27 Quotes Tagged: assumptions

In the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller.

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

He did not consider public opinion to be accurate at long range.

Under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.

The modern mind is never popular in its own day. People hate being made to think.

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.

I say, sir, that you can never make an intelligent judgment without evidence.

The laws of math and science are different from the rules we are looking at here. Those laws describe precise relationships in the physical world, which we know to be true by testing them against the world itself.

The rules artists learn are different. They are assumptions, not absolutes. They describe a goal or method for short-term or long-term results. They
are there to be tested. And they are only of value as long as they are helpful. They are not laws of nature.

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

Thou shalt make no image, no abstraction, including none of THE American, THE Swiss, THE German.

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous. Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them. Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.