“In the past decade or so, the women's magazines have taken to running home-handyperson articles suggesting that women can learn to fix things just as well as men. These articles are apparently based on the ludicrous assumption that _men_ know how to fix things, when in fact all they know how to do is _look_ at things in a certain squinty-eyed manner, which they learned in Wood Shop; eventually, when enough things in the home are broken, they take a job requiring them to transfer to another home.” KnowsMenWellsEnoughFactsHomeRunningJobsPastCertainKnow HowTakenBrokenMen And WomenWoodsDecadesMagazinesAssumptionShopsArticlesTransfersSuggesting Author:Robert Briffault
“The utopia of the Populists was in the past, not in the future. According to the agrarian myth, the health of the state was proportionate to the degree to which it was dominated by the agricultural class, and this assumption pointed to the superiority of an earlier age.” StatesAgePastClassDegreesMythAssumptionSuperiorityUtopiaPopulist Book:The Age of Reform Source: The Age of Reform
“The judge's authority depends upon the assumption that he speaks with the mouth of others. That is to say, the momentum of his utterances must be greater than any which his personal reputation and character can command, if it is to do the work assigned to it - if it is to stand against the passionate resentments arising out of the interests he must frustrate - for while a judge must discover some composition with the dominant trends of his times, he must preserve his authority by cloaking himself in the majesty of an overshadowing past.” IfsCharacterPastSpeakInterestGreaterJudgingDependsAuthorityMouthsPassionateCommandReputationPreservesAssumptionTrendsResentmentCompositionDominantMajestyMomentumUtteranceOvershadowing Author:Learned Hand
“As I looked more carefully at the listening matrix I saw that during the past twenty years we had taken a magnifying glass to the first of these four quadrants, the female experience of powerlessness. I saw I was subconsciously making a false assumption: The more deeply I understood women's experience of powerlessness, the more I assumed men had the power women did not have. In fact, what I was understanding was the female experience of male power.” MenYearsFirstsFactsPastUnderstandingTakenSawsFourListeningUnderstoodFemaleTwentiesMalesGlassesAssumptionPowerlessnessMagnifyingMagnifying GlassFalse Assumptions Author:Warren Farrell
“I'm not concerned about avoiding anything that happened three years ago or worried about letdowns or things of that nature. When you use the term 'letdown' you proceed with the assumption that this is a continuation of something that happened in the past.” YearsUsePastThreeTermHappenedConcernedYears AgoWorriedAssumptionThree YearsAvoidingContinuationLetdowns Author:Mike Tomlin
“Old ideas are continually being slain by new facts. There is nothing stable in the conclusions of the mind, and it is impossible that there ever should be unless we hold that the universe is made to the measure of the human mind, an assumption for which nothing in the past gives any warrant.” GivingShouldMindHumansMadeIdeasFactsPastUniverseImpossibleConclusionAssumptionHuman MindStableWarrantsOld Ideas Author:Edith Hamilton
“People have had certain assumptions in the past about Conservative governments, partly because of some of the things that happened in the 1980s, and partly because of the tone of some of the debate in the 1980s that appeared to say public spending on the arts was something you might want to progressively reduce.” PeopleWantArtGovernmentMightPastCertainHappenedConservativeSpendingDebateToneAssumption Author:Jeremy Hunt