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Assumption Quotes

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Assumption Quotes

“It is instructive to see how organizations pursue their goal of reducing errors and uncertainty. They impose standards, employ checklists, demand that knowledge workers list assumptions for their conclusions and document all sources. These actions either directly interfere with forming insights or create an environment where insights and discoveries are treated with suspicion because they might lead to errors. They signal to knowledge workers that their job is not to make mistakes. Even if they don't make discoveries, no one can blame them as long as they don't make mistakes.”

LongActionGoalMistakeEnvironmentBlameInsightConclusionUncertaintyAssumptionMaking MistakesSuspicionInterfere
Author:Gary A. Klein
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“I you're writing memoir, but it even comes up in fiction. People just assume that you're writing thinly veiled autobiography. And particularly, I think, for people of color, our work is always seen as kind of anthropological artifact regardless. So, there's always going to be that assumption, but even more so in a memoir because often the names aren't even changed. It is easier to verify.”

PeopleThinkingWritingKindChangedAssumingMemoirAssumptionAutobiographyVerify
Author:Faith Adiele
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“Very little attention is paid to improving the decision-making skills of both individual executives and the organizational benchstrength as a whole. Often we find that this is overlooked because there is a common assumption the business executives have all the requisite cognitive skills they need when they come to work for the organization. The problem with that perspective is that it overlooks the fact that thinking skills can be learned and improved at any time during the course of a persons lifetime.”

ThinkingProblemIndividualCommonAttentionPerspectiveLifetimeAssumptionOrganizational
Author:Justin Menkes
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“Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original expectations. More often than not, resistance is cultural in nature but the real cause of lots of resistance often is that however much a team might say that it wants to change, the old assumptions are woven, invisibly, deep within the corporate culture, and from this staging ground they act invisibly to sustain the old order. Finding the assumption out and then rooting them out is a special skill. It calls for assumption hunters, I call them.”

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Author:Grant David McCracken
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“There has always been a confusion in the West about -Islam and about the Middle East and the assumption that the countries are Arab. Iranians very much object to that. They are very proud of their own history, but they have this real inferiority-superiority complex thing about the Arabs and the position of Islam in Iran. One of the reasons why Shi'a Islam is so entrenched in Iran is because it has allowed the Iranians to distinguish themselves from the Arabs, who are mostly Sunni.”

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Author:Hooman Majd
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“I am talking about ordinary people making the link between their communities being treated as disposable and the assumption that the environments they depend on are disposable as well. What gives me hope is the kind of bridgework I'm seeing between social movements on the one hand, and young writers and artists on the other, all intent on opposing such pitiless, short-term thinking.”

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Author:Rob Nixon
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“Once you start to ask patients about their priorities, you discover what they're living for. Once you uncover that, it helps you, as a doctor, decide what to fight for. And when we do that, we often end up identifying limits to the kind of care that people want. One's assumption is that these people are going to live shorter lives, but what we're doing is protecting quality of life. In doing so, you sometimes end up helping people live longer. Certainly, you help people live better days and with more purpose in their lives.”

PeopleKindSometimesHelpingCarePurposeFightingQualityPatientPrioritiesAssumptionHelping PeopleQuality Of LifeBetter Days
Author:Atul Gawande
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“There is still an assumption among many people that to be black is to be lower class. In the last fifteen to twenty years, perhaps even further back than that, there's also been an explosion of a very wealthy black class in the United States, but those people are often treated as special cases: they're athletes, entertainers. Jay-Z. Basketball players. The country metabolizes the fact these rich black people exist, but it seems only to reinforce the idea that every other black person is limping along in poverty.”

PeopleCountryBlackPovertyRichPlayerSpecialBasketballAthleteAssumptionWealthyBlack PeopleBasketball Player
Author:Ayana Mathis
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“I realized that, to a large degree, I had kept my rational mind at bay my whole life. I just acted on intuition in terms of how I related to life. At some point, my rational mind started creeping in, and it would not shut up. I finally had to address it and confront it. I think most intelligent people, at a younger age than I have, begin to question some of the fundamental assumptions our society promotes. But me, I just rejected it without even considering it.”

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Author:Jeff Mangum
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“The rottenness of politics in Yugoslavia didn't come as a surprise. The main lesson is that this is a war which could have easily been stopped by Europe. What was lacking was any will to do so. It's an irony of the achievement of Europe that it had lived for 40 years under the assumption of the unimaginability of internal wars, so it didn't know what to do with it when it was confronted with one close up.”

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Author:Tony Judt
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“I certainly have no regrets about overthrowing Saddam Hussein. I'd do it again. And, yes, there are a lot of things that I think we'd all do differently. Maybe we made some erroneous assumptions about the fabric of the society in Iraq and about the solidity of some of the institutions. And yes, there are a lot of things I would do differently. I'd probably work to rebuild Iraq from the outside in, rather than concentrating so much on Baghdad, for instance.”

ThinkingRegretAssumptionNo RegretsHave No Regrets
Author:Condoleezza Rice
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“It's true that in a lot of western feminist movements, you see women working singularly from men. Suffragettes and the women's rights movement in the 60s here, but when I think of the Islamic feminist movement, I think of a lot of men who are very much standing with the women. It really feels like in equal numbers. Women are catching up in the field because we were not given access to knowledge and encouraged into these studies and so these men are helping us and empowering us. They are men of conscience who are fed up with this assumption that they're entitled.”

ThinkingMenHelpingStudyEqualConscienceWesternFeministAssumptionIslamicEmpoweringFed UpFeminist Movement
Author:Asra Nomani
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“Ever since 9/11, the mood has changed quite a bit, and for the worst. The main cause for this change are the merchants of fear, who want to make us believe that Muslims are the new evil. By hammering on the assumption that all Muslims are terrorists who try to destroy the American society, they make people feel so very scared that some have accepted any kind of freedom-lessening measure, as long as it makes people feel less unsafe. That's not only the case in the U.S., the same goes for Europe.”

PeopleTryingBelieveKindLongEvilWorstChangedScaredAcceptedMoodTerroristAssumption
Author:G.W. Sok
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“We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.”

IfsLawScienceFutureAssumingPhysicsAssumptionOur FutureMy Future
Book:The new science: 3 complete works: Where is science going? The universe in the light of modern physics; The philosophy of physics
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“What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.”

MenBelieveMayFaithBeliefAssumptionCreedsMan And Superman
Book:The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more
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“I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.”

LifeInspirationalWisdomMistakeCreativityFailurePursuitAssumptionComposerI Have LearnedProblem SolvingExposureLearning From MistakesMy MistakesGreat MistakesKnowledge And WisdomLife MistakesLearn From My MistakesMistakes And LearningLearned From MistakesFalse Assumptions
Book:Themes and episodes
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