Quotes About Prediction

Forget UNIX - it will be gone in 5 years.

The problem is not one of prediction. It is one of imagination.

Granny knew all about bad fortune-telling. It was harder than the real thing. You needed a good imagination.

Whatever we expect with confidence becomes our own self-fulfilling prophecy.

The successful businessman must be able to foresee possibilities, to estimate with sagacity the outcome in the future.

We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.

There is nothing so uncertain as a sure thing.

In the year 2525, that song will be even less popular than when it first came out.

Even a stopped clock is right twice every day. After some years, it can boast of a long series of successes.

A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.

There is an excellent way to make predictions without the slightest risk of error: predict the past.

We estimate, and this isn't an estimation, that Greta Waitz is 80 seconds behind

Always keep in mind that even your most dreadful expectations, are still nothing more than mere assumptions

It's not a secret that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

A bull doesn't go wrong in predicting an upswing in a falling market. He goes wrong when he predicts a down swing in a rising market.

Benjamin Franklin had predicted as much nearly a century before, commenting that with the introduction of slavery, "the Poor are by this Means deprived of Employment, while a few Families acquire vast Estates; which they spend on Foreign Luxuries, and educating their Children in the Habits of those Luxuries; the same Income is needed for the Support of one that might have maintain'd 100."57

Because what he couldn't know, what no one at that time could know, was what would happen after the death of old King Sverker.

Time will tell us everything

His weakness in this game, and in life, is that he's never prepared for how others will act. They are predetermined but too complex to solve or predict, and there are rules that he is just no good at applying.

The future is a major abstraction, riddled with a million vibrating variables you can't control. The best information you'll ever have about a decision is at the moment of execution.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Why don't we just call plans what they really are: guesses.

estimates that stretch weeks, months, and years into the future are fantasies.