Hypothetical Quotes

• Never answer a hypothetical question. It gets you beyond where you want to be.

  George H. W. Bush

  Answers, Want

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• Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.

  Joan Baez

  Answers, Logic

  Daybreak What Would You Do If (p. 134)

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• I am myself an empiric in natural philosophy, suffering my faith to go no further than my facts. I am pleased, however, to see the efforts of hypothetical speculation, because by the collisions of different hypotheses, truth may be elicited and science advanced in the end.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Philosophy, Effort, Suffering

  Thomas Jefferson, Henry Augustine Washington (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence, cont”, p.260

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• When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.

  Walter Lippmann

  Truth, Honesty, Simple

  Walter Lippmann (1955). “Essays in the Public Philosophy”, p.25, Transaction Publishers

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• No language exists that cannot be misused... Every Interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text.

  Carl Jung

  Language, Interpretation, Unfamiliar

  "Modern Man in Search of a Soul". Book by Carl Jung, p. 14, 1933.

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• I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.

  Thom Gunn

  Home, Self, Tests

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• Now everything is wonderful and hazardous and nothing's hypothetical.

  Alan Moore

  Wonderful

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• Be contemporary. Have impact. Strive for it. Be of the world. Move it. Be bold, don’t hold back. Then the moment you think you’ve been bold, be bolder. We are all alive today, ever so briefly here now, not then, not ago, not in some dreamworld of a hypothetical future. Whatever you do, you must make it contemporary. Make it matter now. You must give us a new path to tread, even if it carries the footfalls of old soles. You must not be immune to the weird urgency of today.

  Ian Bogost

  Moving, Thinking, Impact

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• Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the hypothetical idea itself is used to cut diamonds.

  John Green

  Cutting, Prom Queen, Ideas

  John Green (2013). “Paper Towns”, p.16, A&C Black

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• People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so.

  Kary Mullis

  People, Molecules, Realizing

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• I think the future and the past are equally hypothetical.

  Dan Mangan

  Past, Thinking

  Source: www.songfacts.com

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• There was a time when she had indulged in the hypothetical for hours a day, plotting the map that had led her here. But no life is a line, and hers was an uneven orbit around a dark star, a moth circling a dead bulb, searching for the light it once held.

  Anthony Marra

  Stars, Dark, Light

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• When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Philosophy, Silly, Law

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.310, Harvard University Press

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• So I want to ask you a hypothetical question. My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind.

  Orson Scott Card

  Naps, Want, Next

  Orson Scott Card (2002). “Ender's Shadow”, p.141, Macmillan

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• None but those who have learned the art of subjecting their senses as well as reason to hypothetical systems can be persuaded by the most specious rhetorician that the lots of life are equal; yet it cannot be denied that every one has his peculiar pleasures and vexations, that external accidents operate variously upon different minds, and that no man can exactly judge from his own sensations what another would feel in the same circumstances.

  Samuel Johnson

  Art, Men, Judging

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Hester Mulson Chapone, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1785). “The Rambler”, p.292

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• We have failed to protect science against speculative extensions of nature, continuing to assign physical and mathematical properties to hypothetical entities beyond what is observable in nature.

  Robert Lanza

  Entity, Mathematical, Protect

  "A New Theory of the Universe: Biocentrism builds on quantum physics by putting life into the equation". theamericanscholar.org. March 1, 2007.

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• My anguish came from my hypothesis that other people's hypothetical hypotheses about me mattered. Ridiculous!

  Martha Beck

  People, Ridiculous, Opinion

  "10 Life Lessons You Should Unlearn" by Martha Beck, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 14, 2013.

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• Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic, alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even

  Carl Jung

  Real, Psychics, World

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• The RNA World referred to an hypothetical stage in the origin of life on Earth.

  Sidney Altman

  Origin Of Life, Rna, World

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• We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.

  James A. Baldwin

  Goal, Minorities, Who We Are

  "Gay Rights Speech: What Should Obama Say Tonight?" by Jose Antonio Vargas, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 18, 2010.

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• I mainly get my inspiration for writing from everyday situations and I come up with hypothetical scenarios and I can usually write a lot about that.

  Thomston

  Inspiration, Writing, Everyday

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• A good story needs conflict, and virtual reality is a great hypothetical way to create conflict. ... In some ways, the future is going to be more boring than we think.

  Palmer Luckey

  Reality, Thinking, Way

  Source: www.wbur.org

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• An electron is no more (and no less) hypothetical than a star. Nowadays we count electrons one by one in a Geiger counter, as we count the stars one by one on a photographic plate.

  Arthur Eddington

  Stars, Science, Hypothesis

  Arthur Eddington (2012). “New Pathways in Science: Messenger Lectures (1934)”, p.21, Cambridge University Press

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• We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.

  James A. Baldwin

  Life, Real, Thinking

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• To confess ignorance is often wiser than to beat about the bush with a hypothetical diagnosis.

  William Osler

  Ignorance, Diagnosis, Beats

  Sir William Osler, Mark E. Silverman, T. J. Murray, Charles S. Bryan, American College of Physicians--American Society of Internal Medicine (2003). “The Quotable Osler”, p.102, ACP Press

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