Quotes About Prognostication

On the Psychology of Prediction

I never understand why 'economist makes forecast' is ever a headline. Whether the economist in question is from the International Monetary Fund, a City forecasting group or the Treasury - a forecast is still not news.

I'm always the last person in the world who would ever try to predict a trend.

The physicist Niels Bohr was fond of saying, "Prediction is very hard to do. Especially about the future

I don't think I'll see the next Messi in my lifetime.

Forecasts are difficult to make—particularly those about the future.

No truth can be determined that concerns the future.

No one in particular is a good predictor of anything. Sorry.

You can project a continuation into the future.

It's a curse to see all that might happen but never know what will.

No more than he knew that the Beggar King would die young, or that Khal Drogo would follow him into the grave. Very little of what the fat man has anticipated has come to pass.

Coming events cast their shadows before.

I can't speak for the future. I have no crystal ball.

The days that are still to come are the wisest witnesses.

History shows us that people are terrible about guessing what is going to happen - next week, next month, and especially next year.

There's even an 1892 novel called Golf in the Year 2000 that (somewhat incredibly) predicts the advent of televised sports.

Inside Lydia could feel it: everything that was to come . . . It was far away then, tiny in the distance, but Lydia already knew it would happen. The knowledge hovered all around her, clinging to her, every day getting thicker. Everywhere she went, it was there.

You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.

it might be well to remind ourselves that you cant misrepresent what has yet to occur.

I used to work a lot on food issues and every time somebody predicted that production would be inadequate they got egg on their face a year or two later.

If you have to forecast, forecast often.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

There are always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that however it may end there will always be people to say: "I said then that it would be so," quite forgetting that amid their innumerable conjectures many were to quite the contrary effect.

Coming events cast their shadows before.