Presumably Quotes

#1. Presumably, technology has made man increasingly independent of his environment. But, in fact, technology has merely substituted nonrenewable resources for renewables, which is more an increase than a decrease in dependence.

Herman E. Daly

#2. If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.

Stanley Marion Garn

#3. It's easy to see from commercials the sorts of activities I should presumably be engaged in, but I'm fairly certain that American manhood is vague, internally contradictory and largely nonsensical.

Tycho Brahe

#4. One ends up with a landscape one has never seen before but it is presumably the landscape you were feeling as you started the painting.

Sidney Nolan

#5. And Lawrence was afraid of the main thing. He had a tendency to talk feverishly all around the main thing, as if bundling it with twine. Presumably if he talked in circles around the main thing for long enough it would lie there, vanquished, panting on its side, like a roped steer.

Lionel Shriver

#6. The bicycle is a former child's toy that has now been elevated to icon status because, presumably, it can move the human form from pillar to post without damage to the environment.

Brock Yates

#7. I agree we have enough books that attempt to explain why God allows suffering, presumably in a way that lets God off the hook. And while much smarter men than I have constructed elaborate systems in this pursuit, they are by definition exercises in speculation.

Tullian Tchividjian

#8. Nd the reason is is if you put a backdoor in, hackers can presumably get a hold of that backdoor as well and break it open. So you make systems less secure for everyone if you do that.

Rod Beckstrom

#9. When will it all be over? When will she have time to think and feel again? Presumably not till the baby is a teenager and can safely fend for himself. Although, of course, teenagers need to be taught to drive and say no to drugs and wear condoms.

Liane Moriarty

#10. Since presumably the world exists for God's enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child even when he is in every way a thorn in your heart.

Marilynne Robinson

#11. Viruses have to live somewhere. They can only replicate in living creatures. So, when the Ebola virus disappears between outbreaks, it has to be living in some reservoir host, presumably some species of animal.

David Quammen

#12. 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

#13. There is no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too scary for us.

Bill Bryson

#14. And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.

Virginia Woolf

#15. If you took some famous religious leader, for example, and said it would be nice to clone them indefinitely so you have a dynasty of leaders, my own guess would be that each time the cloning takes place, they would become more and more defective, presumably mentally defective and subsequently worse.

John Gurdon

#16. Writing is a lonely pursuit. The only thing working is imagination and hands.
The only difference between writing and masturbation is one is presumably intended for a mass audience.

Mark Bell

#17. Some compilers allow a check during execution that subscripts do not exceed array dimensions. This is a help, but not sufficient. First, many programmers do not use such compilers because They're not efficient. (Presumably, this means that it is vital to get the wrong answers quickly.)

Brian Kernighan

#18. Timmy put his head to the floor, nose to nose with Thumper. Thumper opened her eyes and gave the kid a lick. Timmy licked her back.
"Don't lick the dog," I said.
"She did it first."
"Yeah, but she cleans her butt with that tongue. Presumably, you don't."
-Jason & 4yoa nephew Timmy

John Inman

#19. Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.

John Green

#20. The relation of loving contains exactly those ordered pairs such that d loves e. This relation is presumably not reflexive on the set of all persons: some people do not love themselves. Much grief is caused by the fact that this relation is not symmetric....

Volker Halbach

#21. This is the theory ... that anything that is art ... is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it's no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.

Edward Gorey

#22. So you're not going to die, are you?" she [Astor] asked politely.
"Not yet," I said. "Not until after you do your homework."
She nodded, glanced toward the kitchen, and said, "I hate math." Then she wandered away down the hall, presumably to hate math at closer range.

Jeff Lindsay

#23. I visited the Chinese side last year. The Chinese are in a constant state of military readiness. They have all their nuclear weapons in the area, presumably trained on targets across the border.

Harrison Salisbury

#24. Boobs exist only to jiggle up and down on the chests of women between the ages of 14 and 32, after which they get too droopy, and then presumably fall off the face of the earth, into space; maybe to eventually become part of the giant rings of Saturn.

Caitlin Moran

#25. When I read about how 200 people died on a polar expedition, I wonder why they didn't get to know the Inuit people who were around and presumably know something about surviving in the Arctic after living there for thousands of years. Talking to people is a survival mechanism.

Tim Cahill

#26. Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view.

Marilynne Robinson

#27. Once again, it must be reiterated that beliefs and practices that developed in response to earlier, and presumably different, environmental pressures tend to persist, and the result may come to be far less than efficient utilization of an environment

Don Edward Beck

#28. If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining.

Richard Dawkins

#29. Tradionally, parents made decisions for a child, because presumably they are looking out for his or her best interests. But if they are blinded, instead, by the best interests of another one of their children, the system breaks down.

Jodi Picoult

#30. his big hands, presumably to stop

Ann Troup

#31. Virgin Mary was said to have appeared there. I was pretty sure she'd had her hands joined in prayer and was crying, presumably over the inhumanity of it all, and not due to sunscreen in the eye or a loose eyelash.

Ellie O'Neill

#32. I am afraid that I do not believe that any body of men can have enough knowledge of the past, the present and the future to establish "development priorities" which presumably means procuring some developments as being good and prohibiting others as being bad.

John James Cowperthwaite

#33. The implication that women work for pin money and can manage on a worse pension, presumably by relying on husbands, riles. But even more galling for women is that few government ministers seem to even appreciate the value of the work they do.

Frances O'Grady

#34. Since women are better at producing babies, presumably Nature has given men some talent to compensate. But for the moment I can't think of it.

Arthur C. Clarke

#35. So Nikki came aboard as Jaqueline's spare cat, presumably in case our prime cat, Eliza, goes on vacation, takes industrial action, or requests a personal day.

Christopher S. Wren

#36. I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution.

William E. Gladstone

#37. In any case, the life of a drunk is presumably livelier than that of the ordinary well-behaved citizen. And then - I read that once somewhere - the life of a hedonist is the best preparation for becoming a mystic.
People like St. Augustine are always the ones that become visionaries.

Hermann Hesse

#38. Every argument is incapable of helping unless it is singular and addressed to a single person. Therefore, one who discourses in any other way presumably does so from love of reputation.

Apollonius Of Tyana

#39. Joshua needed to eat something before embarking upon it, and hence stood in line behind an overtattooed prick who couldn't decide between banana and pumpkin bread, while the barista in a Che Guevara hat (yet presumably fluent in Middle fucking English) looked on indifferently.

Aleksandar Hemon

#40. I associate the truest spirit of Christmas with certain years when I had to spend it at my parents' house as an adult who had, presumably, escaped.

Padgett Powell

#41. If there have been mute inglorious Miltons in rural villages, presumably there have been unrealized Washingtons born in unpropitious times.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#42. She had presumably decided that the problem was the village, and if everybody in the village was gone, they would have to bring John back to take care of her. It was the sort of plan a child would come up with - simple, self-centered, and utterly heartless.

T. Kingfisher

#43. the Cameron Highlanders were ordered to muddy their spats because they were a dazzling white target for the Hun. Within 24 hours the order was countermanded by the Big Chief Cameron of Lochiel who presumably didn't want his Highlanders to look slovenly when dead.

Phyllida Law

#44. Since, as is well know, God helps those who help themselves, presumably the Devil helps all those, and only those, who don't help themselves. Does the Devil help himself?

Douglas Hofstadter

#45. In his parochial school, the nuns had advised him and his classmates that they should sleep each night on their backs with their arms crossed on their chests, hands on opposite shoulders- a presumably holy posture that, not incidentally, made masturbation impossible.

Gay Talese

#46. He was a very humane killer too, for he would dispatch a beast with one blow of it's talk so that it didn't know (and presumably doesn't know) it had been killed.

C.S. Lewis

#47. If Koboi defeats and presumably murders us both then you can consider the debt null and void.

Eoin Colfer

#48. If I had a statue on a column in London, would I prefer the columns to be so high that the statue was invisible, or low enough for the features to be recognizable? I would choose the first alternative, Dr Snow, presumably, the second.

G.H. Hardy

#49. I've always said that my ideal reader would be someone who after finishing one of my novels would throw it out the window, presumably from an upper floor of an apartment building in New York, and by the time it had landed would be taking the elevator down to retrieve it.

Harry Mathews

#50. How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

Harold Bloom

#51. There is the mystery of the scattering, the fact that the people who presumably understand each other are geographically scattered. A man who fits in his milieu as Frost does, is to be considered a happy man.

Ezra Pound

#52. C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.

Dennis Ritchie

#53. Little Lion Street was presumably named after an incident hundreds of years ago which concerned something little and almost certainly involved a street but, Rhys felt, had in no way included a lion.

Kate Griffin

#54. Got it, by Jove! We'll build a great big bloody wall and keep the buggers in!" Presumably he hadn't

Liane Moriarty

#55. The cells and fibers of the brain must carry some kind of individual identification tags, presumably cytochemical in nature, by which they are distinguished one from another almost, in many regions, to the level of the single neurons.

Roger Wolcott Sperry

#56. This is much worse than losing a cat. You do not wish the cat dead, for example, after the first two days. You still love the cat and presumably the cat still loves you, or some variation of love that may in fact be dependence and even indifference.

Suzanne Finnamore

#57. When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.

Richard Dawkins

#58. Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate.

H.L. Mencken

#59. We'll be getting new health insurance and we'll presumably do it through my job with the Senate, and so we'll be on the federal exchange with millions of others on the federal exchange.

Ted Cruz

#60. A culture must be reasonably stable, but it must also change, and it will presumably be strongest if it can avoid excessive respect for tradition and fear of novelty on the one hand and excessively rapid change on the other.

B.F. Skinner

#61. The United States builds weapons presumably secretly, and then it sells them to other countries. So the whole business of secrecy is kind of a fake issue because hardly anything technological remains a secret for very long.

Howard Zinn

#62. His name was Rayner. First name unknown. By me, at any rate, and therefore, presumably, by you too.

Hugh Laurie

#63. I think we're going to have a rather exciting time in the near future.
That gave me a warm tingly feeling inside. Presumably the prospect of more adventures ought to have scared me, but at that moment I felt nothing but wonderful happiness.
Yes, it would be exciting.

Kerstin Gier

#64. No disrespect to the fire god, naturally; blame it instead on His administration, presumably made up of officers of roughly the same level of ability as their terrestial counterparts. That would explain why the mild storm she'd ordered for Oida hit her instead.

K.J. Parker

#65. Simple minds, presumably, are the easiest to manage.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#66. You're young," Teft said. "I'm old."
"That makes you wiser, presumably?"
"Damnation no. The only thing it proves is that I've more experience staying alive than you.

Brandon Sanderson

#67. Number Two's eyes narrowed and became what are known in the Shouting and Killing People trade as cold slits, the idea presumably being to give your opponent the impression that you have lost your glasses or are having difficulty keeping awake. Why this is frightening is an, as yet, unsolved problem.

Douglas Adams

#68. My job is to show and tell. If I get better at showing and telling then presumably I get hired more.

Tom Hardy

#69. Her father picks different names for her as they change locales, but he uses Miranda often, presumably because he knows how much it annoys her.

Erin Morgenstern

#70. This worked pretty well; the nests in gardens tended to grow much more quickly and become heavier than those on farms, presumably because they have more flowers.

Dave Goulson

#71. We don't have sources who are dissidents on other sources. Should they come forward, that would be a tricky situation for us. But we're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission, not to screw it up.

Julian Assange

#72. Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

George Steiner

#73. He was presumably a lover. They did things like commanding battalions. And worse!

Ford Madox Ford

#74. He could dispatch a beast with one blow of his tail so that it didn't know (and presumably still doesn't know) it had been killed. He

C.S. Lewis

#75. No one will presumably ever be able to prove or disprove such fundamental religious principles as the existence of God.

Stephen Kinzer

#76. You.... tapped that ass. Presumably it was, phat?

Jim Butcher

#77. Ha!" he thought. "That will teach me to meddle with magic meant for kings! Norrell is right. Some magic is not meant for ordinary magicians. Presumably John Uskglass knew what to do with this horrible knowledge. I do not. Should I tell someone? The Duke? He will not thank me for it.

Susanna Clarke

#78. She shakes him; that is what she presumable does to other readers too. That is, presumably why, in the larger picture, she exists. What a strange reward for a lifetime of shaking people: to be conveyed to this town in Pennsylvania and given money!

J.M. Coetzee

#79. Eight minutes past the hour here in Belgium - and presumably eight minutes past the hour everywhere in the world.

Murray Walker

#80. It's good to have a manager who shares your interests, or goals. You can presumably trust a husband. I don't know if it's the best way to work. I really shouldn't discuss this.

Dorothy Stratten

#81. Obviously, given the objective that we have, what I would hope is that people would be able to see that actually we had reduced the numbers of people, the net number of people, coming into the country. People would, presumably, see that, but it's difficult to say how.

Theresa May

#82. If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person.

Mary Renault

#83. Is giving in to the photographer's presumably natural impulse to compose and light well sometimes okay and not okay other times?

David Byrne

#84. Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough.

James Baldwin

#85. I am tired and drunk and still hungry. He is full of steak and Coca-Cola and, presumably, energy: enough energy to cross the road and walk up the steps inside the tower of the cathedral, which I have never entered.

Joanna Walsh

#86. Presumably, such is the folly of human beings, the prospects of intellectual suicide might not stop them from indulging their hatred,

Isaac Asimov

#87. The phrase Where I told you to run, so we'd both be free is the most troubling because at first you think he's talking about when he told her to flee, presumably to safety. But then you wonder if he meant for her to run to him. To death.

Suzanne Collins

#88. (For those who like to quote Aristotle's wisdom when appealing to his "Prime Mover" argument for the existence of God, let us remember that he also claimed that women had a different number of teeth than men, presumably without bothering to check.) Everything

Lawrence M. Krauss

#89. Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels ...

Virginia Woolf

#90. The discounting presumably is to be done for each period of time at that rate of interest which represents the alternative cost of employing capital in the occupation in question; that is, at the rate which the entrepreneur could obtain in other investments

Kenneth E. Boulding

#91. It is well known that the human mind very often makes decisions for reasons it clearly does not know, presumably because it does so after having travelled the paths of the mind at such speed that, afterwards, it cannot recognise those paths, let alone find them again.

Jose Saramago

#92. I've lost count of the times I've been asked to 'be' Malcolm Tucker: to go on a political program on television, presumably in order to be the character and give opinions as him.

Peter Capaldi

#93. I had somehow jointed a completely unexpected and unknown company, presumably of people Rita had carelessly left lying around where they had been easily lost, and she had given me no clue how I had managed to get a seat with that group or even who they were.

Jeff Lindsay

#94. State governor is certainly nothing to be sneered at! But I don't think that there are still limits here. A gay man could presumably also become chancellor.

Jens Spahn

#95. That the fighting was done, townspeople began to flood out of alleys and recesses, timidly making for the gate and - presumably - safety.

Robert Jordan

#96. I was reminded of the time I got a free upgrade to first class, where I sat right next to Sean Connery. Tongue-tied, I couldn't think of a thing to say besides, "You're Sean Connery," of which presumably he was aware.

Lionel Shriver

#97. But God also helped those who helped themselves, and presumably expected the chosen to bring warm clothing, water purification tablets, basic medication, a weapon such as the bronze knives that were selling these days, possibly a tent - in short, to bring some common sense to the party.

Terry Pratchett

#98. Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one's conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.

J.G. Ballard

#99. In more than 20 years I've spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.

H. G. Bissinger

#100. If you can't even manage to to force your own presumably democratic governments to allow you to do good things for yourselves, then you probably deserve to become extinct.

Ishmael