Quotes About Prediction

I've seen men die because they were sure that what should not happen, would not.-Robert Jordan(The eye of the world, Wheel of time)

The signs of the times.

Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination... a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.

Now Nostradamus said that the king of Terror would appear September 1999. I believe Nostradamus knew his Bible and knew what the six day theory was, and so he could put it all together.

We will see," he said. "Yes

In a well-known 1996 article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Akerlof explained, using the language of modern economics, why the sexual revolution—contrary to common prediction, especially prediction by those in and out of the Church who wanted the teaching on birth control changed—had led to an increase in both illegitimacy and abortion.4

No horoscope matches this accuracy. No theory of human causality, Freudian, Marxist, Christian or animist, has ever been so precise. No prophet in the Old Testament, no entrail-grazing oracle in ancient Greece, no crystal-ball gypsy clairvoyant on the pier at Bognor Regis ever pretended to tell people exactly when their lives would fall apart, let alone got it right.

Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.

Nancy Wexler fears that science is now in the position of Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes.

On one of these gatherings, a guest speaker informed us that in 30 years, no one in America except the homeschoolers would know how to read or write. 

Can I tell you something you really don't want to hear? He's going to break up with you. - Stuart

This was England. There was always rain in the future.

Identify the dominant philosophy of a society and you can predict its future.

No man can predict the time when others will choose to return to reason.

You're afraid to see where it's leading. I'm not. I'll tell you. The world of the future. The world I want. A world of obedience and of unity. A world where the thought of each man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess the thought in the brain of his neighbor who'll have no thought of his own but an attempt to guess the thought of the next neighbor who'll have no thought—and so on, Peter, around the globe.

when what felt like a wide distribution of probable outcomes narrows to the inevitable.

So this was the mental procedure, which even a little girl could learn: First, size up the situation. Make sure you have all the facts, and nothing but the facts—no folklore, no conventional wisdom, no lazy assumptions. Then examine the facts for patterns and connections. Make a prediction. See if it works. And if it doesn't work, start all over again.

Maybe it is that if these stones speak at all, they speak true,' she said softly. 'They speak what will be, not what we want to hear.

The past is all we know of the future.

Why should it feel so risky to count concretely on a future?

If it came to pass that Thatcher should shake hands with President Grant, as Polly predicted, he would still be a man who viewed life from the bottom of the ditch, not the top.

And the Tory Party. That's why I said I felt trouble was brewing. Arthur Balfour is attempting to sit on the fence, but that won't do him much good. He may well find himself out of 10 Downing Street sooner than he expects.

In general, human beings are remarkably bad at predicting how various experiences will make them feel.

If people err systematically and substantially in making those predictions, it's likely that they will make some bad decisions—decisions that produce regret, even when events turn out well.