Premises Quotes - Page 6

• Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Depressing, Art, Games

  Harold Rosenberg (1983). “Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations”, p.71, University of Chicago Press

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• What joins the Americans one to another is not a common ancestry, language or race, but a shared work of the imagination that looks forward to the making of a future, not backward to the insignia of the past. Their enterprise is underwritten by a Constitution that allows for the widest horizons of sight and the broadest range of expression, supports the liberties of the people as opposed to the ambitions of the state, and stands as premise for a narrative rather than plan for an invasion or a monument. The narrative was always plural; not one story, many stories.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Ambition, Past, Race

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• If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe.

  Gregory Bateson

  Men, Mind, Suffering

  Gregory Bateson (1972). “Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology”, p.336, University of Chicago Press

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• All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Law, Cosmos, Fundamentals

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “The Classic Horror Stories”, p.453, OUP Oxford

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• I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Writing, Doors, Fiction

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• Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.

  Aldous Huxley

  Cat, Thinking, Symphony

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• Find the trend whose premise is false, and bet against it.

  George Soros

  Investing, Trends

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• To survive in modern times, a company must have an organizational structure that accepts change as its basic premise, lets tribal customs thrive, and fosters a power that is derived from respect, not rules. In other words, the successful companies will be the ones that put quality of life first. Do this and the rest - quality of product, productivity of workers, profits for all - will follow.

  Ricardo Semler

  Successful, Quality, Firsts

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• The organized labor movement as it is constituted today is as much a concomitant of a capitalist economy as is capital. Organized labor is predicated upon the basic premise of collective bargaining between employers and employees. This premise can obtain only for an employer-employee type of society. If the labor movement is to maintain its own identity and security, it must of necessity protect that kind of society.

  Saul Alinsky

  Capitalist Economy, Identity, Movement

  Saul Alinsky (2010). “Reveille for Radicals”, p.27, Vintage

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• The wisdom of the masses is not always wise. You could put a lot of things to a vote-you could have put anti-miscegenation laws to a vote, and that would have passed pretty handily. Either all people are created equal-or they're not. You're either buying into the original premise of America-or you're not.

  Jon Stewart

  Wise, Law, America

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• [The artist's aim is] not to instruct the viewer, but to give him information... . The artist would follow his predetermined premise to its conclusion, avoiding subjectivity. Chance, taste, or unconsciously remembered forms would play no part in the outcome. The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise.

  Sol LeWitt

  Beautiful, Artist, Play

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• I'm honestly not sure that I've ever tried to talk as a theologian about "homosexual acts," per se. My disagreement with the current teaching of the Roman Congregations is about what I consider to be their fundamentally flawed premise of the objectively disordered nature of the inclination.

  James Alison

  Teaching, Currents, Homosexual

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• I've spoken seriously, and I am very serious, but you know an awful lot of the work is meant to twist things to the point of almost absurdity. I don't want to celebrate absurdity, but I do mean to challenge a lot of premises.

  Douglas Huebler

  Mean, Challenges, Twists

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• I think my one of my strengths in standup is my ability to adlib. I do all my best writing on stage. I can sit down and write jokes, but I'd rather go on stage with a premise or an idea and let the jokes come that way. My creative juices are never flowing any better than when I'm onstage.

  Henry Cho

  Writing, Thinking, Creative Juices

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• Believe it or not, I write on stage. I can't write anywhere else; I have to be in a moment. I also have to challenge myself to make something funny out of a premise. I never have my own jokes written. I have to change things as I go along, and I have to entertain myself.

  J. B. Smoove

  Believe, Writing, Challenges

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• I have always thought that the photographer does artistic work and that art consists of working with fictional premises.

  Joan Fontcuberta

  Art, Doe, Photographer

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• Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity to live.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, Acting, Purpose

  Ayn Rand (1963). “For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (50th Anniversary Edition)”, p.108, Penguin

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• The church generation in which Jesus returns will actively participate in this revolution. ... My premise: Many people alive today will see this revolution in their lifetime.

  Mike Bickle

  Jesus, People, Church

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• The juggle of sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Sophistry, Conclusion

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• It is often the case with a new idea that when it comes knocking on society's door with modesty and the best premises for its existence, there is a tremendous outcry from inside.

  Isak Dinesen

  Ideas, Doors, Modesty

  Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen (1987). “On Modern Marriage and Other Observations”

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• Fatalism is a false premise. What will be is not necessarily what must be.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Fate, Fatalism

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• By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.

  Alvin Toffler

  Civilization, Challenges, Criticism

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• Once one accepts the premise of the Declaration of Independence - that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed" - it follows that the governed must, in order to exercise their right of consent, have full freedom of expression.

  Thomas I. Emerson

  Exercise, Government, Expression

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• We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses - in short, from fewer premises.

  Aristotle

  Atheism, May, Assuming

  "Posterior Analytics". Book by Aristotle. Book I, Part 25,

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• I wish people were willing to dig a little deeper than the surface elements of a premise before tossing one story in with another.

  Isaac Marion

  People, Wish, Stories

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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