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Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.
-Alan Alda
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Treat with utmost respect your power of forming opinions, for this power alone guards you against making assumptions that are contrary to nature and judgments that overthrow the rule of reason.
-Marcus Aurelius
Meditations, 3.9
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There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.
-Sir Alfred Jules Ayer
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Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.
-Hosea Ballou
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A speculator is a man who observes the future, and acts before it occurs.
-Bernard Baruch
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It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.
-Jean Baudrillard
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To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
-Albert Camus
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The world can doubtless never be well known by theory: practice is absolutely necessary; but surely it is of great use to a young man, before he sets out for that country, full of mazes, windings, and turnings, to have at least a general map of it, made by some experienced traveler.
-Lord Chesterfield
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Another great evil arising from this desire to be thought rich; or rather, from the desire not to be thought poor, is the destructive thing which has been honored by the name of speculation; but which ought to be called Gambling.
-William Cobbett
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The narrower the mind, the broader the statement.
-Ted Cook
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In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.
-Denis Diderot
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I never guess. It is a shocking habit -- destructive to the logical faculty.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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It is theory that decides what can be observed.
-Albert Einstein
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Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain, gaining new and wider views, discovering unexpected connections between our starting points and its rich environment. But the point from which we started out still exists and can be seen, although it appears smaller and forms a tiny part of our broad view gained by the mastery of the obstacles on our adventurous way up.
-Albert Einstein
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A theory is the more impressive the greater is the simplicity of its premises, the more different are the kinds of things it relates and the more extended the range of its applicability.
-Albert Einstein
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Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.
-Henry Ford
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Choose an attitude of wonderment, taking in all that is being said without assuming you already know what the speaker is talking about. Let go of jumping ahead to finish his or her thoughts. In order to learn you have to risk change...changing your mind!
-Dwight Frindt
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No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond.
-Andre Gide
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The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.
-J.B.S. Haldane
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Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.
-Edith Hamilton
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If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.
-William Hazlitt
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Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development.
-Alexander Herzen
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If there were no bad speculations there could be no good investments; if there were no wild ventures there would be no brilliantly successful enterprises.
-F. W. Hirst
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Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Books about Assumptions
