Unexamined Assumptions Quotes

Some persons believe everything that their kindred, their parents, and their tutors believe. The veneration and the love which they have for their ancestors incline them to swallow down all their opinions at once, without examining what truth or falsehood there is in them. Men take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the "-ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's still exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather--all pervasive and so virtually impossible to escape. Still, we can try.

Rule of thumb: Be skeptical of things you learned before you could read. E.g., religion.

These [religious ideas] are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fullfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.

We have so many ideas and beliefs about ourselves. We told ourselves story about what we want and who we are, smart or kind. Often these are the unexamined and limited ideas of others that we have internalized and then gone on to life out.

Watch the things you say you can't believe, and then recall the things you accept without thinking, like your own existence.

There are truths which some men despise because they have not examined, and which they will not examine because they despise.

Sometimes we adopt certain beliefs when we're children and use them automatically when we become adults, without ever checking them out against reality. This brings to mind the story of the woman who always cut off the end of the turkey when she put it in the oven. Her daughter asked her why, and her mother responded, "I don't know. My mother always did it." Then she went and asked her mother, who said, "I don't know. My mother always did it." The she went and asked her grandmother, who said, "The oven wasn't big enough."

The arguments for purity of life fail of their due influence, not because they have been considered and confuted, but because they have been passed over without consideration.