Supposition Quotes

• Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

  George Washington

  Education, Wisdom, Religious

  Noah Webster, George Washington (1806). “Elements of useful knowledge: containing a historical and geographical account of the United States”, p.217

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• The greater absurdities are, the more strongly they evince the falsity of that supposition from whence they flow.

  Francis Atterbury

  Flow, Absurdity, Falsity

  Francis ATTERBURY (Bishop of Rochester.) (1740). “Sermons and Discourses on several Subjects and Occasions”, p.67

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• Error is a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter. Error is neither Mind nor one of Mind's faculties. Error is the contradiction of Truth. Error is a belief without understanding. Error is unreal because untrue. It is that which stemma to be and is not. If error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurdity -namely, erroneous truth. Thus we should continue to lose the standard of Truth.

  Mary Baker Eddy

  Life, Pain, Mistake

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• If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism — at least in the sense of this work — is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.

  Ludwig Feuerbach

  Believe, Heart, Essence

  Ludwig Feuerbach (1854). “The essence of Christianity”, p.8

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• There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.

  Samuel Johnson

  Birthday, Sex, Giving Up

  Samuel Johnson (2002). “A Johnson Sampler”, Non Pareil Books

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• Faith is not the supposition that something might be true, but the assurance that someone is there.

  Kallistos Ware

  Might, Being True, Assurance

  Kallistos Ware, Kallistos (Bishop of Diokleia) (1995). “The Orthodox Way”, p.16, St Vladimir's Seminary Press

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• Away with the cant of 'Measures not men!'-the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along.

  George Canning

  Horse, Men, Political

  House of Commons, 1801

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• Let us with Caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

  George Washington

  Religious, Godly, Indulge In

  George Washington, United States. President (1789-1797 : Washington) (1847). “Washington's Farewell Address to the People of the United States of America: Published in September, 1796”, p.9

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• Being able to ‘think out of the box’ presupposes you were able to think in it.

  Bob Lutz

  Thinking, Able, Boxes

  "GM's Bob Lutz: What I've Learned" by Cal Fussman, www.esquire.com. March 4, 2010.

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• I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.

  Anne Sullivan Macy

  Education, Children, Learning

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• The practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different: we speak different tongues, and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same - that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist. Nor could anything we would like to call social life. Translation is another name for the human condition.

  David Bellos

  Practice, Names, Two

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• Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man that would keep all the wine out of the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy, to deny a man the liberty he hath by nature upon a supposition that he may abuse it.

  Oliver Cromwell

  Country, Wine, Men

  Oliver Cromwell (1820). “Memoirs of the Protector, Oliver Cromwell: And of His Sons, Richard and Henry”, p.561

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• This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Divinity, Mask, Individual

  Jorge Luis Borges (1962). “Ficciones”, p.27, Grove Press

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• If you want to enter a state of grace,
  question the assumption you’re defending right now.

  Byron Katie

  Grace, Want, Assumption

  Twitter post from Dec 09, 2012

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• The idea that we should be open to all ideas is very different from the supposition that all ideas are equally valid.

  Lawrence Summers

  Ideas, Different, Should

  "Harvard Radical". www.nytimes.com. August 24, 2003.

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• John Adams, second president of the United States, wrote that our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. George Washington warned us never to indulge the supposition 'that morality can be maintained without religion.'

  Joe Lieberman

  Religious, People, Scary

  "Lieberman Seeks Greater Role for Religion in Public Life" by Richard Perez-Pena, www.nytimes.com. August 28, 2000.

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• In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Regret, Children, Taken

  Benjamin Franklin (2008). “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin”, p.152, Applewood Books

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• One unconsciously takes it for granted that doer and sufferer think and feel alike, and according to this supposition we measure the guilt of the one by the pain of the other.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Pain, Thinking, Guilt

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.56, Courier Corporation

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• No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Reality, Ignorant, Mind

  "I Have Landed". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts", p. 48, May 14, 2002.

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• The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother.

  Mark Twain

  Travel, Brother, Hands

  Mark Twain (2008). “The Innocents Abroad”, p.233, Velvet Element Books

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• The desertion of Jesus, by his followers, furnishes an argument in support of the supposition that he attempted to be king of the Jews, rather than that he was a superior being.

  Lysander Spooner

  Jesus, Kings, Support

  Lysander Spooner (1971). “The collected works of Lysander Spooner”

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• Zen, like life, defies exact definition, but its essence is the experience, moment by moment, of our own existence -- a natural, spontaneous encounter, unclouded by the suppositions and expectations that come between us and reality. It is, if you like, a paring down of life until we see it as it really is, free from our illusions; it is merely a divestment of ourselves until we recognize our own true nature.

  David Fontana

  Reality, Essence, Expectations

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• There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom. The glib supposition of utilizing atomic energy when our coal has run out is a completely unscientific Utopian dream, a childish bug-a-boo. Nature has introduced a few fool-proof devices into the great majority of elements that constitute the bulk of the world, and they have no energy to give up in the process of disintegration.

  Robert Andrews Millikan

  Running, Dream, Giving Up

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• It will not be possible to rule out the supposition that the process of evolution may be guided by an intelligent design.

  F. C. S. Schiller

  Intelligent, Design, May

  "Humanism: Philosophical Essays". Book by F. C. S. Schiller, June 1903.

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• ..all arguments concerning existence are founded on the relation of cause and effect; that our knowledge of that relation is derived entirely from experience; and all our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past. .... Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses.

  David Hume

  Memories, Past, Words Of Wisdom

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