Quotes & Sayings About Premises

It never occurs to any of these balloons that someone smoking on school premises isn't rebelling against the system, we're not even thinking about the system, we just want a fag. It's a survival technique, a lot of teachers smoke but no one's barging in the staff room judging their lives, their futures, putting them on detention. — Lisa O'Donnell

I've spoken seriously, and I am very serious, but you know an awful lot of the work is meant to twist things to the point of almost absurdity. I don't want to celebrate absurdity, but I do mean to challenge a lot of premises. — Douglas Huebler

It is often the case with a new idea that when it comes knocking on society's door with modesty and the best premises for its existence, there is a tremendous outcry from inside. — Isak Dinesen

I once read an article which made the argument that modern Western schools have a good deal in common with modern prisons, and I've always thought it was pretty accurate. With both schools and prisons, the ones running the system have a very simple set of priorities for their inmates: they want them to stay on the premises, they want them to stay healthy and watered and fed, and they want them not to be gratuitously violent in a way that'll draw public attention. — Benedict Jacka

The Iraq war that I signed up for was launched on false premises. The American people were misled. Now, whether that was due to bad faith or simply mistakes in intelligence, I can't say for sure. But I can say it shows the problem of putting too much faith in intelligence systems without debating them in public. — Edward Snowden

The skilful disputant well knows that he never has his enemy at more advantage than when, by allowing the premises, he shows him arguing wrong from his own principles. — William Warburton

When I was younger, I listened to the greats: Winters, Mel and Carl, Nichols and May, Pryor, Carlin, Klein, Berman and lots of Lenny Bruce albums. But once I started doing fairly well, I didn't want to hear anybody's jokes or premises. — Richard Lewis

American troops and American taxpayers are shouldering a huge burden with no end in sight because Mr. Bush took us to war on false premises and with no plan to win the peace. — Al Gore

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it. Thought, experienced primarily as language, is permeated by the linguistic and perceptual values developed expressly to subordinate women. Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name. No transcendence of the male system is possible as long as men have the power of naming ... As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so feminists will have to steal the power of naming from men, hopefully to better effect. — Andrea Dworkin

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

Even in ordinary conversation, the ideas connected with the word Logic include at least precision of language, and accuracy of classification: and we perhaps oftener hear persons speak of a logical arrangement, or of expressions logically defined, than of conclusions logically deduced from premises. — John Stuart Mill

I had no future either, not because it existed somewhere else but because I couldn't imagine it. That I might control my future and try to make it turn out the way I wanted was completely beyond my horizon. Everything was of the moment, I took everything as it came and acted on the basis of premises I didn't even know myself, and without realizing this is what I did. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Now be it known, That I John Adams, President of the United States of America, having seen and considered the said Treaty do, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, accept, ratify, and confirm the same, and every clause and article thereof. And to the End that the said Treaty may be observed, and performed with good Faith on the part of the United States, I have ordered the premises to be made public; And I do hereby enjoin and require all persons bearing office civil or military within the United States, and all other citizens or inhabitants thereof, faithfully to observe and fulfill the said Treaty and every clause and article thereof. — John Adams

[Chemist Michael] Polanyi found one other necessary requirement for full initiation into science: Belief. If science has become the orthodoxy of the West, individuals are nevertheless still free to take it or leave it, in whole or in part; believers in astrology, Marxism and virgin birth abound. But no one can become a scientist unless he presumes that the scientific doctrine and method are fundamentally sound and that their ultimate premises can be unquestionably accepted. — Richard Rhodes

Faith's premises are felt to be so valuable that they deserve the best intellectual reflection possible to confirm argumentatively what faith already knows inwardly — Thomas C. Oden

Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche's thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the left as well as of the Right. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Logic might be imagined to exist independent of writing - syllogisms can be spoken as well as written - but it did not. Speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis. Logic descended from the written word, in Greece as well as India and China, where it developed independently. Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience. Logic takes its form in chains: sequences whose members connect one to another. Conclusions follow from premises. These require a degree of constancy. They have no power unless people can examine and evaluate them. In contrast, an oral narrative proceeds by accretion, the words passing by in a line of parade past the viewing stand, briefly present and then gone, interacting with one another via memory and association. — James Gleick

Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The smallest thing in this universe is an intelligent living creature.
He sets himself to be imaginary in the premises of arrogant scientist. — Toba Beta

An archer, the moment he thinks he's experienced, is lost; every lion we encounter in our brief life is different from every other lion; woe to us if we stop to make comparisons, to deduce our movements from norms and premises. — Italo Calvino

On investments, 1998: Where I'm from we don't trust paper. Wealth is what's here on the premises. If I open a cupboard and see, say, 30 cans of tomato sauce and a five-pound bag of rice, I get a little thrill of well-being - much more so than if I take a look at the quarterly dividend report from my mutual fund. — Garrison Keillor

But the pill did nothing, probably expired like everything else on the premises. — Barbara Kingsolver

Arjuna asked Sri Krishna, "In this chaotic condition of my mind, what is my duty? I surrender myself to you, great Master. Please tell me."
The answer of Bhagavan Sri Krishna is, "You understand nothing. You draw conclusions without proper understanding of the structure of life and your relationship to people or things in general. It is a very sorry state. How can you draw conclusions without proper premises? If you draw a conclusion based on a wrong premise, the conclusion is also wrong. Therefore, all that you have been told up to this time is without any foundation because you do not know either yourself or the world. — Swami Krishnananda

The separation of psychology from the premises of biology is purely artificial, because the human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body. — Carl Jung

The house was as empty as a beer closet in premises where painters have been at work. — Mark Twain

Before taking his leave of a premises, the dustman would request either beer or a tip for his trouble, quaintly known in the trade as 'sparrows'. — Lee Jackson

I'm away for a while. But there's no cash on the premises, no drugs, and the pitbull's tested positive. Twice. — William Gibson

In law, as in every other branch of knowledge, the truths given by induction tend to form the premises for new deductions. The lawyers and the judges of successive generations do not repeat for themselves the process of verification any more than most of us repeat the demonstrations of the truths of astronomy or physics. — Benjamin N. Cardozo

The supernatural, and all it represents, is profoundly abnormal, and therefore unreal. Few would argue with these conclusions. Fine. Now the highest aim of the realistic horror writer is to prove, in realistic terms, that the unreal is real. The question is: "Can this be done?" The answer is: "Of course not." One would look silly attempting such a thing. Consequently, the realistic horror writer, wielding the hollow proofs and premises of his art, must settle for merely seeming to smooth out the ultimate paradox. In order to achieve this effect, the supernatural realist must really know the normal world, and deeply take for granted its reality. (It helps if he himself is normal and real.) Only then can the unreal, the abnormal, the supernatural be smuggled in as a plain brown package marked Hope, Love, or Fortune Cookies, and postmarked: the Edge of the Unknown. — Thomas Ligotti

Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time. — Aldous Huxley

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

If you found enough cat hairs in a person's house, you pretty much had to assume there was a feline on the premises somewhere — Stephen King

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). — J.M. Coetzee

Typically, when you're with your friends, premises are coming up left and right. But when you're on stage, you must create the premise. So you have to create the premise, paint the picture and then deliver the punch line. — Jon Stewart

Naturalism is a picture of the whole of reality that cannot, according to its own intrinsic premises, address the being of the whole; it is a metaphysics of the rejection of metaphysics, a transcendental certainty of the impossibility of transcendental truth, and so requires an act of pure credence logically immune to any verification (after all, if there is a God he can presumably reveal himself to seeking minds, but if there is not then there can be no "natural" confirmation of the fact). Thus naturalism must forever remain a pure assertion, a pure conviction, a confession of blind assurance in an inaccessible beyond; and that beyond, more paradoxically still, is the beyond of no beyond. — David Bentley Hart

In the security community, this letter is known by all as a "get-out-of-jail-free card." Pen testers tend to be very conscientious about making sure they always have a copy of the letter with them when they're on or anywhere near the premises of the client company, in case they get stopped by a security guard who decides to flex some muscle and impress the higher-ups with his gumshoe instincts, or challenged by a conscientious employee who spots something suspicious and has enough gumption to confront the pen tester. — Kevin D. Mitnick

All mathematical proofs must be deductive. Each proof is a chain of deductive arguments, each of which has its premises and conclusion. — Morris Kline

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises. — Russell Baker

Many of the religious apologists out there are not stupid people, they are often brilliant. People working in the field of theology and philosophy smart people everywhere. What they are those religious apologists are smart poeple who can build these amazingly intricate rationalizations for whatever weird practice they favor. Whether it's ritual cannibalism, or praying to spirits, or treating women as chattel. And they always building this on terrible shaky foundation of false premises. — PZ Myers

In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: This Door Is Locked for No Reason. — Bill Bryson

Why do we resist the mystery that change brings? When we get too rigid and inflexible, rigor mortis of the soul sets in. For proof of this, we need look no further than to those who choose to stay in a relationship or job long after the soul, or life force, that originally brought it passion and joy has vacated the premises. — Dennis Merritt Jones

For instance, Objectivists will often hear a question such as: "What will be done about the poor or the handicapped in a free society?" The altruist-collectivist premise, implicit in that question, is that men are "their brothers' keepers" and that the misfortune of some is a mortgage on others. The questioner is ignoring or evading the basic premises of Objectivist ethics and is attempting to switch the discussion onto his own collectivist base. Observe that he does not ask: "Should anything be done?" but: "What will be done?" - as if the collectivist premise had been tacitly accepted and all that remains is a discussion of the means to implement it. Once, when Barbara Branden was asked by a student: "What will happen to the poor in an Objectivist society?" - she answered: "If you want to help them, you will not be stopped. — Anonymous

If philosophy had the power to establish incontrovertible truths, immune to doubt, and if philosophers were as a rule wholly disinterested practitioners of their art, then it might be possible to speak of progress in philosophy. In fact, however, the philosophical tendencies and presuppositions of any age are, to a very great degree, determined by the prevailing cultural mood or by the ideological premises generally approved of my the educated classes. As often as not, the history of philosophy has been a history of prejudices masquerading as principles, and so merely a history of fashion. It is as possible today to be an intellectually scrupulous Platonist as it was more than two thousand years ago; it is simply not in vogue. — David Bentley Hart

By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism. — Alvin Toffler

(Cedric Price produced the Potteries Thinkbelt) ... project which questioned most of the cherished establishment premises of university education and substituted in their place their complete inversion. — Roy Landau

[Louis Rendu] collects observations, makes experiments, and tries to obtain numerical results; always taking care, however, so to state his premises and qualify his conclusions that nobody shall be led to ascribe to his numbers a greater accuracy than they merit. It is impossible to read his work, and not feel that he was a man of essentially truthful mind and that science missed an ornament when he was appropriated by the Church. — John Tyndall

In the best farce today we start with some absurd premise as to character or situation, but if the premises be once granted we move logically enough to the ending. — George Pierce Baker

Welcome to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. A magical place for kids and grown-ups alike, where fantasy and fun come to life. Fazbear Entertainment is not responsible for damage to property or person. Upon discovering that damage or death has occurred, a missing person report will be filed within 90 days, or as soon property and premises have been thoroughly cleaned and bleached, and the carpets have been replaced. — Scott Cawthon

What I want you to understand, is the full evil of those who claim to have become convinced that this earth, by its nature, is a realm of malevolence where the good has no chance to win. Let them check their premises. Let them check their standards of value. Let them check - before they grant themselves the unspeakable license of evil-as-necessity - whether they know what is the good and what are the conditions it requires. — Ayn Rand

Fleeing the premises?" Detective Canavan echos sarcastically. "Have you been watching Castle again?"
"It's a reasonable question," I say. "And Castle's a very good show. — Meg Cabot

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises. — Umberto Eco

Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name. — Andrea Dworkin

Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these - the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure - emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century. — Elaine Pagels

You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then, essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche ... and it's from that position, a position outside the cultural operating system, that we can begin to ask real questions about what does it mean to be human, what kind of circumstance are we caught in, and what kind of structures, if any, can we put in place to assuage the plan and accentuate the glory and the wonder that lurks, waiting for us, in this very narrow slice of time between the birth canal and the yawning grave. In other words we have to return to first premises. — Terence McKenna

So.....you're the guy Maggie's got the hots for." Maggie rolled her eyes and dropped her head into her hands. Leave it to Shad to just come right out with it. From her dejected position, she couldn't see Johnny's response, but she felt his interest pique like a blow torch aimed right at her face. Her neck and cheeks flamed hot.

"Johnny Kinross - in the flesh," Shad was warming up to the subject now, his lines right out of a poorly-written made-for-TV movie. "You are Johnny Kinross, right? I mean...I never saw you. But I think we had a pretty good relationship." Maggie sputtered, a laugh erupting from her chest. Shad swiveled his head and gave her his "Shut-up-woman!" lips and his "domineering male" chin thrust. He was talking again before Maggie could give him her "you've-got-ten-seconds-to-vacate-the-premises-before-I-cut-you" glare in response. — Amy Harmon

And the City, in its own way, gets down for you, cooperates, smoothing its sidewalks, correcting its curbstones, offering you melons and green apples on the corner. Racks of yellow head scarves; strings of Egyptian beads. Kansas fried chicken and something with raisins call attention to an open window where the aroma seems to lurk. And if that's not enough, doors to speakeasies stand ajar and in that cool dark place a clarinet coughs and clears its throat waiting for the woman to decide on the key. She makes up her mind and as you pass by informs your back that she is daddy's little angel child. The City is smart at this: smelling and good and looking raunchy; sending secret messages disguised as public signs: this way, open here, danger to let colored only single men on sale woman wanted private room stop dog on premises absolutely no money down fresh chicken free delivery fast. And good at opening locks, dimming stairways. Covering your moans with its own. — Toni Morrison

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. — Elizabeth Janeway

I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises. — Ursula K. Le Guin

To translate kinesics or paralinguistic messages into words is likely to introduce gross falsification due not merely to the human propensity for trying to falsify statements about "feelings" and relationship and to the distortions which arise whenever the products of one system of coding are dissected onto the premises of another, but especially to the fact that all such translation must give to the more or less unconscious and involuntary message the appearance of conscious intent. — Greg Bear

The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbors. — Terry Pratchett

The human heart operates from two premises: "I Am Responsible" and "Only Love Works. — Swami Dhyan Giten

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. — Bertrand Russell

The accession of not one but three illegal drug users in a row to the US presidency constitutes an existential challenge to the prohibitionist regime. The fact that some of the most successful people of our time, be it in business, finances, politics, entertainment or the arts, are current or former substance users is a fundamental refutation of its premises and a stinging rebuttal of its rationale. A criminal law that is broken at least once by 50% of the adult population and that is broken on a regular basis by 20% of the same adult population is a broken law, a fatally flawed law. How can a democratic government justify a law that is consistently broken by a substantial minority of the population? What we are witnessing here is a massive case of civil disobedience not seen since alcohol prohibition in the 1930 in the US. On what basis can a democratic system justify the stigmatization and discrimination of a strong minority of as much as 20% of its population? — Jeffrey Dhywood

For two centuries supporters of the Electoral College have built their arguments on a series of faulty premises. The Electoral College is a gross violation of the cherished value of political equality. At the same time, it does not protect the interests of small states or racial minorities, nor does it serve as a bastion of federalism. Instead the Electoral College distorts the presidential campaign so that candidates ignore most small states - and many large ones - and pay little attention to minorities. — George C. Edwards III

Above all, I am anxious to grant no credence whatsoever to the special mythology of "the Enlightenment." Nothing strikes me as more tiresomely vapid than the notion that there is some sort of inherent opposition - or impermeable partition - between faith and reason, or that the modern period is marked by its unique devotion to the latter. One can believe that faith is mere credulous assent to unfounded premises, while reason consists in a pure obedience to empirical fact, only if one is largely ignorant of both. — David Bentley Hart

The existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer those of Hume. The foot-print in the sand-to refer to his happy illustration-does now stand alone. Instead of one, we see many footprints, each in turn in advance of the print behind it, and on a higher level. — Hugh Miller

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises. — Samuel Butler

I was the first to make it understood
that reason could undermine the just premises of the good. — Aristophanes

A square, flat-roofed hovel, neatly frescoed, with its wall-tops gallantly bastioned and turreted with dried camel-refuse, gives to a landscape a feature that is exceedingly festive and picturesque, especially if one is careful to remember to stick in a cat wherever, about the premises, there is room for a cat to sit. — Mark Twain

For it is the fate of every myth to creep by degrees into the narrow limits of some alleged historical reality, and to be treated by some later generation as a unique fact with historical claims ... this is the way in which religions are wont to die out: under the stern, intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, the mythical premises of a religion are systematized as a sum total of historical events; one begins apprehensively to defend the credibility of the myths, while at the same time one opposes any continuation of their vitality and growth; the feeling for myth perishes, and its place is taken by the claim of religion to historical foundations. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Two students severely injured, you yourself covered in blood, a Reaper on the premises, a Fenrir wolf running around loose somewhere, and extensive property damage to the resort. Well?" Nickamedes snapped. "What do you have to say for yourself, Gwendolyn?"
I thought for a second, then grinned at him. "I followed your directions exactly. I never set one foot outside the hotel. — Jennifer Estep

In practice, socialism didn't work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy. — David Horowitz

The foundations of population genetics were laid chiefly by mathematical deduction from basic premises contained in the works of Mendel and Morgan and their followers. Haldane, Wright, and Fisher are the pioneers of population genetics whose main research equipment was paper and ink rather than microscopes, experimental fields, Drosophila bottles, or mouse cages. Theirs is theoretical biology at its best, and it has provided a guiding light for rigorous quantitative experimentation and observation. — Theodosius Dobzhansky

Common sense got drunk and giddy when Olivia was on the premises. Maybe he should just raise a glass, too, and dub reason a lost cause. — Kelly Moran

Uncle had learned long ago that obeying a rule in fact but not in spirit was very hard on people who say we for I and who do not allow dogs on their premises. — E.L. Konigsburg

Modern societies accepted the treasures and the power offered them by science. But they have not accepted - they have scarcely even heard - its profounder message: the defining of a new and unique source of truth, and the demand for a thorough revision of ethical premises, for a complete break with the animist tradition, the definitive abandonment of the 'old covenant', the necessity of forging a new one. Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the riches they owe to science, our societies are still trying to live by and to teach systems of values already blasted at the root by science itself. — Jacques Monod

Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions. — Alfred North Whitehead

Find the trend whose premise is false, and bet against it. — George Soros

The competition of social power with State power is always disadvantaged, since the State can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself, even to the point of outlawing any exercise of social power whatever in the premises; in other words, giving itself a monopoly. — Albert Jay Nock

Anything, anything at all can be logical. For something to be logical, it just has to be a valid example of reasoning from some set of premises. — Mark C. Chu-Carroll

The man who takes up nothing but a newspaper, but reads it to think, to deduct conclusions from its premises, and form a judgment on its opinions, is more fitted for society than he, who having all the current literature and devoting his whole time to its perusal, swallows it all without digestion. — Cecil B. Hartley

The economic prerequisites for the socialist revolution are fully matured in the US. The political premises are likewise far more advanced than might appear on the surface. — James P. Cannon

One of the most serious problems that our country has inherited an unwillingness to talk to anyone who disagrees with us or who won't accept, before a discussion, all the premises that we demand. — Jimmy Carter

We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in. The man who believes that the resources of the world are infinite, for example, or that if something is good for you then the more of it the better, will not be able to see his errors, because he will not look for evidence of them. For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception - his epistemological premises - he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be. Sometimes the dissonance between reality and false beliefs reaches a point when it becomes impossible to avoid the awareness that the world no longer makes sense. Only then is it possible for the mind to consider radically different ideas and perceptions. — Gregory Bateson

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. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I'm a bitter-ender. It's potentially my fatal flaw that I do not give up on something. I will not rest. I work and work and work until I can no longer and someone has to remove me from the premises. — Sarah Jessica Parker

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. — Karl Marx

I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment. Edrita [his wife] could sense that I was on a long and uncertain path. She was always more conservative than I, but she did share my basic social values and was willing at least to let me test my political follies ... Whenever I read the New Testament after 1950, I was trying to read it entirely without its crucial premises of incarnation and resurrection. That required a lot of circular reasoning for me to establish what the text said. I habitually assumed that truth in religion was finally reducible to economics (with Marx) or psychosexual motives (with Freud) or self assertive power (with Nietzsche). It was truly a self-deceptive time for me, but I had no inkling of its insidious dangers. — Thomas C. Oden

I'll give you a hint. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong." "Francisco, — Ayn Rand

Religions are conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises. — Ambrose Bierce

If metaphysics enjoys the least freedom from assumed premises, man enjoys the least freedom from metaphysics in that metaphysical beliefs are the most ultimate and pervasively relevant to human attitudes; it is consciously or unconsciously the source of all values and of the meaning we attach to life itself. — Fazlur Rahman

From a distance a metronome is ticking through the fog, and I mechanically chew to the familiar caress of its music, counting, along with everyone else, up to fifty: fifty statutory chews for each mouthful. And, still mechanically beating out the time, I go downstairs, and, like everyone else, check off my name in the book as one leaving the premises. But I sense that I'm living separately from everyone else, alone, surrounded by a soft, soundproof wall, and that my world is on my side of this wall. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

The belief of an infinity of creative and created Gods, each more eminently requiring an intelligent author of his being than the foregoing, is a direct consequence of the premises, which you have stated. — Christopher Hitchens

In a practical syllogism, the major premise is an opinion, while the minor premise deals with particular things, which are the province of perception. Now when the two premises are combined, just as in theoretic reasoning the mind is compelled to affirm the resulting conclusion, so in the case of practical premises you are forced at once to do it. — Aristotle.

The method of exposition which philosophers have adopted leads many to suppose that they are simply inquiries, that they have no interest in the conclusions at which they arrive, and that their primary concern is to follow their premises to their logical conclusions. — Morris Raphael Cohen

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so. — Mahatma Gandhi

Writers, and the battery of critics, scholars, and publishers supporting them, would ignore or deny the commercial and symbolic interests which drive them, so involved are they in the literary game, and so accepting are they of its unspoken rules and premises (what Bourdieu calls the field's illusio). — John R.W. Speller

An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions — Ayn Rand

The Bible tells us how to be saved, but textualism goes on to make it tell us that we are saved, something which in the very nature of things it cannot do. Assurance of individual salvation is thus no more than a logical conclusion drawn from doctrinal premises, and the resultant experience wholly mental. — A.W. Tozer

No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little. — Barbara W. Tuchman