Quotes About Assumptions

Assumptions suck. They're like expectations. Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship

There is no question that many religious disciplines can produce interesting experiences in suitable minds. It should be clear, however, that engaging a faith-based (and probably delusional) practice, whatever its effects, isn't the same as investigating the nature of one's mind absent any doctrinal assumptions.

What we should admire is the acute fulfillment of the unspoken assumptions, the smooth harmony of the whole activity, which only become evident in the final success.

That just goes to show that you never can tell about a person by guessing, Frances informs her niece. That's why language was invented. Otherwise, we'd all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood.

People expected certain things of me: assistance, silence, comfort. They had no idea who I was.

Well, everyone made assumptions, didn't they? Everyone thought they knew her when they knew nothing at all. She had wanted a bigger life, something spectacular, and now here she was in London, much to her parents' dismay up in Reading. She was a small-town girl who desperately wanted a big-city life. That's the story of a mouse, her father had told her. Not of a bright, talented woman who should be in university.

She thought back to what he had said. /I could make you very happy./ It was something men said then, when they were trying to persuade you, and that was what they meant. It seemed rash and sweeping to her, dazzling but *presumptuous*. She had to try to see herself, then, as somebody who could be /made happy/. The whole worrying, striving, complicated bundle of her -- was that something that could just be picked up and /made happy/?

When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was.

These tend to be in the areas of basic values like integrity, creating mutually beneficial relationships with customers and employees, and providing honest value. What I am saying is don't make assumptions about what will work tomorrow based on what worked yesterday, especially in the area of processes, procedures, strategies, and operations.

Every time we make an assumption—for example, that we understand our spouse—we are exposing ourselves like an open wound. Assumptions and expectations that rely on someone or something else leave us vulnerable. At any moment, one of the uncountable possible contradictions can pop up and sprinkle salt on our assumptions, causing us to flinch and howl.

Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

Before we can be confident we are reading the Bible accurately, we need to understand what assumptions and values we project onto the Bible:

Thinking critically about why you assume what you assume can make you sensitive, over time, to the cultural mores you bring to the biblical text.

Why will men have theories about women? I haven't any about men.

It's a room that men have spoilt through trying to make it nice for women. Men don't know that we want—" "And never will.

We must remove our mask to call attention to white advantage. That may help us understand one another a bit better. It may bridge divides, disrupt assumptions and stereotypes that block empathy and get in the way of serious efforts to achieve our country. As it stands, we don't really talk frankly about race. And too many people are too damn scared to say so.

If what I have called the "value gap" is the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by which the value gap is maintained. These are the narrative assumptions that support the everyday order of American life, which means we breathe them like air. We count them as truths. We absorb them into our character.

For Baldwin, even in his later work, the category of race all too often pulls us out of the places where the hard work of self-examination happens. It can easily become an illusion of safety, because so many questions are settled beforehand by the assumptions and stereotypes that come with our understanding of race.

And, in the end, we must resist Ibsen's ghosts, the 'old ideas and beliefs' that cage us in categories and assumptions about who we are and what we are capable of and blind us to the beauty of others, never forgetting that categorization refers only to the different conditions under which we live; it doesn't capture the essence of who we are.

Successful conversations that lead to productive Level 2 relationships typically start with the assumptions of sociological equity and balance.

This may seem like a harsh view of our culture, and there are certainly trends in other directions, but when we deal with culture at the tacit assumption level we have to think clearly about what our assumptions actually are, quite apart from our espoused values. The result of a pragmatic, individualistic, competitive, task-oriented culture is that humility is low on the value scale.

Progress is a set of assumptions.

When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions -- that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride.