Quotes About Speculation

I had no idea if he had asked me because he liked me, or if his mom made him (our parents know each other), or because he lost a bet.

The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist?

half the town would claim they'd seen it coming, just because they thrived on downfalls of any sort.

Thinking about the world as it isn't, but might be or might have been, is called counterfactual thinking.

At present, the potential causal role that the availability of choice has in making people into maximizers is pure speculation. If the speculation is correct, we ought to find that in cultures in which choice is less ubiquitous and extensive than it is in the U.S., there should be fewer maximizers.

There's a rumor that a recent Oscar host is going to play Catwoman. Waiting by my phone for the call.

fallacy of extrapolation":

PHILOSOPHY TODAY GETS no respect. Many scientists use the term as a synonym for effete speculation. When my colleague Ned Block told his father that he would major in the subject, his father's reply was "Luft!"—Yiddish for "air." And then there's the joke in which a young man told his mother he would become a Doctor of Philosophy and she said, "Wonderful! But what kind of disease is philosophy?

People love conspiracy theories.

if gambling is exciting, you're doing it wrong.

One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture

this is mathematical speculation by a bunch of overcaffeinated theorists.

this is more in the category of late-night herb-inspired speculation than actual scientific prediction.

Getriebe!? Ob dieser außerirdische schreibmaschinengesteuerte Hightech-Flieger mit Schwerwasser-Kaltfusions-Antrieb wohl mit Automatik daherkommt?

Taittinger pondered, but he was well aware that no amount of pondering had yet helped him to a sensible conclusion.

Mousewhisker: I just hope hunting in the wind doesn't make us as stunted as WindClan warriors. Leafpool: WindClan warriors are only smaller because their ancestors are smaller, not because of the wind. Mousewhisker: So what made their ancestors smaller? Leafpool: *shrugs* Only StarClan knows. Mousewhisker: It was probably the wind.

want to know who killed Ashfur as much as you do.

Besides, what if BSG and Firefly took place in the same universe? You ever consider that?" I

Then she snapped her fingers and we were standing on Europa, discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life beneath the moon's icy crust. I

Dejando de lado la metáfora, pienso que la filosofía de los antiguos griegos nos atrae hoy porque nunca antes o desde entonces, en ningún lugar del mundo, se ha establecido nada parecido a su altamente avanzado y articulado sistema de conocimiento y especulación sin la fatídica división que nos ha estorbado durante siglos y que ha llegado a hacerse insufrible en nuestros días.

There's a rumour that we actually make all our albums in the last six months before they're released and the rest of it is procrastination.

It is so easy for us theorists who build wonderful castles, beautiful ideas. Sometimes, it is remarkable, sometimes these beautiful ideas prove to be close to what the observations tell us. But often and also they turn out to be wrong.

Hollywood usually guesses that extraterrestrials would only be interested in one of three things: (1) They want to breed with us, because their own reproductive machinery is on the blink; (2) They want Earth's resources; or (3) They want the Earth. All of it.

Not as a demonstrated natural law, but as a working hypothesis.