Quotes About Prediction

Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere.

Venture-capital firms invest in trends by projecting returns. But most projections are pretty much bogus, and research shows that experts are no better at predicting the future than dart-throwing monkeys.

An actor is always looking for something. When your luck improves, trends change, you get one of those roles that do very well, sometimes even your worst work becomes a super success. So one can never predict what will happen tomorrow.

Coorg will be the new Switzerland, Goa will be the new Thailand. If we predict these trends correctly, while market size may shrink, we will have a good opportunity to use our model.

Someone 'big' will get thrown out of their Trials or at the Olympics. I would bet my house on it.

Forecasts have been fundamental to mankind's journey from a small tribe on the African savannah to a species that can sling objects across the solar system with extreme precision.

What you expect, it will happen.

I'd compare stock pickers to astrologers but I don't want to bad mouth astrologers.

I want you to take a good, hard look at me, America, because this is exactly what you've got coming.

Nearly everyone interested in common stocks wants to be told by someone else what he thinks the market is going to do. The demand being there, it must be supplied.

Fortune tellers live in the future. So do people who want to put things off. So do fundamentalists.

Information about the future is much more valuable and interesting than information about the past.

As Lincoln had predicted would happen under popular sovereignty, civil war now raged on the Kansas prairie—proof indeed that slavery was too volatile ever to be solved as a purely local matter.

A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to climb a tree. This would demonstrate that he was indeed a seer.

Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.

I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street.

Revolutions are like earthquakes: they are always being predicted, and sometimes they come.

This argument—"We are all of us carried along by a fiery zeal to recover our liberty; our arms cannot be wrested from our hands,"97—was a politico-military ideal but an inaccurate prediction, for both Cicero and the Roman republic, in part due to the inferiority of their arms, were killed within the year by Caesar's standing army.

In any event, the Hamburg four finalized their plans for pilot training in the United States without attracting attention from police or intelligence agencies.48 Marwan al-Shehhi fell into conversation that spring with a Hamburg librarian, Angela Duile, as he prepared to depart for America. "Something will happen and there will be thousands dead," he told her. He mentioned the World Trade Center, she recalled. She did not think he was serious.

He told Williams that he appreciated what the United States was trying to do in Afghanistan. "The day you leave, the Taliban will be back," he predicted.

Your guess [about the future of technology] is as good as mine. The only thing I'm sure of is (a) most of the predictions I hear are almost certainly wrong, and (b) the things that will turn out to be important will come as a surprise, even though in hindsight they'll seem perfectly obvious.

One thing that has impressed me for years-and which was so poignantly displayed in Mel Gibson's gripping film-is the reality that one reason why the religious leaders in Christ's day rejected their Messiah was because they misunderstood the Old Testament prophecies predicting His arrival. Think about it. Because it happened once, couldn't it happen again?

Boxing several favorites in a race is a concession that you have no opinion of any value

The sky isn't falling. We're not going to have more meteors hit because of sequestration.