Misleading Assumptions Quotes

The true way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others.

I'll hear people say every so often that having HIV must not be so bad - 'Just look at Magic and how well he's doing.'

Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.

Attributing to anything or anyone more good than God has attributed to them is not a positive move, nor does it mean that you have done them any good. A single grain of truth is preferable to a bumper harvest of false imaginings.

People ask if my parents are hippies, but they're actually very conservative. A girl called Rebel sang at their wedding, and that's where my name came from.

There is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the effect for the cause.

Don't judge a book by its thickness either.

I don't believe Fermat had a proof. I think he fooled himself into thinking he had a proof.

Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth.

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

I understand how a first impression is often just that: a quick snapshot that, on its own merit, is meaningless.

Why, I wonder, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, and who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth-that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent, and every setback insuperable?

One of the tragedies of modern times is that people have come to believe that something said by someone in the past, perhaps for illustrative or provocation purposes, actually represents that person's beliefs at the time.

Many employer-employee relationships are built on a lie that starts from the first interaction: neither party automatically conceives of the relationship as something that will last a lifetime, but both interact as if it is. This lie of omission bases the relationship on distrust.

We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious.

The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.

Ninety-five percent of the beliefs we have stored in our minds are nothing but lies, and we suffer because we believe all these lies.

We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.

Around the world, when China has good results, people always think something bad.

The small force that it takes to launch a boat into the stream should not be confused with the force of the stream that carries it along: but this confusion appears in nearly all biographies.