Michael Mandelbaum Quotes
While analogies are useful, however, they can also be misleading. They smuggle in assumptions that can be wrong.
Quotes to Explore
-
I try to get going early, on the assumption that the way you begin your day is the way you continue. But certain books only want to be written at night, so there's no hard rule where work is concerned.
-
If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.
-
When historians of early America turned from the pursuit of past politics, they devised a category known in the academy as 'social and intellectual history.' In it, they stuffed nearly everything except politics on the assumption, which the anthropologists assured them was correct, that it would all fit together. Somehow it did not.
-
I studied psychology and sociology. I think my assumption was that I would go to graduate school, and I don't know what I was going to do after that.
-
In elite, primarily white institutions, there are many blacks who have white wives. So much so that sometimes there is almost the assumption that I would be married to a white woman.
-
With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother's recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations?
-
There's the assumption being made by the national security advisers to the Obama administration that the North Korean leadership is not suicidal, that they know they will be obliterated if they attacked the United States. But I would point that everything in South Korea and Japan is well within range of what they might want to do.
-
The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion.
-
I was under the assumption that the first job you get out of college is the job you have for the rest of your life. That's how my parents were; my parents have been teachers for as long as I've known 'em. I was worried that I'd gotten into something that I was going to hate.
-
Since the dawn of the Internet, I have always operated under the assumption that if the government or corporations have technological capability to do something, they are doing it - whatever the laws we happen to know about might say.
-
When somebody has an enormous success in this culture, people start asking two questions, which are 'What are you doing now?' and 'How are you going to beat that?' And I have to say, I love the assumption that your intention is to beat yourself constantly - that you're in battle against yourself.
-
When you're in elected office, you always have to operate under the assumption that you're in a dog fight for re-election. It's when you don't prepare for a tough battle, when you're caught flat-footed, that you're vulnerable.
-
I think it becomes incumbent upon a candidate to essentially disavow some of the things that are in that party platform. Otherwise, I think the assumption is that you are a true believer.
-
An assumption underlying almost all comments on interruptions is that they are aggressive, but the line between what's perceived as assertiveness or aggressiveness almost certainly shifts with an interrupter's gender.
-
In 'Henry V,' the story of the assumption of true and responsible leadership by Henry I think is hard-won. He has to lose friends; he has to risk his life.
-
I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children.
-
The assumption is simply that I hit on all the things I've hit on so far by accident, that my talent is just this raw thing that pours out of me, and then white people feel like they have to come in and contain it, refine it, and bring it to the place where it can been released.
-
One of the greatest mistakes of successful people is the assumption, 'I behave this way, and I achieve results. Therefore, I must be achieving results because I behave this way.' This belief is sometimes true, but not across the board.
-
Sadly, I don't think books ever sell based on your name alone - the minute we make an assumption like that is the minute it all goes horribly wrong!
-
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.
-
The hijab or a variation of the word shows up eight times in the Quran. And it never means headscarf. And so what's happened is that the identity of a Muslim woman especially is being equated to this piece of cloth on her head. And in that ideology there's a very fundamental assumption that people need to think very deeply about, which is do you believe that a woman is too sexy for her hair?
-
We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become.
-
Reciprocity is not mandatory.
-
While analogies are useful, however, they can also be misleading. They smuggle in assumptions that can be wrong.
