Quotes About Speculation

Journalism, so far from being in the hands of a priesthood, came to be first a party weapon, and then a commercial speculation, carried on without conscience or scruple, like other commercial speculations. Every newspaper, as Blondet says, is a shop to which people come for opinions of the right shade. If there were a paper for hunchbacks, it would set forth plainly, morning and evening, in its columns, the beauty, the utility, and necessity of deformity.

The most dangerous thing is to buy something at the peak of its popularity. At that point, all favourable facts and opinions are already factored into its price and no new buyers are left to emerge

The male author unthinkingly creates a world in which every single member of society is male except—hey presto!—when the protagonist feels like getting laid. Especially common in science fiction; apparently many writers assume that in the future women will die out.

And half of the fun of nearly everything, you know, is thinking about it beforehand, or afterward.

My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.

Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.

Indeed, and crucially so, the serial form took the control of the novel away from the reader and left him in an imagined space that could not be thought of in terms of the physical space still to be read. At the end of each instalment the reader would contemplate a vacuum, an 'end' which looked forward to a continuing verbal space which he could not measure. He might speculate but he could not know.

Rumor, innuendo, and wild speculation are the enemies of any scientific investigation, especially one that is focused on such unusual phenomena.

Spanish physicist Beatriz Gato-Rivera has questioned whether we could be immersed in a larger civilization without being aware of it. She notes that "typical civilizations of typical galaxies" would likely be hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years more evolved than our own.

Improbability is no barrier to gossip.

Tongues were wagging. Aspersions were being cast like dandelion spores on hot gossipy winds.

But how can we know that dragons did not exist? We have never actually BEEN to the Dark Ages.

There's no point in making predictions. It's not worth speculating because nothing is set in stone and things change all the time in football. Today there are opportunities that no one knows if they will come round again in the future.

She supposed she could Google, but she preferred to wonder.

I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.

Imagine if the dinosaurs had tried picturing the rulers of their planet 100 million years hence. They'd undoubtedly envision these creatures as... dinosaurs! Conceiving of aliens as polished versions of ourselves is appealing, but unconvincing.

What we know about the global financial crisis is that we don't know very much.

I accept that speculation, cheerful or otherwise, about the private life is something public figures must expect, but I am lucky enough to continue to enjoy the love and support of Victoria and my children, Claudia and Freddy, and to finally be at ease with myself.

Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation.

When we get to what happens when we die, we don't have any video footage. So let's at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are.

Gossip never has to be true. It only has to be interesting.

But speculation is the only way to make progress in our understanding.

Well, that's the problem with postulatin', Hannibal. Brings up trouble that ain't happened yet and likely won't ever. Why bother with it?

People were pointing and muttering to each other