On either side of a potentially violent conflict, an opportunity exists to exercise compassion and diminish fear based on recognition of each other’s humanity. Without such recognition, fear fueled by uninformed assumptions, cultural prejudice, desperation to meet basic human needs, or the panicked uncertainty of the moment explodes into violence.

The strength of one’s opinion should not exceed their knowledge on the matter.

We are all theologians, either good ones or bad ones. I’d rather be a good one. Wouldn’t you?

Lahat ng mga salitang yan may dating sa’yo. Sabi kasi ng isip mo.

There is no growth in assuming. For it does not give, it takes away.

Always keep in mind that even your most dreadful expectations, are still nothing more than mere assumptions

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.

Character displays “the weighty impatience of having to explain something that should already be understood.

Oh, yes.” There was no shame in it. Sometimes there wasn’t time to do anything else but take a flying leap. Sometimes you had to trust to experience and intuition and general awareness and take a running jump. Nanny herself could clear quite a tall conclusion from a standing start.

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

Study the assumptions behind your actions. Then study the assumptions behind your assumptions.

True masters deconstruct as well as reconstruct.

A favor is a friendly, gracious, kind, generous or obliging act that is freely granted. It is offered and not solicited.A promise is a declaration assuring that one will or will not do something. It is a vow to commit oneself by a promise to do or give. It is a pledge: to make a...

Why do people assume? If I hate you, I’ll tell you. In this case, it’s not hate. It’s hurt. I’ll lick my wounds, which only oozed because I gave a damn, and be over it before the sun rises.

It is easy to get faith into our heads. It is hard to get faith into our bloodstream.

As the unexpected becomes ordinary, the spotlight shifts once again to land where your brain thinks it will get more informational bang for the attentional buck.

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...

That’s the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.

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

If I had a dollar for every time a random woman walked up to me and tried to seduce me, I’d have 50 cents. That’s assuming drag queens are half price.

They have the unique ability to listen to one story and understand another.

Just remember: If you make unfounded assumptions before choosing a path, you’re blindly sauntering along.

Conventional wisdom won’t provide continual growth.

Intelligence people are no different from anybody else. They have preconceptions, and when they see them in real life, it reinforces how brilliant they think they are.

Words in the head are sticky and social creatures – when you finally pull one out, you’re liable to get lots of bits of meanings that have rubbed onto them as a result of their palling around with other words.

Just because I am queer doesn’t mean I am queer for you

All literature becomes a sacred text.

I know I have this judgmental side that I’m often fighting against. But today I recognized the depths of my assumptions about people. What I envision is nothing remotely similar to the reality. Humility hurts. Coming home is disturbing.

Learning to pass, it turns out, is less a matter of acting than not acting. You can become part of a given scene, situation, or people (‘our people,’ as it were), simply by letting yourself serve as a mirror for those around you. When I was still in college, when I still thought I might...

It has been said already, but bears repeating: no blanket statement can sum up an entire group of people. No book, no chapter, no study, no research report can attempt to do that either. Instead, Understanding Y attempts to start a conversation – one that we hope will delve a little deeper and dispel some...

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.

My point is this — you don’t know. When I was first here, people looked at my hair, noticed apples on my tray, and thought ‘hippie.’ Then, from ‘hippie’ they thought ‘druggie.’ From there it went to ‘will get me in trouble’ and ‘not worth my time,’ and then they stopped thinking at all. No...

Learning to be aware of what you unconsciously know may depend on a line of focused effort and specialized knowledge and even some measure of aptitude, but actually learning it may be effortless, automatic, and require very little of what we normally think of as intelligence.

… always keep in mind that an article of faith is not something that the faithful assume. Faith, for those who have it, is the most certain form of knowledge, not a tentative opinion.

Assumptions are unopened windows that foolish birds fly into, and their broken bodies are evidence gathered too late.

Convention (is) so often a mask for injustice.

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

(A middle-class child’s) parents didn’t just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.

You’re going to listen to me, and for once you’re going to hear what I say and not read between lines that aren’t there.

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

The author called us to re-examine assumptions bequeathed to us from Greece and Rome. Just as a bridge built by the Roman Empire might have held up tolerably for centuries under foot traffic but crumble under the weight of a modern truck, the author cautions that classical thinking had limits exposed by contemporary events and...

You figured that the only way I’d be happy is if I did the things you thought would be best for me.

It makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl...

Over time, I discovered that learning new things doesn’t always liberate you. Instead it makes you wonder if your pants are on backward or if the trees are holding the sky up – it makes you question all of your assumptions and conventions.

Perhaps, if you weren’t so busy regarding my shortcomings, you’d find that I do possess redeeming qualities, discreet as they may be. I notice when the sky is blue. I smile down at children. I laugh at any innocent attempt at humor. I quietly carry the burdens of others as though they were my own....

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...

Who we are is not a question we can ask without seeking to understand the context in which we live. Biblical counselors seek to understand the influences that shape the responses of the human heart.

It will be found that every attack upon religion, or upon characteristic ideas inherited from religion, when its assumptions are laid bare, turns out to be an attack upon mind.

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

Culture is the sum of the values, beliefs and assumptions of human groups.