Quotes About Assumptions

I didn't want to open up to the kind of pastor who believed that, while I told him my story, God was secretly and inerrantly revealing the rest of my story to him. I've had pastors make assumptions about me before. I'd tell them a story or two, and they filled in the blanks with their own theories and conclusions about the condition of my soul.

Tradition with all its happy assumptions and necessary evils, all of its content majorities and stout killers, is not always a reliable guide.

Les hommes de nature infidèle, si infatués qu'ils paraissent, sont souvent assez modestes en amour, parce qu'ils imaginent les autres d'après eux-mêmes. (Le roi de fer, partie 3, ch. 7, p. 328)

Breakthroughs occur not when someone works within the established paradigm but when assumptions are abandoned, rules are ignored, and creativity runs amok

The second we see somebody on the street or meet someone, we make snap judgments about them, about who they are and why we wouldn't necessarily sit with them or why we would or what's cool or not cool.

As a woman who chooses to be childless, I generally have just one problem: other adults. Living in a culture where women are assumed to prioritize motherhood above all else and where a woman's personal choices are often considered matters of public discussion means everyone thinks they have the right to discuss my body and my choices, so anyone who is curious about my lack of spawn feels the right to march right on over and ask me about it.

After all, what did Prince Charming know about Cinderella besides her shoe size?

I've never understood it. That is always the first thing someone asks: Where are you from. Not 'What do you like?' or 'What do you believe?' or even 'What is your mother like?' which all have more bearing on the person I am. And if I don't tell them where I'm from, they try to guess.... It drives them mad, as if to know me they need to know where I am from.

None of us wants to reject our core assumptions about the universe and start all over again. It is hard work, and it deprives us of nearly everything that makes us feel secure.

What is culture? It's a set of consistent patterns people follow for communicating, thinking, and acting, all grounded in their shared assumptions and values.

His facial hair served not just as a calendar but also as a mask, absorbing the stares of others while allowing him a little privacy in plain sight. "I can hide behind it, I can play to stereotypes and assumptions. One of the benefits of being labeled a hermit is that it permits me strange behavior.

Anthropologists teach others to try to avoid the pitfalls of ethnocentrism by learning to understand a culture in terms of its own assumptions about reality. Western shamans can do a similar service with regard to cognicentrism. The anthropologists' lesson is called cultural relativism. What Western shamans can try to create, to some degree, is cognitive relativism.

Most men believe deep down that all women, even those they see on television, are potential mates.

Escapism sold books, to be sure, but not nearly as many as were sold by exposing America's flaws and making the average American reader (and book club member) look closely at his or her most cherished social assumptions. Americans might not be eager to accept integration, feminism, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency, and the drug culture– or to shoulder the blame for the existence of these problems– but they were certainly willing to read about them.

The law of intended consequences," she said. "That's what I call it anyway. When you look for what you expect to find, invariably you'll find it.

I can be a little prickly when people make assumptions about women.

Labeling we use to define a boy only obscures him. It is of no help to boys and no help to us, either.

The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).

A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.

Don't Make Assumptions. Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

If others tell us something we make assumptions, and if they don't tell us something we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know and to replace the need to communicate. Even if we hear something and we don't understand we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions. We make all sorts of assumptions because we don't have the courage to ask questions.

Such practices and beliefs, which interfere with happiness, are neither inevitable nor necessary; they evolved by chance, as a result of random responses to accidental conditions. But once they become part of the norms and habits of a culture, people assume that this is how things must be; they come to believe they have no other options.

Most economic fallacies derive - from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

Pensar que otro te tiene que tratar bien porque tú eres una persona honesta es como esperar que el toro no te embista porque eres vegetariano.