assumptions

Negotiating in the classic diplomatic sense assumes parties more anxious to agree than to disagree.

. . . you can not use your 'prior knowledge' (e.g. that targets tend to be smooth, that Occam's razor usually works, etc.) to set P(f), without making additional assumptions about the applicability of that 'knowledge'. This is because that knowledge is ultimately based on only two things: your experiences since birth, and your genome's experiences in the several billion years it's been evolving.

Every partaker of the sacrament gives evidence of his willingness to assume three very great obligations, to which he becomes bound in sacred honor: • To take upon himself the name of the Son, • That he will always remember him, • To keep his commandments.

A task becomes a duty from the moment you suspect it to be an essential part of that integrity which alone entitles a man to assume responsibility.

Every young man should aim at independence and should prepare himself for a vocation; above all, he should so manage his life that the steps of his progress are taken without improper aids; that he calls no one master, that he does not win or deserve the reputation of being a tool of others, and that if called to public service he may assume its duties with the satisfaction of knowing that he is free to rise to the height of his opportunity.

It is said that [Robin Hood] fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don't have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, had demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors.

A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest - but if devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

Work is . . . becoming suffused with leisure values. . . . Executives on an expense account hardly know whether they are at leisure or at work; they assume it must be the latter since they are getting paid for what they do. The same executives, pushed into some time-consuming civic activity, have only the somewhat melancholy reassurance of receiving no compensation to testify to this being leisure.

On the stage . . . masks are assumed with some regard to procedure; in everyday life, the participants act their parts without consideration either for suitability of scene or for the words spoken by the rest of the cast: the result is a general tendency for things to be brought to the level of farce even when the theme is serious enough.

J, n. A consonant in English, but some nations use it as a vowel . . . from a Latin verb, "jacere", "to throw," because when a stone is thrown at a dog the dog's tail assumes that shape.