Quotes About Assumptions

Even small changes in our Big Assumptions can have big implications for permanently altering our once-captivating equilibrium.

It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know.

No comprendí entonces lo estúpidas que son las suposiciones apresuradas.

People who are aware that they are making contestable assumptions are much more likely to recognize that reasonable people of goodwill can, in fact, disagree—even about matters of profound human and moral significance.

They do not challenge their assumptions

You can never tell about those Yankees!

It was inconsiderate, she thought, how blandly people mentioned the future in the sick rooms. Phrases like next summer were always popping out; people made such assumptions about their own continuity.

In life, you can be unhappy, or you can change things. And even if there are things you can't change, you can often change your mind-set and question assumptions that are making life less goof than it could be.

If life—and my job—have taught me anything, it should be that every family is a mille-feuille of pathos and neuroses, sins and secrets. Someday I'll stop assuming that everyone except me grew up feeling at home in their homes.

It's amazing, really, the things two people think they know about each other.

To say that climate change will be catastrophic hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions that do not emerge from empirical science.

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.

We can invent as many theories we like, and any one of them can be made to fit the facts. But that theory is always preferred which makes the fewest number of assumptions.

From the outset, however, this whole controversy has been plagued by tacit assumptions, very often of a philosophical rather than a physical character.

People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.

To no surprise, the theories and structures of naturalistic science affirm naturalistic assumptions.

It does not help that some politicians and journalists assume the public is interested only in those aspects of science that promise immediate practical applications to technology or medicine.

That's what you people do, isn't it? Make assumptions and sell them to impressionable idiots.

The most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued, but the ones that are assumed.

Good listeners are no less rare or important than good communicators. Here, too, an unusual degree of confidence is the key—a capacity not to be thrown off course by, or buckle under the weight of, information that may deeply challenge certain settled assumptions. Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they've been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place. The

Good listeners are no less rare or important than good communicators. Here, too, an unusual degree of confidence is the key -- a capacity not to be thrown off course by, or buckle under the weight of, information that may deeply challenge certain settled assumptions. Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they've been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place.

Whether we choose it or not, almost all expressions of church in the West are implicitly vulnerable to nondiscipleship, professionalized ministry, spiritual passivity, and consumerism. The problem is rooted in the profoundly nonmissional assumptions of the system itself.