Inaccurate Assumptions Quotes

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

There can be an easy way to interpret things some times and it seems like maybe I'm on the wrong side of those interpretations a lot of those times.

The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.

When people don't get enough information, they make it up.

The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.

I didn't know anything about Opus Die except from pop culture, like Dan Brown novels, which I knew wasn't really knowing anything about Opus Die.

Yes, you make mistakes in the old cases where you really think you know who the suspect is, and you probably do, and you make the mistake of relying on people.

To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.

Those who think they know me are simply lacking in information.

I have frequently detected myself in such kind of mistakes... in a total misapprehension of character at some point or other: fancying people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid than they really are, and I can hardly tell why, or in what the deception originated. Sometimes one is guided by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge.

I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance.

You can’t trust cost-benefit analyses… agencies have a history of fudging their studies to make proposed projects to look better, understating the costs and overstating the benefits.

I feel like people think that I have mental lapses and I'm injury-prone, which isn't true. You just don't know me.

Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.

I feel like everything with me gets blown out of proportion. I think it's because I'm so quiet about things that people just run with anything they hear.

Trust your gut instinct over spreadsheets. There are too many variables in the real world that you simply can't put into a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets spit out results from your inexact assumptions and give you a false sense of security. In most cases, your heart and gut are still your best guide.

Where are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

History is the unfolding of miscalculations

I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete.

He did not arrive at this conclusion by the decent process of quiet, logical deduction, nor yet by the blinding flash of glorious intuition, but by the shoddy, untidy process halfway between the two by which one usually gets to know things.

Whether it's in Jobcentres or in Whitehall, young people are constantly coming up against a narrative that portrays them as lazy and feckless, when in reality nothing could be further from the truth.

He's wrong. That's why his films look so terrible.

If observed facts of undoubted accuracy will not fit any of the alternatives it leaves open, the system itself is in need of reconstruction.

Age-class running, as you know, is completely unreliable. It's based on this artificial thing, which is that people who are the same age have the same level of physical maturity. Which just isn't true.

All my life, people have asked me what I was so mad about. 'Why you so mad?' And I was never mad. I'm not mad, I just look mad.