Quotes about Assumption

To assume you know someone well enough that you can and do predict their behavior and mental perspective is a gross and often tragic mistake, for it eliminates that person's freedom to create his or her own opinion and drastically affects the emerging picture of the relationship.

There may be a potential beyond the system.  If it's true inquiry, then perhaps it is beyond the system.  But don't assume it, because then it will be part of the system.  Every assumption goes into the system.

Bohm: Your questions contain hidden assumptions; that's the point.  Therefore, when you question the question itself, you may be questioning a deeper assumption.  But that's done non-verbally.  Do you see what I mean?  To question the question eventually has to be a non-verbal act, which you can't describe.
Q: And that may break all the patterns?
Bohm: Yes, somehow it breaks the pattern.  Now, the suggestion is that this pattern of the system is not something with which we are stuck.  It may not be absolutely inevitable; there are signs that it could break.
Q: What do you mean when you say that questioning the question has to be non-verbal?
Bohm: If I say I have a question which may contain assumptions that should be questioned, I could question them verbally.  But what would lead me to question my question?  Eventually I can put it into words; but I'm saying the first step, the first flash of insight, is non-verbal.

When you are thinking something, you have the feeling that the thoughts do nothing except inform you the way things are and then you choose to do something and you do it.  That's what people generally assume.  But actually, the way you think determines the way you're going to do things.  Then you don't notice a result comes back, or you don't see it as a result of what you've done, or even less do you see it as a result of how you were thinking.  Is that clear?

Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery