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Assumptions Quotes

Browse 172 quotes about Assumptions.

Assumptions Quotes

“You've been keeping in touch with the reporter?" "He came by the diner the other day. And that reminds me, you told me he was a by-the-book detective. Calhoun has evidence to the contrary." He squared his shoulders and faced me head-on. Betsy was pushed out of the middle. "What are you implying?" he spat. "Hey, y'all," Betsy interjected. "I'm not implying anything. I just want to know if you still think Detective Thornton is a pristine detective." "Do you always believe everything people tell you?" Alex's jaw clenched. "No." I bared my teeth. If he wanted a fight, he'd certainly get one! He took a step closer to me. "You believe the reporter?" I jerked my head. His neck was corded and his arms tensed. Boy, was he angry. "Some asshole floats into town with tall tales, dangling bait in front of your pretty little face, and you just bite? You've known him for two damn seconds. Me, you've known your whole damn life." "Um... y'all," Betsy said louder. "Where is all this anger comin' from?" I shrieked. "Somebody is going around murdering people. And since the department had to march to the tune of a crooked cop, I felt I had to do something." That was a grave allegation I honestly didn't believe. He had ruffled my feathers and I was lashing out. "And your keen investigative skills led you to believe I was dirty? Perhaps you think I'm the one going around killing people?" His voice teetered on unhinged. "Don't be stupid," I said, more calmly. He felt patronized, that was beyond obvious. Guilt washed over me like a tidal wave and I was searching for the appropriate words to apologize effectively, when he said, "What's with you and older men? Daddy issues?" I gasped. "How dare you?" That was the ugliest thing he could have ever said in this moment. And he'd said it. His facial expression changed, and he took a step forward. I took one backward. Eddie's commanding voice boomed, "Enough." "I tried to warn y'all," Betsy said softly.”

“This sunball-watching person doesn't fit with my mental image of the Shadow of Death.' 'Sorry to disappoint.' Hunt's turn to lift a brow. 'What do you think I do with my spare time?' 'I don't know. I assumed you cursed at the stars and brooded and plotted revenge on all your enemies.”

“The values and assumptions of that household I took in without knowing when or how it happened, and I have them to this day: The pleasure in sharing pleasure. The belief that is is only proper to help lame dogs to get over stiles and young men to put one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. An impatient disregard for small sums of money. The belief that it is a sin against Nature to put sugar in one's tea. The preference for being home over being anywhere else. The belief that generous impulses should be acted on, whether you can afford to do this or not. The trust in premonitions and the knowledge of what is in wrapped packages. The willingness to go to any amount of trouble to make yourself comfortable. The tendency to take refuge in absolutes. The belief that you don't have to apologize for tears; that consoling words should never be withheld; that what somebody wants very much they should, if possible, have.”

“Any faith that does not command the one who holds it is not a real belief; it is a pseudo belief only. And it might shock some of us profoundly if we were brought suddenly face to face with our beliefs and forced to test them in the fires of practical living. Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging our lives so as to admit the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed by its implications.”

“Men may profess their yearning to find a modest and sensible girl to marry. But none of you can resist chasing after a golden-haired flirt with a well-endowed figure, all dimples and giggles- without giving a passing thought to how empty-headed she might be." "Guilty as charged," one of the men admitted, and they all chuckled. "She's not empty-headed," Tom said, unable to keep silent. Adelia gave him a piercing glance, her smile firmly fixed. "I forgot- you're acquainted with the family. Don't say Lady Cassandra is a secret intellectual? An unacknowledged genius of our modern times?" Another round of chuckles, this time more subdued. "She's highly intelligent," Tom replied coolly, "and quick-witted. She's also extraordinarily kind. I've never heard her speak ill of anyone." Adelia flushed at the subtle rebuke.”

“It is already apparent that the word 'Fascist' will be one of the hardest-worked words in the Presidential campaign. Henry Wallace called some people Fascists the other day in a speech and next day up jumped Harrison Spangler, the Republican, to remark that if there were any Fascists in this country you would find them in the New Deal's palace guard. It is getting so a Fascist is a man who votes the other way. Persons who vote your way, of course, continue to be 'right-minded people.' We are sorry to see this misuse of the word 'Fascist.' If we recall matters, a Fascist is a member of the Fascist party or a believer in Fascist ideals. These are: a nation founded on bloodlines, political expansion by surprise and war, murder or detention of unbelievers, transcendence of state over individual, obedience to one leader, contempt for parliamentary forms, plus some miscellaneous gymnastics for the young and a general feeling of elation. It seems to us that there are many New Deal Democrats who do not subscribe to such a program, also many aspiring Republicans. Other millions of Americans are nonsubscribers. It's too bad to emasculate the word 'Fascist' by using it on persons whose only offense is that they vote the wrong ticket. The word should be saved for use in cases where it applies, as it does to members of our Ku Klux Klan, for instance, whose beliefs and practices are identical with Fascism. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), there is a certain quality in Fascism which is quite close to a certain quality in nationalism. Fascism is openly against people-in-general, in favor of people-in-particular. Nationalism, although in theory not dedicated to such an idea, actually works against people-in-general because of its preoccupation with people-in-particular. It reminds one of Fascism, also, in its determination to stabilize its own position by whatever haphazard means present themselves--by treaties, policies, balances, agreements, pacts, and the jockeying for position which is summed up in the term 'diplomacy.' This doesn't make an America Firster a Fascist. It simply makes him, in our opinion, a man who hasn't grown into his pants yet. The persons who have written most persuasively against nationalism are the young soldiers who have got far enough from our shores to see the amazing implications of a planet. Once you see it, you never forget it.”

“Vigilance of the wisest kind is to incessantly remain open to the reality that what I ‘see’ is but a single thread and solitary shard of what ‘is’, for to assume otherwise is to surrender the wisdom of vigilance to the decay of ignorance.”

“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.”

“After the first Neanderthal skeletal remains were identified in Europe in the nineteenth century it was, for a very long while, one of the fundamental unquestioned assumptions of archaeology, a matter taken to be self-evidently true, that other "older," "less-evolved" human species never attained, or even in their wildest dreams could hope to aspire, to the same levels of cultural development as Homo sapiens. During more than a century of subsequent analysis, and despite multiple additional discoveries, the Neanderthals continued to be depicted as nothing more than brutal, shambling, stupid subhumans--literally morons by comparison with ourselves. Since the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, and with increasing certainty as the evidence has become overwhelming, a new "image" of the Neanderthals as sensitive, intelligent, symbolic, and creative beings capable of advanced thought processes and technological innovations has taken root among archaeologists and is set to become the ruling paradigm.”

“So you really think these all represent different holiday lands?" he asked, pulling open the door with the large bird on it. "What do you think this one could be?" "A holiday to honor turkeys?" Sally guessed. Though somehow that didn't sound quite right. "Maybe," Jack mused. "But why would anyone want to honor a turkey? They're such dumb birds. Really, the only good thing to do is eat them." He closed the door, then headed over to the tree with the heart on it. "This one's probably Dissection Town," he decided. "They spend all year long harvesting organs, and one day a year they gather together to eat them." Sally made a face. "Or maybe it's Love Town?" she suggested. "And their holiday is filled with lots of romantic proclamations?" Jack looked disappointed by this idea. He moved on to the tree with the four-leafed plant. "Garden Town," he pronounced. "They're completely vegetarian. And they hate turkeys with a passion.”

“The companies, institutions, and governments relied on assumptions about the predictability of the world, and they were wrong. As their assumptions had worked in the past, they are now blaming the nature of the world (not the erroneous assumptions they made).”

“Climate-aligned interventions at the levels of education & mindsets, foresight & visions, and structures offer the most leverage for systemic change.”

“Life is a time span where people mostly do not see the wood for the trees, wondering what may be the accurate answers to the numerous questions that they have assembled throughout their life, how they might prevent their perception from contradicting the reality of the world of their daily experience and how they can find out the actual standards to measure the soundness of their assumptions. Whichever way, no matter how they ponder, they have no other choice than keeping on looking for Waldo or for Wally. (“How high is too far?”)”

“You do not see this world through your eyes, but your heart. Regardless of the impression you might have about the world, you should consider this first of all.”

“We therapists often make inaccurate assumptions about people living with DID and DDNOS. They often appear to be “just like us,” so we often assume their experience of life reflects our own. But this is profoundly untrue. It results in a communication gap, and, as a consequence, treatment errors. Because the dominant culture is one of persons with a single sense of self, most with multiple “selves” have learned to hide their multiplicity and imitate those who are singletons (that is, have a single, non-fragmented personality). Therapists who do not understand this sometimes describe their clients' alters without acknowledging their dissociation, saying only that they have different “moods.” In overlooking dissociation, this description fails to recognize the essential truth of such disorders, and of the alters. It was difficult for me to comprehend what life was like for my first few dissociative clients.”

“A smile speaks a language of its own. It can be cryptic in its communication –hiding emotions beneath the surface. For every smile can mask years of tears, portray a lie and fool others into believing everything is fine. Don’t always take a person’s smile as a measure of their happiness … take a look into their eyes.”

“Learning to pass, it turns out, is less a matter of acting than not acting. You can become part of a given scene, situation, or people ('our people,' as it were), simply by letting yourself serve as a mirror for those around you. When I was still in college, when I still thought I might make a good priest, I spent some time in a Trappist monastery. I found that by exerting as little of my own personality as possible, I was able to fit right in. The monks in no time came to call me brother, believing I was destined to make vows as one of their own. Passing begins with the assumptions of those around you. The best thing you can do to maintain the illusion is to come as close as possible to doing nothing at all.”

“It has been said already, but bears repeating: no blanket statement can sum up an entire group of people. No book, no chapter, no study, no research report can attempt to do that either. Instead, Understanding Y attempts to start a conversation - one that we hope will delve a little deeper and dispel some commonly held assumptions about Generation Y, a conversation that we hope is the first of many.”

“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.”

“I laid facts out for you, Miss Wadsworth. You assumed I meant lover. You assumed he was untrustworthy, simply because of our professions. Your prejudice interfered with your ability to inquire further, to ask more specific questions, to separate fact from the fiction of your mind. You had the opportunity to clear everything up; I would not have lied to you. That was a choice you made, and did I benefit from it? Of course I did. I make no denial of the fact I’ve used this method on people before, and I will most certainly do so in the future. If you’re angry with anyone, it ought to be yourself as well. You created an illusion of the truth you wanted to see.”