Best 176 quotes in «assumptions quotes» category

Character displays "the weighty impatience of having to explain something that should already be understood.

Civilizaton rests on the assumption that the universe is kindly disposed towards mankind and intended for our benefit. Imagine the upheaval were it to become widespread knowledge that that is not so.

Author discussed what he calls the "narrative fallacy." This refers to our "limited ability" to look at a sequence of facts "without weaving an explanation into them.

Casting a curious gaze down on planet Earth, extra-terrestrial beings could well be forgiven for assuming that we humans are programmed in every move we make, by a palm-sized, oblong, slab of glass. More perplexing than that, who on earth could convince them otherwise ?

Culture can be invisible to its natives.

Convention (is) so often a mask for injustice.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Peter Drucker

Culture is the sum of the values, beliefs and assumptions of human groups.

Daddy got mad when people made assumptions about him, but I liked it. It made me feel someone wanted to know me. Even if they were wrong, it didn't matter. It mattered only that they were trying.

Despite the passage of close to a million years since Homo erectus first sailed to Flores, however, what archaeology does not concede is that the human species could have developed and refined those early nautical skills to the extent of being able to cross a vast ocean like the Pacific or the Atlantic from one side to the other. In the case of the former, extensive transoceanic journeys are not believed to have been undertaken until about 3,500 years ago, during the so-called Polynesian expansion. And the mainstream historical view is that the Atlantic was not successfully navigated until 1492--the year in which, as the schoolyard mnemonic has it, "Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Indeed, the notion that long transoceanic voyages were a technological impossibility during the Stone Age remains one of the central structural elements of the dominant reference frame of archaeology--a reference frame that geneticists see no reason not to respect and deploy when interpreting their own data. Since that reference frame rules out, a priori, the option of a direct ocean crossing between Australasia and South America during the Paleolithic and instead is adamant that all settlement came via northeast Asia, geneticists tend to approach the data from that perspective.

Don’t assume. Ask.

Conventional wisdom won't provide continual growth.

Drop all those assumptions that success is built on success. Add a very little value to yourself and it will amaze you how you will see people appreciate that value!

Even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creative potential. In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives. “Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating,” [Charlan] Nemeth [a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley] says. “It wakes us right up.

Even while an atheist, he held some things sacred.

Every time we make assumptions about what other people feel, do or think, we imprison them and us in a separate reality. When we believe in those assumptions and act accordingly, this separate reality becomes an existential torture chamber for them and ultimately for us. All the terror and pain that we experience or see in the world is the result of our assumptions. Assumptions are the greatest crime in human consciousness. Hence let's start to create an assumption-free world.

Every rock-thrower needs something to stand on to have any accuracy or do any damage with the rocks.

Drivers should not drive more than a minute without having a (purposefully-designed) curve.

Experience is true, but not the lessons it teaches.

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

Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly ever used it EXAMPLE. He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan SHOWED you.

God bestows great gifts on human beings with perfect justice, but not All gifts we are given come from God. Some gifts come from society or culture, and it is here that problems develop.

Harry S Truman despised settled conventions.

He did not consider public opinion to be accurate at long range.

He kept himself in line with popular opinion, which meant popular prejudice.

He treats the person as if they were fully whole. We become what others expect us to be. Dad expected me to get better and even assumed I would have something helpful to say. Funny how we rise and fall to the assumptions of others.

Forming culture is not a one-time event.

Guys, Don't be Clever by knowing one side. Your assumptions are always wrong. Even a one rupee coin have two sides.

Here we begin frank speculation. And since we are speculating, we'll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption.

How can you test whether something's an assumption? Try this: switch things around, and check how bananas everybody goes.

He was a trifle embarrassed to be deserting his hard-won realism in order to follow what he thought was the dominant philosophical fashion.

He was cross-examining my subconscious .

I don’t think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.

He was not what gentlemen usually thought a gentleman was.

Ideas trickle out of science, into the flow of commerce, where they drift into less protectable eddies of art and philosophy.

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.

I find myself constantly taking apart be taken-for-granted.

If she is innocent! Why do you never wonder if Parris be innocent, or Abigail? Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem—vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!

If you are going to judge others it is wisest to do so individually not collectively and on your own direct experience of them personally. But first - and throughout - examine yourself closely. Blurred vision can often occur due to the lens, perspective and perceptions of the viewer projected onto the object that it sees. Be wary of taking to the judges seat. Above all meet at treat yourself and everyone else mindfully, compassionately with humanity.

If you don't know, don't assume. Ask instead. How many times do we just assume? Worse still, how many times do we assume the worst? Stop assuming and just ask!

I hate the word beautiful. Hate it. The word beautiful somehow gives the world permission to make wrongful assumptions about me, like that I don't have a brain. Beautiful somehow gives men permission to say the phrase as a secret password in my direction, and I should therefore fall at their feet. Beautiful makes people believe they can say anything they want about or to me and that I shouldn't be angry. Nothing in the universe could be more wrong.

If the norm of the society is corrupted, then objective journalism is corrupted too, for it must not challenge the norm. It must accept the norm.

If you leave assumptions lying around unchallenged and uncorrected, it isn’t long before they morph into facts.

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.

I had just heard tales that the Valkyrie were large warriors, akin to Amazons.” “If you’re the sole survivor of an army attacked by us, are you going to say we had our asses handed to us by petite, nubile females, or by she-monsters who can bench Buicks?

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

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

I know I have this judgmental side that I'm often fighting against. But today I recognized the depths of my assumptions about people. What I envision is nothing remotely similar to the reality. Humility hurts. Coming home is disturbing.

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.

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.