Premise Quotes
More Premise Quotes
This Court, limited in function in accordance with that premise, does not serve its high purpose when it exceeds its authority, even to satisfy justified impatience with the slow workings of the political process. For when, in the name of constitutional interpretation, the Court adds something to the Constitution that was deliberately excluded from it, the Court, in reality, substitutes its view of what should be so for the amending process.
harlan, john marshall, ii— Dissenting in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 624-25 (1964).
The fundamental premise of liberalism is the moral incapacity of the American people.
alan keyes— Christian Coalition Dinner, February 6, 1999.[5]
There is no such thing as truth. The only thing that is actually there is your "logically" ascertained premise, which you call "truth".
u. g. krishnamurti— Ch. 1: The Certainty That Blasts Everything
"Counterpoint texts tend to resemble one another in the underlying principles of voice-leading they espouse and in the kinds of orderings of rules they provide, but no one could accuse the harmony texts of, let us say, Heinrich Schenker and Hugo Riemann, or of Allen Irvine McHose and Walter Piston--or for that matter, of Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Roger Sessions--of being mutually compatible, either in premise or in practice."
harold powers— Harold Powers, "Is Mode Real", p.18,10.
The premise of neo-conservatives is that markets left to their own devices will produce the best possible result, and that political interference is not required. This defies the human reality that people are not commodities, and simply refuse to behave as if they were.
bob rae— Chapter Two, The First Question: Self Interest and Prosperity, p. 39-40
Variant : They did unto others what they would not have others do unto them, an immoral principle that is the basic premise of the art of war.
jules verne— Tr. Walter James Miller (1978)
The concept of communication includes all of those processes by which people influence one another... This definition is based on the premise that all actions and events have communicative aspects, as soon as they are perceived by a human being; it implies, futhermore, that such perception changes the information which an individual processes and therefor influences him.
Gregory Bateson— p.6 as cited in: Stewart L. Tubbs, Robert M. Carter (1978) Shared Experiences in Human Communication. p.1
I didn't argue that the war in Vietnam was immoral; it was merely stupid and a horrendous waste of time, money, and lives based on a flawed premise.
joseph ("joe") biden— Pages 65-66
The major premise of the conclusion expressed in a statute, the change of policy that induces the enactment, may not be set out in terms, but it is not an adequate discharge of duty for courts to say: We see what you are driving at, but you have not said it, and therefore we shall go on as before.
Holmes, Jr., Oliver Wendell— Johnson v. United States, 163 F. 30 (1st Cir. 1908) (Justice Holmes sitting by designation as a judge of the First Circuit).
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.
karl marx— Volume I; Part 1; "Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook"; Section A, "Idealism and Materialism"
A bully's universe: US foreign policy operates upon the premise that American men and matériel should be capable of reaching and controlling all corners of the world.
ilana mercer— “Putin Saves Us From Ourselves,” WorldNetDaily.com, March 23, 2012.
By the time of his Fourth String Quartet, inversional symmetry had become as fundamental a premise of Bartók's harmonic language as it is of the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Neither he nor they ever realized that this connection establishes a profound affinity between them in spite of the stylistic features that so obviously distinguish his music from theirs...Nowhere does he [Bartók] recognize the communality of his harmonic language with that of the twelve-tone composers that is implied in their shared premise of the harmonic equivalence of inversionally symmetrical pitch-class relations.
george perle— Pages 46-47
I really don't have a solution. Except to say that a precondition for any solution must be a recognition on the part of all parties on the legitimacy of all parties. That is you cannot build a political agreement on the premise that a Jewish state in Palestine is illegitimate.
richard perle— When asked about a solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a 1988 debate with Noam Chomsky at Ohio State UniversitySource:
It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade.
wallace stevens— "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
Education is a process by which the individual is developed into something better than he would have been without it. … The very though seems in a way the height of presumption. For one thing, it involves the premise that some human beings can be better than others.
richard weaver— “Education and the individual,” p. 43
The essential freedom, the ultimate and final freedom that cannot be taken from a man, is to say No. This is the basic premise in Sartre 's view of human freedom: freedom is in its very essence negative, though the negativity is also creative.
— Chapter Ten, Sartre, p. 215 (Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958))
A bully's universe: US foreign policy operates upon the premise that American men and matériel should be capable of reaching and controlling all corners of the world.
— “Putin Saves Us From Ourselves,” WorldNetDaily.com, March 23, 2012.
The basic premise of libertarianism is that each individual should be free to do as he or she pleases so long as he or she does not harm others. In the libertarian view, societies and governments infringe on individual liberties whenever they tax wealth, create penalties for victimless crimes, or otherwise attempt to control or regulate individual conduct which harms or benefits no one except the individual who engages in it.
— Definition written by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, during the process of granting the Advocates for Self Government status as a non-profit educational organization, as quoted in Healing Our World : The Other Piece of the Puzzle (1992) by Mary J. Ruwart
There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of [a] higher order than the right to life ... that was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside your right to be concerned.
— Jesse Jackson, U.S. civil rights activist, now in favor of legal abortion, in National Right to Life News, (January, 1977).
[B]y requiring that an execution be relatively painless, we necessarily protect the inmate from enduring any punishment that is comparable to the suffering inflicted on his victim. This trend, while appropriate and required by the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based.
john paul stevens— Concurring in the judgment, Baze v. Rees, 553 U.S. 35 (2008)
