Croly (2005). “The Promise of American Life”, p.418, Cosimo, Inc.

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