Quotes About Premises

#1. The belief of an infinity of creative and created Gods, each more eminently requiring an intelligent author of his being than the foregoing, is a direct consequence of the premises, which you have stated.

Christopher Hitchens

#2. Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.

Andrea Dworkin

#3. If you want to save capitalism there is only one type of argument that you should adopt, the only one that has ever won in any moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. Check your premises, convince yourself of the rightness of your cause, then fight for capitalism with full, moral certainty.

Ayn Rand

#4. When I was younger, I listened to the greats: Winters, Mel and Carl, Nichols and May, Pryor, Carlin, Klein, Berman and lots of Lenny Bruce albums. But once I started doing fairly well, I didn't want to hear anybody's jokes or premises.

Richard Lewis

#5. Uncle had learned long ago that obeying a rule in fact but not in spirit was very hard on people who say we for I and who do not allow dogs on their premises.

E.L. Konigsburg

#6. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

Ayn Rand

#7. How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#8. A rational man knows-or makes it a point to discover-the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come.

Ayn Rand

#9. Women never reason, or, if they do, they either draw correct inferences from wrong premises, or wrong inferences from correct premises; and they always poke the fire from the top.

Richard Whately

#10. Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises.

Ambrose Bierce

#11. A theory is only as good as its assumptions. If the premises are false, the theory has no real scientific value. The only scientific criterion for judging the validity of a scientific theory is a confrontation with the data of experience.

Maurice Allais

#12. The house was as empty as a beer closet in premises where painters have been at work.

Mark Twain

#13. One of the most important disciplines in journalism is to challenge your working premises.

Bill Keller

#14. In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: This Door Is Locked for No Reason.

Bill Bryson

#15. We are discovering today that several of the premises which are deeply ingrained in our way of life are simply untrue and become pathogenic when implemented with modern technology.

Gregory Bateson

#16. The problem is to appreciate differences in the basic premises of thought and in the very methods of thinking, and these are so often overlooked that our interpretations of Chinese philosophy are apt to be a projection of characteristically Western ideas into Chinese terminology.

Alan W. Watts

#17. The smallest thing in this universe is an intelligent living creature.
He sets himself to be imaginary in the premises of arrogant scientist.

Toba Beta

#18. If the world had two gods, it would surely go to ruin-this is the first premise. Now it is known that it has not gone to ruin-this is the second premise. From these premises the conclusion must of necessity follow, that is, the denial of two gods.

Al-Ghazali

#19. I'm away for a while. But there's no cash on the premises, no drugs, and the pitbull's tested positive. Twice.

William Gibson

#20. The skilful disputant well knows that he never has his enemy at more advantage than when, by allowing the premises, he shows him arguing wrong from his own principles.

William Warburton

#21. Soon I reveled in the very premises I had set aside and rationalized away: the preexistent Logos, the triune mystery, the radical depth of sin passing through the generations, the risen Lord and the grace of baptism.

Thomas C. Oden

#22. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

Alfred North Whitehead

#23. Unless you plan on making academia your life, all you need to know about postmodernism is that its premises are fundamentally wrong.

Tucker Max

#24. Listen to presences inside poems,
Let them take you where they will.
Follow those private hints,
and never leave the premises.

Rumi

#25. What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

Russell Baker

#26. An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions

Ayn Rand

#27. Even in dialogue, your own style rules your selection. Do not give yourself a blank check of this kind: 'I'll merely reproduce what I think a character like so-and-so would say.' You have to reproduce it in the way your literary premises dictate.

Ayn Rand

#28. Framed in black moldings on the wall, other works of arts, conceived and committed on the premises, by the young ladies; being grim black-and-white crayons; landscapes, mostly: lake, solitary sail-boat, petrified clouds, pre-geological trees on shore, anthracite precipice;

Mark Twain

#29. I was the first to make it understood
that reason could undermine the just premises of the good.

Aristophanes

#30. The Scriptures show numerous instances when gospel truths are brought out in different orders, argued for using different premises, and applied to hearts in distinctive ways. It is clear that Paul does not feel an obligation to give the whole gospel picture to his audience in one sitting.

Timothy Keller

#31. Do you think I'd even touch you now? You know what I used to call you? Pussy-on-the-Premises. You were convenient when I needed to blow a load, Fallon.

Anonymous

#32. Hope bases vast premises upon foolish accidents and reads a word where, in fact, only a scribble exists.

John Updike

#33. The premises are so delightfully extensive, that two people might live together without ever seeing, hearing or meeting.

Lord Byron

#34. If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe.

Gregory Bateson

#35. My God died young. Theolatry i found
Degrading, and its premises, unsound.
No free man needs God; but was I free?

Vladimir Nabokov

#36. I'll be the first one to admit that if I have conclusions based on faulty premises, then let me know about that, and I'll be the first one to change it.

Gary Johnson

#37. Sometimes, the only way to learn something really well is to revert to the state of mind of a novice and reawaken to the raw observations that you have accumulated instead of relying on the conclusions you have reached from the exogenous premises absorbed through teaching and bookish learning.

Erik Naggum

#38. All human thought, including scientific thought, rests on premises which cannot be validated by human reason and which came from historical epoch to historical epoch.

Leo Strauss

#39. (Cedric Price produced the Potteries Thinkbelt) ... project which questioned most of the cherished establishment premises of university education and substituted in their place their complete inversion.

Roy Landau

#40. Now when a man is as right as that in his forecasts, there is some reason to think he may be right in his premises.

Frank Sheed

#41. The human heart operates from two premises: "I Am Responsible" and "Only Love Works.

Swami Dhyan Giten

#42. The existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer those of Hume. The foot-print in the sand-to refer to his happy illustration-does now stand alone. Instead of one, we see many footprints, each in turn in advance of the print behind it, and on a higher level.

Hugh Miller

#43. Fleeing the premises?" Detective Canavan echos sarcastically. "Have you been watching Castle again?"
"It's a reasonable question," I say. "And Castle's a very good show.

Meg Cabot

#44. An archer, the moment he thinks he's experienced, is lost; every lion we encounter in our brief life is different from every other lion; woe to us if we stop to make comparisons, to deduce our movements from norms and premises.

Italo Calvino

#45. The premises being thus settled, I proceed to observe that the concatenation of self-existence, proceeding in a reciprocal duplicate ratio, naturally produces a problematical dialogism, which in some measure proves that the essence of spirituality may be referred to the second predicable.

Oliver Goldsmith

#46. The method of exposition which philosophers have adopted leads many to suppose that they are simply inquiries, that they have no interest in the conclusions at which they arrive, and that their primary concern is to follow their premises to their logical conclusions.

Morris Raphael Cohen

#47. The event, in its emergence, poses its own premises, determining that they were the conditions for its realization. This transition is always the result of a salto mortale, which is a creative act in the sense that it gives the preceding links in the chain of events their meaning.

Stathis Kouvelakis

#48. I thought then, and I think now, that the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary and unjust. And I think the premises on which it was launched were false.

Jimmy Carter

#49. Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded in premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data.

Charles Murray

#50. It is often the case with a new idea that when it comes knocking on society's door with modesty and the best premises for its existence, there is a tremendous outcry from inside.

Isak Dinesen

#51. Genius - to know without having learned; to draw just conclusions from unknown premises; to discern the soul of things.

Ambrose Bierce

#52. Typically, when you're with your friends, premises are coming up left and right. But when you're on stage, you must create the premise. So you have to create the premise, paint the picture and then deliver the punch line.

Jon Stewart

#53. The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#54. No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#55. The present non-aristotelian system is based on fundamental negative premises; namely, the complete denial of 'identity.'

Alfred Korzybski

#56. His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough(72).

J.M. Coetzee

#57. Demonstration is also something necessary, because a demonstration cannot go otherwise than it does, ... And the cause of this lies with the primary premises/principles.

Aristotle.

#58. But assuming the same premises, to wit, that all men are equal by the law of nature and of nations, the right of property in slaves falls to the ground; for one who is equal to another cannot be the owner or property of that other.

William H. Seward

#59. Like every big organisation these days, the BBC is obsessed with the wellbeing of those who set foot on its premises. Studios must display warning notices if there is real glass on the set, and the other day I was presented with a booklet explaining how to use a door. I am not kidding.

Jeremy Clarkson

#60. I'll give you a hint. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong." "Francisco,

Ayn Rand

#61. One of the most serious problems that our country has inherited an unwillingness to talk to anyone who disagrees with us or who won't accept, before a discussion, all the premises that we demand.

Jimmy Carter

#62. The man who takes up nothing but a newspaper, but reads it to think, to deduct conclusions from its premises, and form a judgment on its opinions, is more fitted for society than he, who having all the current literature and devoting his whole time to its perusal, swallows it all without digestion.

Cecil B. Hartley

#63. Before taking his leave of a premises, the dustman would request either beer or a tip for his trouble, quaintly known in the trade as 'sparrows'.

Lee Jackson

#64. Good morning, Ms. Daniels. I'm calling to inform you that Julie has left our premises." Not again. Curran's arms closed around me and he hugged me to him. I leaned back against him. "How?" "She mailed herself.

Ilona Andrews

#65. Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#66. A theory is more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the
more different are the kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its range of applicability.

Albert Einstein

#67. In the best farce today we start with some absurd premise as to character or situation, but if the premises be once granted we move logically enough to the ending.

George Pierce Baker

#68. When your principles seem to be demanding suicide, clearly it's time to check your premises

Nathaniel Branden

#69. When all the facts are in, swift and clear decision is another mark of a true leader. A visionary may see, but a leader must decide. An impulsive person may be quick to declare a preference; but a leader must weigh evidence and make his decision on sound premises.

J. Oswald Sanders

#70. The economic prerequisites for the socialist revolution are fully matured in the US. The political premises are likewise far more advanced than might appear on the surface.

James P. Cannon

#71. Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.

Aldous Huxley

#72. I am not offering God as a theory to compete with scientific theories about the universe. Rather I am saying that those self-contained, secular theories provide evidence for theologically neutral premises in philosophical arguments leading to a conclusion that has theistic significance.

William Lane Craig

#73. A theory is the more impressive the greater is the simplicity of its premises, the more different are the kinds of things it relates and the more extended the range of its applicability.

Albert Einstein

#74. Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Samuel Butler

#75. There are no contradictions. If you find one, check your premises.

Ayn Rand

#76. Faith's premises are felt to be so valuable that they deserve the best intellectual reflection possible to confirm argumentatively what faith already knows inwardly

Thomas C. Oden

#77. All mathematical proofs must be deductive. Each proof is a chain of deductive arguments, each of which has its premises and conclusion.

Morris Kline

#78. Common sense got drunk and giddy when Olivia was on the premises. Maybe he should just raise a glass, too, and dub reason a lost cause.

Kelly Moran

#79. Anything, anything at all can be logical. For something to be logical, it just has to be a valid example of reasoning from some set of premises.

Mark C. Chu-Carroll

#80. By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.

Alvin Toffler

#81. I don't laugh so much at jokes and premises as I do at a guy who goes onstage and starts twitching and acting funny.

Harland Williams

#82. The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbors.

Terry Pratchett

#83. The separation of psychology from the premises of biology is purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body.

Carl Jung

#84. What a mathematical proof actually does is show that certain conclusions, such as the irrationality of , follow from certain premises, such as the principle of mathematical induction. The validity of these premises is an entirely independent matter which can safely be left to philosophers.

Timothy Gowers

#85. I'm a bitter-ender. It's potentially my fatal flaw that I do not give up on something. I will not rest. I work and work and work until I can no longer and someone has to remove me from the premises.

Sarah Jessica Parker

#86. A system must necessarily be based on premises that by its very nature it cannot question.

Walter Kaufmann

#87. Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.

Zygmunt Bauman

#88. Mr Wingham has the advantage of being on the premises. He and the young lady play duets after dinner, which acts as a bond. Mr Little on these occasions, I understand, prowls about in the road, chafing visibly.

P.G. Wodehouse

#89. But I suspect that all writers come up with premises of some kind, fragments of narrative or scenarios, in the course of a working week.

Nick Hornby

#90. American troops and American taxpayers are shouldering a huge burden with no end in sight because Mr. Bush took us to war on false premises and with no plan to win the peace.

Al Gore

#91. But the pill did nothing, probably expired like everything else on the premises.

Barbara Kingsolver

#92. I have always thought that the photographer does artistic work and that art consists of working with fictional premises.

Joan Fontcuberta

#93. Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

Karl Marx

#94. The competition of social power with State power is always disadvantaged, since the State can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself, even to the point of outlawing any exercise of social power whatever in the premises; in other words, giving itself a monopoly.

Albert Jay Nock

#95. A sane man often reasons from sound premises; an insane man commonly reasons as well, but the premises are unsound.

Austin O'Malley

#96. Man's character is the product of his premises.

Ayn Rand

#97. The fourfold root of the principle of sufficent reason is Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#98. I got a hotel room at New York New York in Las Vegas and I was very happy. They've got that rollercoaster encircling the entire premises, just like Manhattan.

Mitch Hedberg

#99. I've spoken seriously, and I am very serious, but you know an awful lot of the work is meant to twist things to the point of almost absurdity. I don't want to celebrate absurdity, but I do mean to challenge a lot of premises.

Douglas Huebler

#100. The juggle of sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge