Top 100 Assumption Quotes
#2. There's an assumption if you have any faith you vote this way, you vote that way, or you're this, or you're absolutely a conservative, and those just aren't all true.
Corbin Bernsen
#3. After the Beatles and Dylan, there's this assumption that you are a singer-songwriter, or that if someone else is writing your rhymes, you're a fake rapper.
Alan Light
#4. A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance
Richard Dawkins
#5. We need to let the referee's sole thing be to protect the quarterback and get those late hits out of there. They even have a stat on television that says 'knockdowns.' Knockdowns means that you knock him down after he throws the ball. The assumption is, if it's legal, we'll make excuses for them.
John Madden
#6. The argument that 'boys will be boys' actually carries the profoundly anti-male implication that we should expect bad behavior from boys and men. The assumption is that they are somehow not capable of acting appropriately, or treating girls and women with respect.
Jackson Katz
#7. The assumption that simple = stupid. But it's not true; indeed, I find from personal experience that the stupidest writers are the ones whose writing is positively baroque in form.
John Scalzi
#8. Never base your budget requests on realistic assumptions, as this could lead to a decrease in your funding.
Scott Adams
#9. Often analysis seems to be based on the assumption that future economic output is almost entirely determined by inexorable economic forces independently of government policy so that devoting more resources to one use inevitably detracts from availability for another.
William Vickrey
#10. A central theme of all about love is that from childhood into adulthood we are often taught misguided and false assumptions about the nature of love. Perhaps the most common false assumption about love is that love means we will not be challenged or changed.
Bell Hooks
#11. The assumption that rigidly rejecting words and phrases that have existed for centuries will have much impact on public attitudes is rather dubious.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#12. Learning and teaching are not symmetrical. They are not the flip sides of the same coin, in spite of the fact that almost all papers and conversations on education assume they are. The working assumption
Sugata Mitra
#13. The job of formal methods is to elucidate the assumptions upon which formal correctness depends.
Tony Hoare
#14. Well, I don't. Not absolutely. But adopting making money' as the goal of a manufacturing organization looks like a pretty good assumption. Because, for one thing, there isn't one item on that list that's worth a damn if the company isn't making money.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
#15. I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species.
George C. Williams
#16. All the power [the State] has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power.
Albert Jay Nock
#17. Authority is the assumption that someone else knows better than you.
James Cromwell
#18. Freud's fundamental thought, on which these remarks are based, is formulated by the assumption that consciousness comes into being at the site of a memory trace.
Walter Benjamin
#19. Someone who has a disability is not necessarily in distress. You may be embarrassing and inconveniencing someone by butting in and making assumptions.
Mallory Ortberg
#20. Another assumption is labelled 'regression', and here the reader encounters strange diagrams purporting to represent the direction of psychical energy within the mind.
Sigmund Freud
#21. I operate under the assumption that people don't notice the good in me. That's just how things always seem to play out. I get blamed, while con-artist kids like Venus, and Camille, and Gemma get believed. But the rescue lady noticed. In the background, just observing, she noticed.
Wendelin Van Draanen
#22. A legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid, which is one of today's most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth.
Pope John Paul II
#23. The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don't need justification.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#24. In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#25. I hate it when the real world ignores a perfectly logical, rational assumption.
Jim Butcher
#27. Today neither of our two parties maintains a meaningful commitment to the principle of States' Rights. The 10th Amendment is not a 'general assumption' but a rule of law. States rights mean that states have a right to act or not to act, as they see fit, in areas reserved to them.
Barry Goldwater
#28. In other words, despite the dogged liberal assumption - again, coming from Smith's legacy - that the existence of states and markets are somehow opposed, the historical record implies that exactly the opposite is the case. Stateless societies tend also to be without markets.
David Graeber
#29. If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.
Frank Herbert
#30. It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness. Yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption.
Anthony Storr
#31. I don't have a lot of recreation time. I've always been under the assumption that if you're selling tickets you need to work. The kind of success that's happened to me maybe only happens to one comedian every twenty years and so I'm on the road constantly.
Larry The Cable Guy
#32. With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother's recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations?
Nathan Myhrvold
#33. I had lots of trouble in school as a child, and I lost confidence. Teachers thought I was stupid. I learned to read very late, when I was 11. Dyslexia wasn't recognized then, and the assumption was you were incapable of thinking.
Richard Rogers
#34. You can make the assumption that most human drivers are not out to kill pedestrians. Well, maybe in some parts of Boston they are. But with a person at the wheel who you can see, you behave accordingly. With the robotic car, how do you know what assumption to make?
Rodney Brooks
#35. When I ran for the U.S. Senate the assumption was that anyone's name that was close to "Osama" doesn't stand a chance. So if somebody thought that tacking on "Hussein" in there would be a killer, then I think they underestimate the American people and the seriousness of the problems we face.
Barack Obama
#36. Do not be the judge of people; do not make assumptions about others. A person is destroyed by holding judgments about others.
Gautama Buddha
#37. The assumption was that a calorie is a calorie. Nothing could be further from the truth. The food industry wants you to believe that because it works for them. If a calorie is a calorie, then why would you pick on any individual food stuff?
Robert Lustig
#38. He promised to write a book later about the trip. He sold the rights to the motion pictures and still photographs that would be taken, and he agreed to give a long lecture series on his return. In all these arrangments, there was one basic assumption - that Shackleton would survive.
Alfred Lansing
#39. The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good.
Jonah Goldberg
#40. The assumption of no God cannot be proven by science.
Frank Olvera
#41. We'll need to revise the tired assumption that people automatically become more conservative as they grow older.
Charles Kennedy
#42. The widespread assumption that ethical behavior takes the fun out of life is false. In actuality, living ethically ensures that relationships in our lives, including encounters with strangers, nurture our spiritual growth.
Bell Hooks
#43. If you assume that the new - and simply because it's new - is always to be better than the old, chances are you've never known anything valuable.
Criss Jami
#44. The dangerous assumption we unknowingly accept in the American dream is that our greatest asset is our own ability.
David Platt
#45. Don't assume you are more creative or better than anyone, because some people with better stuffs are just pretending to be dumb for a while.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#46. Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone which influences their stories for the rest of their lives. Children gradually adopt an enduring assumption that everything will turn out well, or badly, depending on their childhood.
David Brooks
#47. What's great about comedy, obviously, is that you set up a situation that people assume one thing and then you break the assumption. That's basically the backbone to comedy. You set up a situation, let people make an assumption, and then you break the assumption.
Bryan Cranston
#48. SYLLOGISM, n. A logical formula consisting of a major and a minor assumption and an inconsequent.
Ambrose Bierce
#49. For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.
Steven Johnson
#50. Too often we are Christians by assumption, manipulation or instruction, rather than Christians by regeneration.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#51. It's a false assumption that people with a lot of money have a lot of free time to shop.
Natalie Massenet
#52. Assuming a specific resource is high cost is often a path to disruption when someone makes a different assumption.
Steven Sinofsky
#53. The modernists started with the assumption that science is the only source of sure knowledge, that nature is all there is, and thus that morality is merely a human invention that can be changed to meet changing circumstances in an evolving world.
Charles Colson
#54. Indeed taking all the evidence together, it is not too much to say that there is no single historic incident better or more variously supported than the Resurrection of Christ. Nothing but the antecedent assumption that it must be false could have suggested the idea of deficiency in the proof of it.
Brooke Foss Westcott
#55. "One and one make two" assumes that the changes in the shift of circumstance are unimportant. But it is impossible for us to analyze this notion of unimportant change.
Alfred North Whitehead
#56. You can't fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are; you fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences, and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is in any way preferable to theirs.
Andrew Solomon
#57. Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.
Marshall McLuhan
#58. The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.
Max Planck
#59. The future is better dealt with using assumptions than forecasts.
Russell L. Ackoff
#60. It was a reasonable assumption on my part.'
'Your assumptions stop being reasonable when they come from fear instead of facts.
Alyxandra Harvey
#61. It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.
Roger Scruton
#62. All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is 'important' in the sense of being 'worthy of being known.'
Max Weber
#63. The hyperreal is the abolition of the real not by violent destruction, but by its assumption, elevation to the strength of the model. Anticipation, deterrence, preventive transfiguration, etc.: the model acts as a sphere of absorption of the real.
Jean Baudrillard
#64. The assumption that the square of a unit vector
is positive unity leads to an algebra whose characteristic
quantities are non-associative.
Cargill Gilston Knott
#65. It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disenfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#66. I'm challenging the assumption that you need to be a dog-eat-dog person to survive in a corporate environment.
Srikumar Rao
#67. In arguing against free enterprise capitalism, the collectivist always adopts the false assumption of a fixed number of jobs in that system. Conversely, in arguing for collectivism, he always assumes that there will be as many jobs as there are workers. The government will make the jobs.
Isabel Paterson
#68. In our greatest universities, naturalism - the doctrine that nature is all there is - is the virtually unquestioned assumption that underlies not only natural science but intellectual work of all kinds.
Philip Johnson
#70. Question every assumption and go towards the problem, like the way they flew to the moon. We should have more moon shots and flights to the moon in areas of societal importance.
Sebastian Thrun
#71. The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#72. There's this assumption that all children have the luxury of a childhood where their innocence is always respected and their main occupation is pleasant play - at the age of 18 or 21, they are then thrust into the real world and shown its uglier side, but not before.
Margo Lanagan
#73. If I were a man, I would strenuously object to the assumption that women have any moral or spiritual superiority as a class.
Betty Friedan
#74. Your reasoning is excellent, it's only your basic assumptions that are wrong.
Ashleigh Brilliant
#75. And the Russians certainly don't have it. If a woman shows up in a fur coat, I just assume she's a crook. And that's me, the nice American. The assumption that you can't make money honestly is a killer.
Esther Dyson
#76. Fashion Fact: Most people make the assumption that I wear trendy shades the majority of the time (often indoors) to protect my eyes from the elements. But in fact it's the reverse. I'm protecting the elements from the brilliance of my eyes.
Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino
#77. If there's a danger at Facebook, it's the assumption that Facebook has us all locked in and we aren't going to go elsewhere.
Robert Scoble
#78. Democracy can't work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that's all there is
so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.
Robert A. Heinlein
#79. The persecuting spirit has its origin ... in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct.
John Fiske
#80. Because what she disliked in men was not their eroticism, but their assumption that women had none. Which left women with nothing to be but housemaids.
Marian Engel
#81. The course hitherto pursued in musical aesthetics has nearly always been hampered by the false assumption that the object was not so much to inquire into what is beautiful in music as to describe the feelings which music awakens.
Eduard Hanslick
#82. The assumption of the word reunion is that, once you're together again, you are united. Two as one. Pulling close to someone is only a temporary symbol. It's the way you breathe with each other that's the telltale sign.
David Levithan
#83. Some of the roots of role-playing games (RPGs) are grounded in clinical and academic role assumption and role-playing exercises.
Gary Gygax
#84. While a trend shown in the past is a fact, a "future trend" is only an assumption.
Benjamin Graham
#85. The most probable assumption is that no currently working 'business theory' will be valid 10 years hence.
Peter Drucker
#86. Here we begin frank speculation. And since we are speculating, we'll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption.
Vernor Vinge
#87. You can only know what you know. Belief is not the same as knowledge. Belief is an assumption of knowledge despite a lack of evidence.
Todd Lockwood
#89. I've found that I can only change how I act if I stay aware of my beliefs and assumptions. Thoughts always reveal themselves in behavior.
Margaret J. Wheatley
#90. Somewhere we had either made a mathematical error or made an assumption that to not justified.
Anonymous
#91. People cannot handle prejudice because they try to deal with the symptom. Prejudice is the symptom, wrong assumptions are the cause.
'Prejudice is the daughter of assumption.
Idries Shah
#92. ..humans love complexity of thought. This they pursue on the totally baseless assumption that complexity indicates profundity or truth.
Walter Ralston Martin
#93. Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.
John Green
#94. The practice of deep listening is the practice of open inquiry, without assumption or judgement.
Sharon Weil
#95. Patience? Certainly no! We have no time for patience! While tomorrow is just an assumption, it is not reasonable to be patient!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#96. When you're in elected office, you always have to operate under the assumption that you're in a dog fight for re-election. It's when you don't prepare for a tough battle, when you're caught flat-footed, that you're vulnerable.
Kevin Yoder
#97. It's a nonsense assumption that you can get rid of terrorism with war. Terrorism is taking the lives of innocent people to gain your objective. War is basically the same thing on a larger scale.
Gene Sharp
#98. Balance Sheets are meaningless. Our accounting systems are still based on the assumption that 80% of costs are manual labor.
Peter Drucker
#99. The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.
William Of Ockham
#100. In 'Henry V,' the story of the assumption of true and responsible leadership by Henry I think is hard-won. He has to lose friends; he has to risk his life.
Kenneth Branagh
