Assumption Quotes
-
Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary studies have been slow to wake up to the importance of MSA (media-specific analysis). Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these assumptions clearly coming into view.
-
My assumption was that people are already motivated to go to a fitness class. That's who I am. I was already ready to go out there and get to class. All I needed was a search tool. But it turns out people need more than that, and that's why gym memberships exist.
-
The assumption that seeing is believing makes us susceptible to visual deception.
-
One time in the late '50s, when Peter Finch, Laurence Harvey, and I were all offered the same movie role - the assumption being that we weren't friends - we marched up to producer Dino De Laurentiis's door and declared in unison, 'We don't think we're suitable for the part.'
-
Every one of these claims embodies a metaphysical assumption, and science, since its very method presupposes them, could not possibly defend them without arguing in a circle. Their defense is instead a task for metaphysics, and for philosophy more generally; and scientism is shown thereby to be incoherent.
-
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.
-
In the beginning, there were bacteria.... A nearly universal assumption is that all subsequent life descended from the original life form through a continuous chain of ancestor-descendant pairs. This assumption looks good because all living organisms share biochemical traits. It is conceivable, of course, that life originated more than once on the early earth but that all except one life form died out early, leaving a single lineage as the ancestor of life as we know it. If this did happen, it was the first important species extinction.
-
Our military plans should be based on the assumption of unpredictability, rather than on carefully drawn, static models of the world.
-
While analogies are useful, however, they can also be misleading. They smuggle in assumptions that can be wrong.
-
A woman's intuition has often proved truer than a man's arrogant assumption of knowledge.
-
... often analysis seems to be based on the assumption that future economic output is almost entirely determined by inexorable economic forces independently of government policy so that devoting more resources to one use inevitably detracts from availability for another.
-
Americans once believed that their prosperity and way of life depended on having assured access to Persian Gulf oil. Today, that is no longer the case. The United States is once more an oil exporter. Available and accessible reserves of oil and natural gas in North America are far greater than was once believed. Yet the assumption that the Persian Gulf still qualifies as crucial to American national security persists in Washington. Why?
-
Incorrect assumptions lie at the root of every failure. Have the courage to test your assumptions.
-
I think when people hear about a celebrity writing a book of any kind, the assumption is that it was dictated to a ghostwriter.
-
Only recently has part of America challenged the long-held assumption that America is a Christian nation. Most citizens do not recognize just how quickly we have moved in an anti-Christian direction.
-
Never assume the obvious is true.
-
There is a root arrogance in any writer; a hugely arrogant assumption that anyone is going to listen to them.
-
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.
-
In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.
-
Authority is the assumption that someone else knows better than you.
-
It's true that in a lot of western feminist movements, you see women working singularly from men. Suffragettes and the women's rights movement in the 60s here, but when I think of the Islamic feminist movement, I think of a lot of men who are very much standing with the women. It really feels like in equal numbers. Women are catching up in the field because we were not given access to knowledge and encouraged into these studies and so these men are helping us and empowering us. They are men of conscience who are fed up with this assumption that they're entitled.
-
Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' made me long to wake in an era when my Casio wristwatch would strike folks as sorcery, and Martin Amis's 'Time's Arrow' wrecked my assumption that all narratives had to proceed from Then to More-Recently-Than-Then.
-
Assume a virtue if you have it not.
-
The validity of all the Inductive Methods depends on the assumption that every event, or the beginning of every phenomenon, must have some cause; some antecedent, upon the existence of which it is invariably and unconditionally consequent.
