Assumption Quotes - Page 34

• The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the "-ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's still exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather--all pervasive and so virtually impossible to escape. Still, we can try.

  Michael Pollan

  Weather, Trying, Quality

  Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.28, Penguin

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• Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds

  Thomas Hardy

  Perfect, Deeds, Grew

  Thomas Hardy (2016). “Far from the Madding Crowd: Works of Hardy”, p.83, 谷月社

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• All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there. I can't see it, because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle. I can't jump because the bit forbids it, and my own basic force - my horsepower, if you like - is too little.

  Peter Shaffer

  Average, Track, Littles

  Peter Shaffer (2011). “Equus”, p.10, Simon and Schuster

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• As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Pain, War, Differences

  Mohsin Hamid (2007). “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, p.168, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• She laughed out loud, a warm, knowing laughter that made me once again wonder about the secret ingredient in these women’s lives. Whatever it was, I was clearly missing it. It was so much more than just self-confidence; it seemed to be the ability to love oneself, enthusiastically and unsparingly, body and soul, naturally followed by the assumption that every man on the planet is dying to get in on the act.

  Anne Fortier

  Laughter, Self Confidence, Men

  Anne Fortier (2012). “Juliet (Random House Reader's Circle Deluxe Reading Group Edition): A Novel”, p.168, Ballantine Books

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• The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

  David Foster Wallace

  World, Disease, Like You

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• If others tell us something we make assumptions, and if they don't tell us something we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know and to replace the need to communicate. Even if we hear something and we don't understand we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions. We make all sorts of assumptions because we don't have the courage to ask questions.

  Miguel Angel Ruiz

  Believe, Mean, Needs

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• It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren't facts at all. You could build a whole life's story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which.

  Deb Caletti

  Mind, Stories, May

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• Changes in the structure of society are not brought about solely by massive engines of doctrine. The first flash of insight which persuades human beings to change their basic assumptions is usually contained in a few phrases.

  Kenneth Clark

  Doctrine, Phrases, Firsts

  John Ruskin, Kenneth Clark (1991). “Selected writings”, Penguin Group USA

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• A proud woman who has learned to submit carries all her pride to the reinforcement of her submission, and looks down with severe superiority on all feminine assumption as unbecoming.

  George Eliot

  Pride, Looks, Proud

  George Eliot (2016). “Complete Works Of George Eliot”, p.150, ShandonPress

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• Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply; for who is he that assumes to flatter me? To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is, in fact, a subtle detraction.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Facts, Assuming, Flattery

  Henry David Thoreau (1929). “Early spring in Massachusetts and Summer”

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• The signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me, to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing, are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs; one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains. One takes them seriously, listens to them, follows where they lead. ... But in the middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these life-signs, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Pain, Doubt, Growth

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• Assumptions are dangerous things.

  Agatha Christie

  Dangerous, Dangerous Things

  "The Wide Window". Book by Daniel Handler, 2000.

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• motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

  Adrienne Rich

  Motherhood, Mesh, Relation

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.144, W. W. Norton & Company

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• War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests: by war the issue is left to chance, and the tacit assumption that the best man will win is not at all justified. It might equally be argued that the worst, the most unscrupulous man will win, although history will continue the absurd game by finding him after all the best man.

  Germaine Greer

  War, Winning, Men

  Germaine Greer (1972). “The female eunuch”

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• beware the Lure of a handsome Face, the all too ready Assumption that the lovely Façade must needs have lovely Chambers within; for as 'tis with Great Houses, so, too, with Great Men.

  Erica Jong

  Beauty, Men, House

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• The assumption that men and woman are essentially alike in all respects, or even in the most important ones, is a damaging one, as damaging as the assumption that they are different in ways in which they aren't different, perhaps more so.

  Margaret Mead

  Men, Important, Different

  Margaret Mead, Margaret Mary Caffrey, Patricia A. Francis (2006). “To Cherish the Life of the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead”, p.35, Basic Books

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• The assumption that men were created equal, with an equal ability to make an effort and win an earthly reward, although denied every day by experience, is maintained every day by our folklore and our daydreams.

  Margaret Mead

  Winning, Men, Effort

  Margaret Mead (2000). “And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America”, p.125, Berghahn Books

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• There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who 'fail' at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Suicide, Successful, Dying

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2014). “An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness”, p.72, Pan Macmillan

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• No one has ever explained why it is that parents and guardians consider dull people such safe matrimonial investments for their young charges. Even granting the unsound assumption that dull people are more apt to be content with their own matrimonial fetters, they are certainly more apt to be the cause of discontent in others.

  Alice Duer Miller

  People, Parent, Causes

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• America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.

  Susan Sontag

  Order, White, America

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• Although most of us are complacent in our assumption that science is gaining on the unknown, scientists are acknowledging that man's own brain is complex beyond any hope of complete understanding.

  Marilyn Ferguson

  Men, Understanding, Brain

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• Perhaps I may record here my protest against the efforts, so often made, to shield children and young people from all that has to do with death and sorrow, to give them a good time at all hazards on the assumption that the ills of life will come soon enough. Young people themselves often resent this attitude on the part of their elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if they were denied the common human experiences.

  Jane Addams

  Children, Attitude, Soon Enough

  Jane Addams (2012). “Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes”, p.14, Courier Corporation

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• We [MIT Smart Cities research group] try to identify the fundamental underlying design assumptions that everybody takes as a sort of given and unchallengeable when you think about solving these problems. And we try to challenge those assumptions.

  William J. Mitchell

  Smart, Thinking, Cities

  Source: bigthink.com

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• The paradox is that we have this amazing capacity in our minds and hearts to learn and gain insights and then to build a kind of personal storehouse of knowledge. The underside is that those insights harden and fill the spaces in our hearts and minds. They become assumptions, conclusions and judgments.

  Mark Nepo

  Heart, Space, Mind

  Mark Nepo (2013). “Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred”, p.284, Simon and Schuster

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