Quotes About Prediction

There's not a doubt in my mind that you will see a spate of municipal-bond defaults.

I am an economist, not an astrologer.

Much of the email we use today is based on what I foresaw in 1978.

Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.

But did I think it would last more than 13 episodes at the time? No, I didn't think that. I never know.

It ain't a vision if it's not conceivable in 20 years it was a hunch

Fate hovers into sight and becomes obvious; and then it is sometimes much too late to do anything about it. Often someone's direct-sensing systems

First, the future event must already exist in some way we do not understand. Second, if it exists, then it is part of some kind of hidden psychic agenda. The third factor requires that some function of human consciousness be able to link into this plan to perceive it. If we try to be psychic, and at the same time believe that a future planned agenda does not already exist in some form, then, of course, we are going to shoot ourselves in our psychic feet.

survival-oriented intelligence was too stupid to recognize and foresee its existence ahead of time.

You don't need to predict the future. Just choose a future -- a good future, a useful future -- and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about. Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.

Many a prophecy, by the mere force of its being believed, is transmuted to fact.

What is really amazing, and frustrating, is mankind's habit of refusing to see the obvious and inevitable until it is there, and then muttering about unforeseen catastrophes.

If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of becoming a prophet.

If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

All anyone can see in a birthchart are tendencies that will become facts if he does not do something to alter them.

Understanding men or ideas or movements, or the outlooks of individuals or groups, is not reducible to a sociological classification into types of behaviour with predictions based on scientific experiment and carefully tabulated statistics of observations.

It would be a little late in deciding now that we would not live our lives by the whimsical wisdoms of futuretellers, don't you think? [Chapter 33, page 386]

It would be a simple matter if lives were lived by hindsight,' Rushton said. 'There is much we would not begin, if we could see how it would end.

J.P Morgan, when asked what the stock market will do, replied,

In June, 1957, Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet Communist Party boss, was interviewed before a nation-wide American television audience. With calm assurance he stated: ". . . I can prophesy that your grandchildren in America will live under socialism. And please do not be afraid of that. Your grandchildren will not understand how their grandparents did not understand the progressive nature of a socialist society.

From now on, I don't care if my tea leaves spell 'Die, Ron, Die,' I'm chucking them in the bin where they belong.

Using a combination of history, common sense, the Word of God and the Spirit of God, every leader can generally predict the way things will go.

In 1975 Wally Broecker published an influential paper correctly predicting a twentieth-century warming of 0.8°C, and worrying about the consequences for agriculture and sea level.64