Assumption Quotations

When you're in elected office, you always have to operate under the assumption that you're in a dog fight for re-election. It's when you don't prepare for a tough battle, when you're caught flat-footed, that you're vulnerable.

The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion.

New York musicians rarely have the time for idle chat and conversation after a gig. Despite popular assumption of our scintillating after-hours, that illusion is overtaken by the constant hustle to juggle a part-time or full-time job, a myriad of errands, a second or third gig of the day, and perhaps a child or two somewhere.

There's the assumption being made by the national security advisers to the Obama administration that the North Korean leadership is not suicidal, that they know they will be obliterated if they attacked the United States. But I would point that everything in South Korea and Japan is well within range of what they might want to do.

The assumption that nature is all there is, and that nature has been governed by the same rules at all times and places, makes it possible for natural science to be confident that it can explain such things as how life began.

Some people who meet me might think I starve myself, because there's such an assumption that being thin involves putting yourself through torture and punishing your body, but I'm just naturally skinny - you should watch me demolish a ploughman's lunch.

There can be no assumption that today's majority is 'right' and the Amish and others like them are 'wrong.' A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no rights or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different.

While analogies are useful, however, they can also be misleading. They smuggle in assumptions that can be wrong.

Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.

The inquiries of the jurist are in truth prosecuted much as inquiry in physic and physiology was prosecuted before observation had taken the place of assumption.

When I started, there was more of a cultural assumption that many readers would find gay characters irrelevant or repugnant.

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.

My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right.

In a start-up company, you basically throw out all assumptions every three weeks.

I had furthermore spoken on the assumption that Russia would mobilize, whereas the assumption of the German Government had hitherto been, officially, that Serbia would receive no support; and what I had said must influence the German Government to take the matter seriously.

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.

The assumption that Washington could and would resolve Lehman Brothers without a bankruptcy, as it had Bear Stearns, was the single biggest mistake in the series of mistakes in 2007 and 2008 that led to the financial panic and the ensuing epidemic of job losses.

I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.

Mainstream medias representation, or its guerrilla decontextualization, of black mens lives in particular can set the stage for erroneous assumptions capable of damaging an individual or a nation.

I am just postmodern enough not to trust 'postmodern' as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods.

There is a false assumption about the Parti Quebecois that we don't know anything about the economy... Well that's a myth.

People really do make the assumption that I had some weirdo Hollywood upbringing, but my parents are incredibly down-to-earth people who worked really hard to raise us in a way that was health.

The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species.

Every economic opinion is associated with a set of assumptions.

My assumption when I began writing was that you were never going to make any money. And you were never going to reach everyone. Therefore you had to do as much as you could in the service of something you genuinely believed in. And if you do that and people get upset, well, there you go.

We must become acquainted with our emotional household: we must see our feelings as they actually are, not as we assume they are. This breaks their hypnotic and damaging hold on us.

My assumption was that all indigenous architecture would be more fractal. My reasoning was that all indigenous architecture tends to be organized from the bottom up. As it turns out, though, my reasoning was wrong.

What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.

There is an assumption that if you're young and pretty, you will get all these opportunities that are way beyond your musical foundation.

In 'Henry V,' the story of the assumption of true and responsible leadership by Henry I think is hard-won. He has to lose friends; he has to risk his life.

A fair trial is one in which the rules of evidence are honored, the accused has competent counsel, and the judge enforces the proper courtroom procedures - a trial in which every assumption can be challenged.

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.

Society cannot continue to disable themselves through their need to categorize people or make assumptions as to another individual's abilities.

Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.

I'll tell you what the real problem is: These people are working under the assumption that they know better about what is good for kids, what kids need to learn to get ahead in this world.

There's an assumption in many of these cultures that these children are mentally retarded, when in fact they're not at all. I saw how the operation affects the child, as well as the child's family and often the village.

I just operate on the assumption that all phone conversations are bugged.

In the middle of the night, when you're ambiguously ethnic, like me, when you're brown, beige, mauve, siena, one of those lighter browns in the Crayola box. You have to be careful of the cops and robbers, because nobody's quite sure what you are, but everybody has assumptions.

We believe the currently one cannot speak of a revolutionary situation, just as there is no concrete possibilities of an immediate and comprehensive assumption of power by the people.

Physics is based on the assumption that certain fundamental features of nature are constant.

If there's a danger at Facebook, it's the assumption that Facebook has us all locked in and we aren't going to go elsewhere.

You can make the assumption that most human drivers are not out to kill pedestrians. Well, maybe in some parts of Boston they are. But with a person at the wheel who you can see, you behave accordingly. With the robotic car, how do you know what assumption to make?

Domestic terrorism has opened new war zones, operating off the assumption that all Americans are potential terrorists.

The human mind inherently seeks intelligible order. Thus the conviction that such an order exists to be found is a crucial assumption.

In the end, my reasons for moving down the timeline and introducing a new cast have more to do with keeping myself entertained, on the assumption that if I get bored, my readers are going to be even more bored.

I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children.

You must stick to your conviction, but be ready to abandon your assumptions.

In our development, as we grow throughout our lives, the structure of our beliefs becomes very complicated, and we make it even more complicated because we make the assumption that what we believe is the absolute truth.

When I was a kid, and I was odd, the default assumption was that I was odd, not that I was gay. Now when a kid is odd in a Greensburg, gay or straight, the default assumption is gay.

We need to let the referee's sole thing be to protect the quarterback and get those late hits out of there. They even have a stat on television that says 'knockdowns.' Knockdowns means that you knock him down after he throws the ball. The assumption is, if it's legal, we'll make excuses for them.

By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.

The Chinese began with the assumption that the group is the fundamental unit of reality. Individuals? Sure, we can factor them out from their groups, but let us not think that they as individuals have any viability apart from their group.

Sending greeting cards to aliens is hardly a new idea. In 2005, Craigslist solicited messages for broadcast to space by a transmitter in Florida, and in 2008, NASA beamed a Beatles song to the North Star (Polaris), on the assumption that any putative Polarians would appreciate the Fab Four's 1960s-genre compositions.

I had lots of trouble in school as a child, and I lost confidence. Teachers thought I was stupid. I learned to read very late, when I was 11. Dyslexia wasn't recognized then, and the assumption was you were incapable of thinking.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

I'm challenging the assumption that you need to be a dog-eat-dog person to survive in a corporate environment.

When somebody has an enormous success in this culture, people start asking two questions, which are 'What are you doing now?' and 'How are you going to beat that?' And I have to say, I love the assumption that your intention is to beat yourself constantly - that you're in battle against yourself.

It's a false assumption that people with a lot of money have a lot of free time to shop.

It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California.

It's got a lot more room for nuance and an assumption that people have started from the beginning. 'Bloodline' ends up being like a really good novel.

My way of thinking as I approach any human being on this planet is, 'What are you doing now?' That's what interests me. I don't come at anybody with a whole bunch of assumptions.

The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction.

It is a common assumption that a person's good works will get them into Heaven.

My assumption from talking with Ken in the interview process is that the investigation will go forward. I think he feels confident that there is a good team of people in place who are working on it and he has several more months to be part of the investigation before he reports for duty out here.

My assumption is that I would not continue on the board, or as chairman. I have a full business life ahead of me,

My assumption is that ... they ... found out that PC World had named the 7170 to its top 10 list in 2005, so the choice was easy for them.

I was struck after 9/11 by what seemed the assumption that everyone bereaved by that event was suffering the same thing. I wanted to explore how individual grief is, how complicated, how colored by the complexity of the mourner's relationship with the person who's died.

One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is the assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind

Lighter-than-usual trading volumes, due to the Assumption Day holiday in Europe, facilitated the single currency's gains,

Of course, the assumption that Pakistan is in a position to exercise complete influence is flawed.

One thing that he said was the assumption that a sniper was a single person could not be further from the truth,

One of the assumptions that divides institutions of faith from those based on politics and international agreements is the automatic assumption that you have to teach me spirituality, that you have to give me a moral center, that you must convince me there's more to development than economic mechanisms.

Obviously, he's going to the right because he knows that's where the votes are. My assumption is if he gets through the primary, he will tack toward the center.

People want closet space. If you fill it to the gills, the assumption is you don't have enough closet space.

If we hadn't had a recession a year ago, and we were watching the fall in employment, a stalling manufacturing sector, falling bond yields and falling stock prices, many people would think we were entering a recession. There's an assumption that the recovery will continue and get stronger next year, when in fact it's possible the economy's tipping over again.

Lenders now feel the agenda has changed, with inquiries looking at virtually every source of income. Some aspect of these inquiries appears to be based upon an assumption of excess profitability. This seems dubious when you look at the numbers.

The price point is certainly an impressive value statement, ... I think the going assumption is you have to pay about $10 a month to be involved in a gaming community like this, so to offer a one time fee of $49.99 is going to make it a lot less challenging for kids or teens to get permission to play. I think it's a key price point position.

The primary assumption is that economic and profit growth will resume by midyear.

Photography has the power to undo your assumptions about the world.

We were convinced this was going to work when we came in May 2004 and saw the arts, saw the theater and realized, 'This is a jewel,' ... Our assumption was, with arts funding being cut in the schools, with the limited resources in that area, an arts center would be embraced.

And just as the false assumption that we are not connected to the earth has led to the ecological crisis, so to the equally false assumption that we arenot connected to each other that has led to our social crisis.

Love can only consist in failure...on the fallacious assumption that it is a relationship. But it is not. It is a production of truth.

The universe is full of dead people who lived by assumption.

The modernists started with the assumption that science is the only source of sure knowledge, that nature is all there is, and thus that morality is merely a human invention that can be changed to meet changing circumstances in an evolving world.

We must strive for literacy and education that teach us to never quit questioning and probing at the assumptions of the day.

What we should admire is the acute fulfillment of the unspoken assumptions, the smooth harmony of the whole activity, which only become evident in the final success.

Kind of the assumption is that we can work through this in the next four months, and I'll be ready to move on by the end of July.

I would think the normal assumption is if one person wants that search excluded, that search is excluded.

From what I understand ... in terms of his activities in the late 1990s, he really wasn't on the radar then. I might go visit my sister in the Bay Area and stay for a four-week visit and someone may see me regularly and make the assumption that I am living there, when, in fact, I am just visiting. All this would be speculation.

If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance

I hate fame. There's this assumption that everyone wants it - that by being a musician, I've signed up for it at some point. But personally, what I signed up for is sharing my music. I've always said I'd rather have four No. 10 songs than one No. 1 hit.

Based on the assumption that all precautions are taken as requested, we consider the difference in risk between U.S. and Japanese beef to be extremely small.

We're operating on the assumption that we will be pulling together something in September for a vote some time this fall, ... there is no consensus." ()

I always go under the assumption that players are going to play until I hear differently. I'm sure he'll be ready to go.

If we were to conduct our projection now, the assumption would be for higher oil prices than in the March projection.

History has shown that the Legislature has never done that. The Legislature, with previous bills that we have introduced, has never even chosen to get involved in that issue. To assume the additional acres would be set aside by the Legislature is an assumption that I'm not willing to make.

Historians once assumed that when childhood mortality was high, people must not have loved their children very much; it would have been too painful. Research has since proved that assumption wrong.

There is an odd assumption that compassion and care are finite or that critics can be everything to everyone - commenting on everything simply because they can. That's not what cultural criticism is.

There is an unproven assumption underlying this legislation that students lose a lot of credits when they transfer to another institution.