Presumed Quotes

1. "In athletics, the idea of possibility is presumed. It's not 'if;' it's 'how.'"
Author: Aimee Mullins

2. "My library was -- all libraries are -- a place of ultimate refuge, a wild and sacred space where meanings are manageable precisely because they aren't binding; and where illusion is comfortingly real. To read, to think, to trace words back to their origins real or presumed; to invent; to dare to imagine. "The Rights of Desire"
Author: André Brink

3. "Why is it that with women, some kink, some vulnerability of the sex, is always presumed to lie at the heart of things- as if they have no other life, no relevance as important as that which they have for us men?"
Author: Anna Funder

4. "But there were women in the world, and from them each of our heroes had taken to himself a wife. The good ladies were no strangers to the prowess of their husbands. and, strange as it may seem, they presumed a little upon it."
Author: Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

5. "(This place) presumed to be a town then, but was hardly more than a word under a tin roof."
Author: Beryl Markham

6. "What never fails to astonish at Skara Brae is the sophistication. These were the dwellings of Neolithic people, but the houses had locking doors, a system of drainage and even, it seems, elemental plumbing with slots in the walls to sluice away wastes. The interiors were capacious. The walls, still standing, were up to ten feet high, so they afforded plenty of headroom, and the floors were paved. Each house has built-in stone dressers, storage alcoves, boxed enclosures presumed to be beds, water tanks, and damp courses that would have kept the interiors snug and dry. The houses are all of one size and built to the same plan, suggesting a kind of genial commune rather than a conventional tribal hierarchy. Covered passageways ran between the houses and led to a paved open area—dubbed "the marketplace" by early archaeologists—where tasks could be done in a social setting."
Author: Bill Bryson

7. "I presumed the president was being truthful until a series of events undercut that confidence."
Author: Bob Graham

8. "How did Kirchmann understand the worthlessness of jurisprudence ? The answer lies in the aphorism: "Three revisions by the legislator and whole libraries became wastepaper." With a sharp alteration this answer became a slogan:"A stroke of the legislator's pen and whole libraries became wastepaper." Another aphorism in the same vein made the point even more brusquely and less politely: "Positive law turns the jurist into a worm in rotten wood." Kirchmann meant that jurisprudence could never catch up with legislation. Thus our predicament becomes immediately obvious. What remains of a science reduced to annotating and interpreting constantly changing regulations issued by state agencies presumed to be in the best position to know and articulate their true intent?"
Author: Carl Schmitt

9. "Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion."
Author: Charles Robert Maturin

10. "He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and it's beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for he vision of a single flower."
Author: Cormac McCarthy

11. "Unaware that he is only interested in the presumed parched pucker in her pants, she is more than happy to give him her phone number."
Author: Curtis Ackie

12. "There was dust everywhere: dust on the cracked and rheumy window; dust over the drugget that made shift as Mr. Guyle's carpet; dust on the framed portraits of my lords Eldon, Coke and other luminaries that hung on the wall; and dust, it may be presumed, in the ventricles of Mr. Guyle's ancient legal heart."
Author: D.J. Taylor

13. "...There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful."
Author: Dave Hickey

14. "Naturalism, therefore, can never be anything more than a guiding prejudice, an established principle only in the sense that it must be indefensibly presumed for the sake of some larger view of reality;"
Author: David Bentley Hart

15. "It used to be presumed that if you weren't at your desk working, you weren't working, But we said, 'Why can't we make a workplace where casual meetings are as important as working at your desk?' Sometimes that's where your better creative work happens."
Author: David Chipperfield

16. "Why is someone telling you they loved you so awful?' I ask.‘It's not just that he told me he loved me, it's more about he expected me to say it back. I don't like feeling cornered into saying stuff I don't feel and doing stuff I don't want to do. And anyway, love at our age is ridiculous,' Renee says, tapping her toe in a puddle of water.Putting it like that makes more sense. People live whole lives together pretending to be in love. I guess Mum and Dad did that for most of their relationship. Then they realised they couldn't pretend any more but they were stuck with each other, and look where that got them. I've never really thought about love being such a big deal before. I just presumed that if someone was kind enough to say it to me, I would be kind enough to say it back, but maybe you shouldn't just say ‘I love you.' You have to mean it."
Author: Dawn O'Porter

17. "A democratic society must seek to give every young person, whether native-born or newcomer, the knowledge and skills to succeed as an adult. In a political system that relies on the participation of informed citizens, everyone should, at a minimum, learn to speak, read and write a common language. Those who would sustain our democratic life must understand its history. Tailoring children's education to the color of their skin, their national origins, or their presumed ethnicity is in some fundamental sense contrary to our nation's founding ideals of democracy, equality and opportunity."
Author: Diane Ravitch

18. "Only a fool makes threats he's not prepared to carry out. If I were to threaten to hit you unless you shut your mouth, and you presumed to speak, what do you think I'd do?"
Author: George R.R. Martin

19. "Dear lieutenant, I think we all seduced you, deflected you from a course that might have let you live. Seeking something in the quick of us, searching to secure a kind of love with the provenance of age and land and family, you took over our premises; you presumed to the legacy that was ours, and if you did not see that such assumptions have their own ramifying repercussions, and that the stones demand their own continuity of blood, if you did not understand the gravity of their isolation, the solitude of their trapped state or the hardness of their old responsibility, still you cannot fault the castle or either one of us, or complain that you were led to your own conclusion. I left the castle; you brought us all back."
Author: Iain Banks

20. "Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx."
Author: James Baldwin

21. "From several of the Indian tribes inhabiting the country bordering on Lake Erie purchases have been made of lands on conditions very favorable to the United States, and, as it is presumed, not less so to the tribes themselves."
Author: James Monroe

22. "Only now, when it is too late, do I long for Dearth. I was a misbegotten child of bad blood and bile, and I mistook my own orneriness for cleverness. I presumed to know what happiness was - something I could possess, like a marble, or a man. Something I could only find elsewhere. But just when I started to find it at home, I outfoxed myself and lost it forever."
Author: Jane Avrich

23. "Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.Most city architectural designers and planners are men. Curiously, they design and plan to exclude men as part of normal, daytime life wherever people live. In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies."
Author: Jane Jacobs

24. "Heil Hitler," he said, which, he presumed, was another way of saying, "Well, goodbye for now, have a pleasant afternoon."
Author: John Boyne

25. "It is not true as is romantically presumed that people frightened or injured or persecuted are wakeful. More often than not they retire into sleep to be free of trouble for a time."
Author: John Steinbeck

26. "One has to be foolish or irredeemably stupid to believe that anything good can come to Europe from the land of presumed opportunity."
Author: Julius Streicher

27. "A great deal of what is presumed to be intractable or inevitable in this world doesn't strike me that way at all."
Author: Katherine Boo

28. "His instructions for the flight had been unequivocal. He was to remain quiet and anonymous, avoiding unnecessary conversation and making every effort to appear as invisible as possible. He presumed this meant someone had ensured that the aisle seat would remain empty. Surely an intelligence expert of any quality - particularly a British one - would not expect an Irishman to sit next to someone for nine hours without talking."
Author: Kathryn Guare

29. "In spite of the string of magazine covers announcing the contrary, we all know that ten simple things will not save the earth. There are, rather, three thousand impossible things that all of us must do, and changing our light bulbs, while necessary, is the barest beginning. We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want."
Author: Lyanda Lynn Haupt

30. "During the many centuries that magic, here on this planet, was presumed to have worked, there were at least as many theories as to how magic worked as there were cultures and religions."
Author: Lynn Abbey

31. "No matter where life takes me, you'll find me with a smile. Presumed to be happy, always laughing like a child. I never thought life could be this sweet! It's got me cheesing from cheek to cheek!"
Author: Mac Miller

32. "His youth had been so long ago that he could remember nothing of it but he presumed, erroneously, that he had tasted the purple fruit, had broken hearts and hymens, had tosses flowers to ladies on balconies, had drunk champagne out of their shoes and generally been irresistible."
Author: Mervyn Peake

33. "If prayer fails I am in a greater darkness yet, not knowing whether I have presumed too much or believed too little."
Author: Morris L. West

34. "We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely—those against private citizens or those against itself?The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax.Or compare the degree of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults a policeman, with the attention that the State pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet, curiously, the State's openly assigned priority to its own defense against the public strikes few people as inconsistent with its presumed raison d'etre."
Author: Murray N. Rothbard

35. "I won't take advantage of you. Today, I'll be your friend.""Fen has been my friend for decades," she said, sliding her arm into his when he offered it to her. "And he never presumed to put his mouth on mine.""Obviously I'll be a different kind of friend."
Author: Nalini Singh

36. "Again and again across the centuries, cosmic discoveries have demoted our self-image. Earth was once assumed to be astronomically unique, until astronomers learned that Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun. Then we presumed the Sun was unique, until we learned that the countless stars of the night sky are suns themselves. Then we presumed our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire known universe, until we established that the countless fuzzy things in the sky are other galaxies, dotting the landscape of our known universe.Today, how easy it is to presume that one universe is all there is. Yet emerging theories of modern cosmology, as well as the continually reaffirmed improbability that anything is unique, require that we remain open to the latest assault on our plea for distinctiveness: multiple universes, otherwise known as the "multiverse," in which ours is just one of countless bubbles bursting forth from the fabric of the cosmos."
Author: Neil DeGrasse Tyson

37. "Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends."
Author: Paul Fussell

38. "I don't know and probably never will know enough about the true nature of the universe to tell anyone else what to believe, and I've come to distrust the words of those who have presumed to do so."
Author: Pete Hautman

39. "The aesthetic construct, and nothing else, has taught us to expose ourselves to a non-enslaving experience of rank differences. The work of art is even allowed to 'tell' us, those who have run away from form, something, because it quite obviously does not embody the intention to confine us. 'La poesie ne s'impose plus, elle s'expose' Something that exposes itself and proves itself in this test gains unpresumed authority. In the space of aesthetic simulation, which is at once the emergency space for the success and failure of the artistic construct, the powerless superiority of the works can affect observers who otherwise take pains to ensure that they have no lord, old or new, above them."
Author: Peter Sloterdijk

40. "Well, in the meantime, Carter and I have been discussing the matter of Ryan." This time it wasn't the clang of a pan I heard, but instead a messy smack--the contact of Carter's backhand with Dean's head, I presumed. "Just hear me out. You have options. I have an Italian uncle. He'll make sure Ryan is sleeping with the fishes by next week.""Dean!" Unable to repress my amusement, my eyes flew wide and my grin grew."Either that, or we can go all Sweeney Todd on him and--""Oh, will you stop?" My laughter was crippling. "There will be no calls to your uncle and no trip to the barber shop--please, leave Sweeney Todd out of it."
Author: Rachael Wade

41. "And I asked my mother about it; I said, 'Is there something wrong?' She said, 'God... God makes people. You understand that, don't you?' And I said, 'Yeah!' She said, 'Who makes a rainbow?" I said, 'God.' She said, 'I never presumed to tell anyone who could make a rainbow what color to make children.'"
Author: Richard Dawson

42. "Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances."
Author: Richard Hughes

43. "I never presumed that a technique of composition or an idea was so special that just using it would guarantee the quality of the music."
Author: Robert Morris

44. "It can have a secular purpose and have a relationship to God because God was presumed to be both over the state and the church, and separation of church and state was never meant to separate God from government."
Author: Roy Moore

45. "His understanding of transference in the therapeutic relationship and the presumed value of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He is commonly referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis" and his work has been highly influential-—popularizing such notions as the unconscious, defense mechanisms, Freudian slips and dream symbolism — while also making a long-lasting impact on fields as diverse as literature (Kafka), film, Marxist and feminist theories, literary criticism, philosophy, and psychology. However, his theories remain controversial and widely disputed. Source: Wikipedia"
Author: Sigmund Freud

46. "I struck down his evil no matter what name it took for itself, no matter that it called itself history or revolution, America or the son of God, no matter that it called itself righteous, a righteousness that presumed the license to bind the free word and thought, that presumed the wisdom to timetable the birth of a soul, that presumed the morality that offers its children up to the plague rather than teach them the language of love. A thousand righteous champions calcified into something venal and mean by their presumptions of something sacred and pure and undirtied by the blood and spit and semen of being human: I recognized all of them by the bit of him they carried, sometimes in one eye, sometimes under their nails."
Author: Steve Erickson

47. "Matt looked up kids from his high school class. Only three were listed as dead, but a bunch were listed as missing/presumed dead.As a test, he looked us up, but none of our names were on any of the lists.And that's how we know we're alive this Memorial Day."
Author: Susan Beth Pfeffer

48. "When people stargazing, they stare at stars,and many other things which they've already presumed commonly and universally as stars."
Author: Toba Beta

49. "What am I?...I say so inasmuch as I am the memory of all my past moments, the sum of everything I remember. If I say I in the sense of that something that is here at this moment and is not the mainmast or the coral, then I am the sum of what I feel now. But what is what I feel now? It is the sum of those relations between presumed indivisibles that have been arranged in that system of relations in that special order that is my body."
Author: Umberto Eco

50. "In particular, I established a reasonably accurate energy threshold for permanent displacement of a nucleus from its regular lattice position, substantially smaller than had been previously presumed."
Author: Walter Kohn

Presumed Quotes Pictures