Quotes About Prediction

Yes, a genuine expert can always foretell a thing that is five hundred years away easier than he can a thing that's only five hundred seconds off.

But the cruelest habit the modern prophecy-savans have, is that one of coolly and arbitrarily fitting the prophetic shirt on to the wrong man. They do it without regard to rhyme or reason.

There is no prophecy in our day but history. But history is a trustworthy prophet. History is always repeating itself, because conditions are always repeating themselves. Out of duplicated conditions history always gets a duplicate product.

How often I find myself called wrong,' Churchill had written to his wife on 17 April 1924, 'for warning of follies in time.

becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to.

The past and the present are within my field of inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.

Every man has his destiny. But who needs to to go to a fortune-teller to find it? Do I go to a chef to find out if I'm hungry? Nobu

Every man has his destiny. But who needs to go to a fortune-teller to find it?

A surgeon gets $500 for taking out a tumor. A pathologist gets five dollars for examining it, making a diagnosis, recommending further treatment, and predicting the patient's future.

Noi toÈ›i am crezut c? istoria ar putea fi tratat? ca o experien?? de fizic?. Deosebirea este c? în fizic? poÈ›i repeta o experien?? de o mie de ori, dar în istorie o singur? dat?.[...] - ?i acum ce s? facem? întreb? Ivanov. S? st?m cu mâinile încruciÈ™ate pentru c? urm?rile unei acÈ›iuni nu pot fi pe deplin prev?zute È™i de aici rezult? c? orice acÈ›iune este d?un?toare?

Paul's prediction about "the form of religion but denying the power" (2 Tim. 3:5) was being fulfilled.

History is really a study of the future, not the past.

In psychology, there's something called the broken-leg problem. A statistical formula may be highly successful in predicting whether or not a person will go to a movie in the next week. But someone who knows that this person is laid up with a broken leg will beat the formula. No formula can take into account the infinite range of such exceptional events.

Even totally random patterns will often appear non-random to us.

The likelihood of my initial hunch being right was too low

expectations about their

Signs with missing letters can only mean bad things.

Sometimes you know something is going to happen, even though they are ample opportunities to prevent it. Even though you don't want it, you know it's inevitable.

That's a cute sentence: the years to come. Why are you so sure they're coming?

When you predicted an apocalypse, you needed sooner or later to produce one.

History is that thing that, in hindsight, one always saw coming; a few seem able to glimpse it before it has settled on its destination

Just as it is impossible to predict with complete accuracy the path of a single electron, so too you cannot know with certainty the future behavior of a single potato. Thus far observations show that man has mashed potatoes millions of times, but it is not inconceivable that one time in a billion the situation could reverse itself, that a potato could mash a man.

la idea de anunciar la poesía de Shakespeare mil años antes de su nacimiento carece de sentido. Pues el autor podía no haber nacido, haber fallecido en la infancia, haber vivido de otra manera y, por tanto, escribir de otra forma; sin embargo, el habla inglesa preveía la existencia misma de la poesía inglesa.

One has only to look through the history of science to reach the most probable conclusion: that the shape of things to come is determined by things we do not know today, and by what is unforeseeable.