Assumptions Quotes

There's only a casual relationship between human behavior and logic.

~ Philip Houston

I might be quiet, but that doesn't mean I'm not independent.

~ Sneha Ameya

Assumptions are unopened windows that foolish birds fly into, and their broken bodies are evidence gathered too late.

~ Bryan Davis

Often she felt as though she had been picked up and turned about like a kaleidoscope, that all her complacent assumptions had been shaken up and reassembled in a different order

~ Judith Lennox

Do you really understand all this army stuff?It helps not to be too bright, sir.

~ M*A*S*H Episode Guide Team

When dealing with critics always remember this: Critics judge things based on what is outside of their content of understanding.

~ Shannon L. Alder

It makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, even though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume it's there anyway. Though if it were a sentence about Brooke herself you'd have to add the equivalent describing word and that's how you'd know. The black girl ran across the park.

~ Ali Smith

It is almost impossible for contemporaries to judge the true value of discoveries, or to give the proper position to the men of their own time who make these discoveries. The Surgeon-General of the Public Health Service expected the greatest results to flow from his commission of medical officers, but the conclusions of the Board turned out to be all wrong, while he did not notice the report from his own subordinate, Dr. H. R. Carter, which turned out to be pure gold and was one of the great steps in establishing the true method of the transmission of Yellow Fever.

~ William Crawford Gorgas

Always keep in mind that even your most dreadful expectations, are still nothing more than mere assumptions

~ Sherif A. El-Mawardy

I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military - or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway - in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the fact- and logic-based worlds of, say science and journalism - a culture addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Learning to be aware of what you unconsciously know may depend on a line of focused effort and specialized knowledge and even some measure of aptitude, but actually learning it may be effortless, automatic, and require very little of what we normally think of as intelligence.

~ Gregory C. Carlson

Gytha Ogg, you wouldn’t be a witch if you couldn’t jump to conclusions, right?” Nanny nodded. “Oh, yes.” There was no shame in it. Sometimes there wasn’t time to do anything else but take a flying leap. Sometimes you had to trust to experience and intuition and general awareness and take a running jump. Nanny herself could clear quite a tall conclusion from a standing start.

~ Terry Pratchett

I’ve always been under the assumption that death is a one-time, encompassing event.” “Why would you ever think that?

~ Grace Draven

Familiarity can provide the misguided illusion of understanding. Assume nothing.

~ Truth Devour

It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.

~ George Eliot

A judgement results from some kind of consideration of the evidences available and is always better than an assumption!

~ Abhishek Ratna

I say, sir, that you can never make an intelligent judgment without evidence.

~ Malcolm X

They have the unique ability to listen to one story and understand another.

~ Pandora Poikilos

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

~ George Eliot

That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.

~ Steven Johnson

Thou shalt make no image, no abstraction, including none of THE American, THE Swiss, THE German.

~ Karl Barth

Virulence is the sound of a self-selecting community talking to itself and positively reinforcing itself with no obligation to answer to anyone or look anyone in the eye.

~ Thomas L. Friedman

In the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller.

~ Malcolm Gladwell

People in one of two states in a relationship. The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It's a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they'll say,'Oh, he's just in a crummy mood.'Or they can be in negative sentiment override, said that even a relatively new tool thing that a partner says get perceived as negative. In negative sentiment override state, people draw lasting conclusions about each other. If their spouse does something positive, it's a selfish person doing a positive thing. It's really hard to change their states, and those states determine whether when one party tries to repair things, the other party sees that as repair or hostile manipulation.

~ John Gottberg

TR on using extramarital accusations against Wilson: It won't work. You can't cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts like an apothecary's clerk.

~ David Pietrusza

It's as if she assumes everything will go right, and when it doesn't - which, of course, is pretty often - she is surprised and affronted.

~ Christina Baker Kline

Intelligence people are no different from anybody else. They have preconceptions, and when they see them in real life, it reinforces how brilliant they think they are.

~ Tom Clancy

Washington not only fit the bill physically, he was also almost perfect psychologically, so comfortable with his superiority that he felt no need to explain himself. (As a young man during the French and Indian war he had been more outspoken, but he learned from experience to allow his sheer presence to speak for itself.) While less confident men blathered on, he remained silent, thereby making himself a vessel into which admirers for their fondest convictions, becoming a kind of receptacle for diverse aspirations that magically came together in one man.

~ Joseph J. Ellis

... always keep in mind that an article of faith is not something that the faithful assume. Faith, for those who have it, is the most certain form of knowledge, not a tentative opinion.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

It has been said already, but bears repeating: no blanket statement can sum up an entire group of people. No book, no chapter, no study, no research report can attempt to do that either. Instead, Understanding Y attempts to start a conversation - one that we hope will delve a little deeper and dispel some commonly held assumptions about Generation Y, a conversation that we hope is the first of many.

~ Charlie Caruso

What is important is to treat everyone like an individual and learning not to generalize autism. With autism, people make assumptions, but it's very broad, and everyone's so different. You have to treat each person as an individual.

~ Nikki Reed

The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.

~ David Brin

When we believe in lies, we cannot see the truth, so we make thousands of assumptions and we take them as truth. One of the biggest assumptions we make is that the lies we believe are the truth!

~ Don Miguel Ruiz

It's sad that we never get trained to leave assumptions behind.

~ Sebastian Thrun

Still, intuitive assumptions about behavior is only the starting point of systematic analysis, for alone they do not yield many interesting implications.

~ Gary Becker

Society cannot continue to disable themselves through their need to categorize people or make assumptions as to another individual's abilities.

~ Evelyn Glennie