Quotes About Uncertainty

As historian Albert L. Hurtado wrote, War, pestilence, and famine blow books around the planet like so many hostages to uncertain fortune. Thieves steal, vandals deface, pious clergy burn, and worms eat books. Whether threatened by worms or war, there is nothing permanent about books and libraries.

If the future is to remain open and free, we need people who can tolerate the unknown, who will not need the support of completely worked out systems or traditional blueprints from the past.

For I am fighting for the old days, the old ways which I love so much, but which, I fear, are now gone forever, no matter how the die may fall. For, win or lose, we lose just the same. - Ashley Wilkes, Gone with the Wind

She was less frightened also because life had taken on the quality of a dream, a dream too terrible to be real. It wasn't possible that she, Scarlett O'Hara, should be in such a predicament, with the danger of death about her every hour, every minute. It wasn't possible that the quiet tenor of life could have changed so completely in so short a time.

If! If! If There were so many ifs in life, never any certainty of anything, never any security...

Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is.

Life was never more real to me than a shadow show on a curtain. And I preferred it so. I did not like the outlines of things to be too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy…

Any growth requires a temporary loss of security.

The world is coming to an end in 1950.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics: If you think things are in a mess now, just wait!

The modern computer hovers between the obsolescent and the nonexistent.

Some people think technology has the answers.

Three things are certain: Death, taxes, and lost data. Guess which has occurred.

The technology is good and it's bad. You know what you're dealing with out there musically, but my head stops at this electronic stuff. I don't quite know what I'm dealing with out there yet.

Some folks think life and technology and mind can keep expanding forever. Others say it can't. We are still not clear on that.

I debated whether or not to pin the setting down to a particular date but in the end I decided to leave things vague. It depends how fast technology improves.

Basic research is when I'm doing what I don't know what I'm doing.

I keep wondering at night, 'Will I have a bank the next morning, or will some technology company be doing banking without needing a bank?'

There it was again, the prickling sense of standing on a precipice.

I'm still not totally sure I know what's true about me.

If Liana wanted to fight over Harlow, she was going to lose. Not that I liked him that way. That was to say, I wasn't sure how I felt about Harlow, but it damned sure wasn't up to her to tell me.

I'm really too young to go out into the world alone, " he thought as he lay down

Thanksgiving is the day you don't know if you're invited for dinner or an intervention either way is going to be an ambush.

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters