Premises Quotes

The premise, to me, is the most important thing that you have to know going in. It's the problem as you see it. So I write down the problem as I see it. That is the premise for my book.

Our premise is there are going to be a lot of winners. It's not winner take all. Other people do not have to lose for us to win.

Whereas non-scientific (and potentially dangerous) thinking starts with a premise and then looks for things that support it, scientific thinking constantly tries to disprove itself. That alone makes all the difference in the world.

Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned-that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character-that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind.

A fundamental premise of politics is we can make this work if people just never figure it out.

There is no such thing as truth. The only thing that is actually there is your 'logically' ascertained premise, which you call truth.

The media's job is to question a premise.

America is built around this premise that you can do it, and there are an awful lot of people who are unlikely to have done it who did.

The premise of 'The Originals' are places that have been open 50, 60, 75, 100 years or longer that are still doing it right that maybe a lot of people, particularly the younger generations, have not even thought about.

I wish people were willing to dig a little deeper than the surface elements of a premise before tossing one story in with another.

The juggle of sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion.

I realised that all one really had to do was just observe. Observe and slightly exaggerate, and you had comedy. Instead of creating a mythical premise for a stupid joke, I found playing off truth got the best result.

It's always hard, but it's always fun to attack a premise that you think is interesting. It does take a few drafts for sure.

I think it serves the purpose of the film if the premise is that you're unsure of me because you've only ever really seen me play villains.

I write my scripts short and they develop on the set, which I have found a far better premise both economically and practically.

Man's character is the product of his premises.

For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one. Putin is a serious strategist – on the premises of Russian history. Understanding US values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point among US policymakers.’

I don't think that success is the premise to what is good or bad.

A rational man knows-or makes it a point to discover-the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come.

We can't unify around a single premise! Name one thing the Republican Party today could unify on. You can't.

One of the fundamental premises of this Bible is that the gospel changes everything. If this is true, how does the gospel change the very thing we spend most of our waking hours doing - work.

One of the premises of parenting might be that the job of parents is to teach their kids to get along without them.

I feel that if I establish the world or the premise from the first line, then I can get the reader to come with me where I want her to go.

I found, especially with stand-up, that if a premise works, you can make the joke work. If a premise doesn't work, you can't force it to.

Believe it or not, I write on stage. I can't write anywhere else; I have to be in a moment. I also have to challenge myself to make something funny out of a premise. I never have my own jokes written. I have to change things as I go along, and I have to entertain myself.

An important and fundamental premise of the American judicial system is the presumption of innocence, that is until proven guilty.

His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough"(72).

I don't think you can solve what's going on in Iraq unless you can deal effectively with the region and you can't deal effectively with the region if you start with the premise that you can't talk to people who disagree with you.

Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity to live.

My God died young. Theolatry i found Degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God; but was I free?

It is ironic that Einsteins most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed[..].

Accepting the key premise that the learner is the primary customer of schooling means others follow naturally. ... The core business of schooling is learning, and the quality of learning experienced by all learners should be the standard against which performance is measured.

Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. He may learn that what he thought was true was not true. By the elimination of a false premise, his basic capital wealth which in his given lifetime is disembarrassed of further preoccupation with considerations of how to employ a worthless time-consuming hypothesis. Freeing his time for its more effective exploratory investment is to give man increased wealth.

To give a causal explanation of an event means to deduce a statement which describes it, using as premises of the deduction one or more universal laws, together with certain singular statements, the initial conditions ... We have thus two different kinds of statement, both of which are necessary ingredients of a complete causal explanation.

The fourfold root of the principle of sufficent reason is "Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives.

All our technology - whether we use fax machines or computers or speak on phones or watch programs on television - is based on the premise that the essential nature of the material world is non-material.

How can you communicate your thoughts or demonstrate your hypotheses by conventional means when all the values and standards that you want to challenge are built into those means? Science and new technology today like to declare that they encourage 'lateral thinking,' new ways of seeing and putting data together - but all systems have an inbuilt resistance to what has not been programmed into them through the premises on which their rules are based.

Inferences of Science and Common Sense differ from those of deductive logic and mathematics in a very important respect, namely, when the premises are true and the reasoning correct, the conclusion is only probable.

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge. Therefore a good scientist is never ‘certain’. Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain: because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better elements of evidence, or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we value reliability.

The number one premise of business is that it need not be boring or dull. It ought to be fun. If it's not fun, you're wasting your life.

The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody.

An excellent indie horror book with a wholly original premise.

The ideas are secondary to the primary premise of people's potential. I'm always in wonder and astonishment.

The central premise behind Oslo was that if Arafat were given enough legitimacy, territory, weapons and money, he would use his power to fight terror and make peace with Israel.

...If peace were the goal of today's intellectuals, a failure of that magnitude -- and the evidence of unspeakable suffering on so large a scale -- would make them pause and check their statist premises. Instead, blind to everything but their hatred for capitalism, they are now asserting that 'poverty breeds wars' ... But the question is: What breeds poverty? If you look a the world of today and if you look back at history, you will see the answer: the degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity.

One can feel the immense joy of Amy Hill Hearth's engagement in her first novel. It radiates through every scene and through every page. Sometimes, an exceptional writer finds an exceptional premise, and the result is a truly exceptional book. Such is the case with Miss Dreamsville...The writing is brilliant, especially the dialogue through which the characters are defined.

American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict....We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare

All who are caught in its seductive, tantalizing web and remain so will become addicted to its immoral, destructive influence. For many, that addiction cannot be overcome without help. The tragic pattern is so familiar. It begins with curiosity that is fueled by its stimulation and is justified by the false premise that when done privately, it does no harm to anyone else. For those lulled by this lie, the experimentation goes deeper, with more powerful stimulations, until the trap closes and a terribly immoral, addictive habit exercises its vicious control.

How can we judge fairly of the characters and merits of men, of the wisdom or folly of actions, unless we have . . . an accurate knowledge of all particulars, so that we may live as it were in the times, and among the persons, of whom we read, see with their eyes, and reason and decide on their premises?