Top 122 Assumption Quotes

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.

The course hitherto pursued in musical aesthetics has nearly always been hampered by the false assumption that the object was not so much to inquire into what is beautiful in music as to describe the feelings which music awakens.

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.

The feudal concept of self-preservation is poisoned at the core by the virulent assumption of master and man, of potentate and slave, of external and internal suppression of the life urge of the only one – of its faith in human sacrifice as a means of salvation.

The widespread assumption is that somehow, the brain produces the mind; somehow millions of neurons fire signals at one another create or produce consciousness… but we have no idea how or why this happens. I’m afraid that in many cases, people in the tech world fail to understand that.

I need to crack the Mumbai traffic code – if I leave early, under the assumption that there will be traffic, I get completely clear roads and reach an hour before my meeting, and then because I can’t find parking I end up having to walk anyway.

Assuming that Iran could become the only oil producer unable to export its oil is a wrong assumption… The United States will never be able to cut Iran’s oil revenues.

Above all, it was the style of Quakerism I was brought up with – an aggressive contempt for popular opinion. The assumption is that most people think something that is wrong, which is great.

Even my parents sort of went along with the assumption that they were a good couple, but they probably weren’t a very good couple.

People associate strength with physical, and that’s the wrong assumption. You’re as strong as your mind is.

I just really try to stay focused on what the material is wanting to do. My basic assumption is that no one will ever listen to it anyway. It’s fidelity to the material. That’s my contract: It’s me and the material. And if it connects with other people, I’m thrilled.

As I get older I think, contrary to modern assumption but in line with the old Lerner and Lowe song, that it would actually benefit both them and society if – to quote Professor Higgins – a woman could be more like a man.

The assumption that everyone in government is a bad actor imperils our democracy.

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

When the state imposes the death penalty, it proclaims that taking one human life counterbalances the taking of another life. This assumption is profoundly mistaken.

It’s not only conceivable, but it’s my goal to stay at Bayern for a long time – under the assumption that I play.

There is a British assumption that you mustn’t speak evil of anyone‘s garden because it is rude – it is like criticising their home, their children or their pets.

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

One of the frustrating tics of our society’s progressive vanguard is the assumption that every evil it discovers was entirely invisible in the past, that this generation is the first to wrestle with dominance and cruelty.

This unthinking assumption of moral virtue on the Left is frustrating. I saw someone on Facebook talking about capitalist scum, he was angry and thought it was OK because his anger was righteous.

We’ll need to revise the tired assumption that people automatically become more conservative as they grow older.

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.

A major part of the conservative plans to reform Medicaid turn on the assumption that states will be better able to manage the program, and deliver its benefits, free from all the intrusive regulation that Washington imposes.

The principle of the brotherhood of man is narcissistic… for the grounds for that love have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.

One of the greatest mistakes of successful people is the assumption, ‘I behave this way, and I achieve results. Therefore, I must be achieving results because I behave this way.’ This belief is sometimes true, but not across the board.

There’s a very good reason for why economics developed the way it did, and that is that in many situations, the assumption that people will exploit the opportunities available to them is very plausible, and it simplifies the analysis of how markets will behave.

I think the first assumption as a coach can’t be that we just have to run harder or do it tougher. You have to understand that everybody is a human being and you have to understand that everybody has things that they’re dealing with.

There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda, but it doesn’t work that way.

Indeed, the big U.S. error after 9/11 was to treat Pakistan as if it were an ally. With an ally, it is possible to assume a large degree of policy overlap. With Pakistan, no such assumption can be made.

The bad-boy label is just an assumption.

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.

My assumption was that people are already motivated to go to a fitness class. That’s who I am. I was already ready to go out there and get to class. All I needed was a search tool. But it turns out people need more than that, and that’s why gym memberships exist.

I’m gay. Megan’s my girlfriend… These aren’t secrets to people who know me. I don’t feel like I’ve not lived my life. I think people have this assumption that if you’re not talking about it, you must be hiding it, like it’s this secret. That was never the case for me.

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

You know, I start with the assumption that -or with, with the belief that this president has to succeed. We all have an enormous amount of capital invested in his success. His success is the country‘s success.

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.

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

Year after year, politicians have drafted huge piles of legislation on the assumption that most people are not good. And we know the consequences of that policy: inequality, loneliness and mistrust.

People who assume I want to run for elected office may be dealing from a bad assumption.

The assumption is simply that I hit on all the things I’ve hit on so far by accident, that my talent is just this raw thing that pours out of me, and then white people feel like they have to come in and contain it, refine it, and bring it to the place where it can been released.

Since the dawn of the Internet, I have always operated under the assumption that if the government or corporations have technological capability to do something, they are doing it – whatever the laws we happen to know about might say.

Curiosity is life. Assumption is death.

Apartheid – both petty and grand – is obviously evil. Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority.

Many people think of me as a perfectionist, someone who polishes and shines each song and performance. I’ve always been bothered by that assumption.

I think it becomes incumbent upon a candidate to essentially disavow some of the things that are in that party platform. Otherwise, I think the assumption is that you are a true believer.

All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is ‘important‘ in the sense of being ‘worthy of being known.’

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.

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.

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.

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

Because kids are physically smaller, there’s an assumption by people who haven‘t read a kids’ book for a long time that their ideas and themes and problems and ambitions must be commensurately smaller and less important. I would venture that sometimes the opposite is true.

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.

Sometimes, there can be a slightly condescending assumption that anything unlikable about a female character is a mistake, as if they’re a contestant in a beauty pageant and have to seem charming and upbeat all the time.

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

An assumption underlying almost all comments on interruptions is that they are aggressive, but the line between what’s perceived as assertiveness or aggressiveness almost certainly shifts with an interrupter’s gender.

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.

Instead of trying to group people into something and have this one assumption, get to know someone for who they are. I guess a lot of people are really lazy to start getting to know people or make that effort.

I thin many people’s deviant behavior starts with dreams because dreams are so non-linear… as if there’s an assumption that everything has to be linear or has to be plotted.

Your birthday happens each year on exactly the same day. It is a solid thing, a dependable thing, a measure of your life broken down into 365 subunits. For a Leaper, it is a bit different. For us, the basic assumption is shattered from the beginning.

I try to get going early, on the assumption that the way you begin your day is the way you continue. But certain books only want to be written at night, so there’s no hard rule where work is concerned.

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.

With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother‘s recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations?

What I find weird is that the term ‘chick lit‘ is used to encompass literally anything a woman writes about relationships. It’s the assumption that because you’re female, you must write in a certain way. I don’t understand why that is – it is a bit demeaning.

I am not taking for granted a call-up to the England squad or making any assumption about my future international career.

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.

At the heart of both democracy and capitalism is a simple assumption that, across the board, people make free and relatively rational decisions: that we are, to borrow a medical term, Gillick Competent.

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.

I have made the mistaken assumption – and I will attempt to be better at this – of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that it is open season. And that is my mistake.

Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.

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

The problem is that many people operate on the assumption that NASA should go to Congress every year with hat in hand and justify it every year. Well, I see it as the greatest economic driver that there ever was. Economic drivers don’t need justification.

There’s always an assumption that when the girls get married they don’t want to work.

The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.

Closely allied to the assumption that Democrats can’t win because they’re too secular is the view that they can’t win if they’re too liberal. This assumption has steered Hillary Clinton toward the center, following her husband. I tend to share this view myself.

Government doesn’t do much for the new Americans. The assumption is that they’ll take care of themselves if they work hard enough.

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 was under the assumption that the first job you get out of college is the job you have for the rest of your life. That’s how my parents were; my parents have been teachers for as long as I’ve known ’em. I was worried that I’d gotten into something that I was going to hate.

There is this absurd assumption that the revitalisation of the public sphere is always a good thing. I think people tend to confuse ‘civic‘ and ‘civil,’ and they believe that everything that is done by citizens is necessarily a good thing because you build a network, an association.

I don’t personally try to balance my work because I operate under the assumption that anyone reading or watching my stuff isn’t having a particularly balanced day anyway. But negative attitudes just amuse me more than positive ones.

With us city girls, there is an assumption that we have the space to raise our voice.

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

Tragedies such as Nevil Shute’s ‘On the Beach‘ and Stanley Kubrick‘s ‘Dr Strangelove’ are so powerful because there’s an underlying assumption that this did not have to happen. It is empowering.

The possibility of saying anything about a thing rests on the assumption that it preserves its identity, or continues to be the same thing in the respect described, that it will behave in future situations as it has in past.

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.

Our long-range predictions – especially those which anticipate extreme-weather events – rely on an assumption that the future will be similar to the past. Lose that, and we lose the tools that have allowed us to prepare for such eventualities.

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.

I start out with the assumption that a lawyer in a criminal case is going to be incompetent – substantially so. I find my assumption to be rarely wrong. Yet society starts out with the very opposite assumption.

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.

People actually aren’t moving on from companies much more quickly than in the past, but there’s a perception that they do, so companies are investing less in talent on the assumption that young employees won’t stay long.

The inability or unwillingness of citizens to differentiate between fake and authentic news is undermining a fundamental assumption of democracy: the informed voter.

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.

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.

Lots of time people have the assumption that I’m making so much money that I don’t care.

If you’re black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.

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

Internet outrage can seem mindless, but it rarely is. To make that assumption is dismissive. There’s something beneath the outrage – an unwillingness to be silent in the face of ignorance, hatred or injustice. Outrage may not always be productive, but it is far better than silence.

In a way I never did with George W. Bush or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, I will write about the actions of the Trump presidency with the working assumption that our nation must be protected both by and from the president.

I don’t see the point of belonging to a party on the increasingly dubious assumption that it’s slightly less bad than the opposition.

A self-fulfilling prophecy is an assumption or prediction that, purely as a result of having been made, cause the expected or predicted event to occur and thus confirms its own ‘accuracy.’

I think when people hear about a celebrity writing a book of any kind, the assumption is that it was dictated to a ghostwriter.

The assumption that people sometimes make is that I have made a cold, calculated decision to put my career ahead of having family, and that’s not true.

I am working on the assumption that in the future there will be no Jews in Gaza.

This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic.

Personally, I don’t see old economics and behavioural economics as opposed. It is useful to assume people are rational as a good approximation to their long term behaviour, but it would be unwise not to think how in practice their behaviour may deviate from that simplifying assumption.

I think every girl should have a tailor in her phone. It’s part of why we beat ourselves up, or why shopping is so frustrating and hard: we have this assumption that when you take something off the rack, it will fit you.

It’s easy to assume that just because you make something in small volumes, not using many tools, that there is integrity and care – that is a false assumption.

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.

I think there’s this assumption that everybody would rather be a director, and I don’t know that that’s the case for me, so we’ll see.

Most people assume that women are responsible for households and child care. Most couples operate that way – not all. That fundamental assumption holds women back.

An inevitable question asked of a performer who has made a modest success of his career is, ‘How has success changed you?’ It’s a loaded question because it automatically assumes that there has been a change. And, in a sense, the assumption is a correct one. Basically, however, most people remain pretty much the same.

Researchers may like to think that, given all the facts, we make rational choices. Ask economists how that assumption works out for them. No, we are emotional creatures who use value-based reasoning in conjunction with our rationality.

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.

I think people see the social media numbers, and the assumption is made that we’re running a campaign that is just social media, but I think we’re running a very old-school campaign.

Corbyn and Trump don’t seem to have anything in common except the assumption on the part of anyone subscribing at any level to the standard thinking that they could never achieve electoral success. They were supposed to doom, if not destroy, their party’s future.

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information – the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.

Especially in writing love stories, there’s always the assumption that once you’ve said ‘I do,’ once you get to the point where you’re married, well, the hard part is over.

Coming out of WWII, there was the assumption, the hope, the vision of a world at peace, of a kind of Wilsonian universalism, that we and the Soviets would get along, we’d have a kind of lovefest for as far into the future as anyone could see.

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.

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.

The assumption should be that we will not appear in print or the blogosphere. Having dinner should not be fodder for Facebook. And this is just as true for ‘public personalities‘ as it is for the average person. After all, even people in the public eye have a right to a private life.

We need to challenge this assumption that any child who’s alone, who isn’t being directly supervised and observed, is a child in in peril.

You proceed from a false assumption: I have no ego to bruise.