Quotes About Assumptions

Good controversy should not be a quarrel about assumptions

Most of our assumptions about the way women have always thought about "beauty" date from no earlier than the 1830s, when the cult of domesticity was first consolidated and the beauty index invented.

The professor argues against measuring effectiveness in the shallow short-term in the fierce humanities, for teaching that seeks not merely learning, but unlearning, that seeks to unsettle knowledge and assumptions in ways more fundamental than any exam can or should test.

If I'd learned anything over the past few years, it was not to make stupid assumptions. The idea that family would not harm you was a stupid assumption of the first order.

I like lowriders and music from the '50s and '60s. A lot of people assumed I was Mexican.

In Mexico they think I'm Mexican. In Italy they think I'm Italian.

I can pass as a lot of things: people meet me and don't think I'm gay and speak about gay people in a certain way or they don't know I'm Middle Eastern and do the same.

Contemporary cultures present no tougher challenges to Christianity than did the fall of Rome, the collapse of the medieval synthesis, the breakup of the unity of Christendom in the sixteenth century, or the French Enlightenment. Christian teaching today must be pursued amid a similar collapse of modern assumptions.

Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds

Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help.

Whenever someone refers to me as someone who happens to be black, I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.

In short, numbers are accepted as evidence when they agree with preconceptions, but not when they don't.

The presumption of equal outcomes in the absence of malign actions can lead to incorrect— and disastrous— conclusions in other circumstances.

These were neither the first nor the last times when statistical disparities led people to jump to conclusions about villainy being the cause. False assumptions as to causation are more than intellectual errors, and their consequences go far beyond economic losses.

people share a very similar vision of the world and treat its conclusions as axioms rather than as hypotheses that need to be checked against facts.

Why must people always assume we moderns knew more than any of the previous cultures? It simply isn't true, evidence proves otherwise.

Adult infallibility, which seems to me to be an oxymoron, is a regrettable condition, a type of regression, a hardening of the arteries around the heart of ignorance. It frequently manifests itself in an irrational irascibility that is directed at an unspecified "they," who upon examination turn out to be politicians, professionals, or scientists who have challenged our comfortable assumptions about the world.

Tunnel vision is no way to make it as a researcher. Your assumptions are your worst enemies. Trust them too much, and you'll fail to see what's right under your nose.

Your assumptions are your worst enemies. Trust them too much, and you'll fail to see what's right under your nose.

History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.

Falsehood and error arise, not from our perceptions, but from the conclusions to which we jump about things which have not yet been established as true; in such cases further investigation may not confirm our first opinions, and may even disprove them. . . .

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

Figure out what's different about your perspective and use it. There is no competition for a creative person. There are only your own assumptions and habits to overcome.

The more assumptions we can invalidate, the faster we can find and fix problems, increases our resilience, agility, and ability to learn and innovate.