99 Prediction Quotes

We can safely make one prophecy: whatever the outcome of this war, the British Empire is at an end. It has been mortally wounded. The future of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis in their cursed island. (4th February 1945)

It's going to be a season with lots of accidents, and I'll risk saying that we'll be lucky if something really serious doesn't happen.

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close.

The future... seems to me no unified dream but a mince pie, long in the baking, never quite done.

The Germans will make a few scattered attacks, then go away. The Romans will enjoy a fine September.

Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.

Hulk Hogan, what'cha gonna do when The Rock runs wild on you? But you see Hogan, The Rock's gonna tell what's gonna happen. He's gonna tell you exactly what you're gonna do. You're gonna feel electricity like you've never felt before, electricity that's happened like never before. You will hear 70,000 strong chanting your name, chanting The Rock's name. Hulk Hogan, you will see the People's Elbow come crashing down on your chest. And Hogan, above all else, above all else, you will, you will, you will, you will, you will, good god almighty you will smell what The Rock is cooking!

Senator Douglas holds, we know, that a man may rightfully be wiser today than he was yesterday - that he may rightfully | change when he finds himself wrong. But can we, for that reason, run ahead, and infer that he will make any particular change, of which he, himself, has given no intimation?

There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.

The chief point we must remember is that the great and rapid advance of the physical sciences took place in fields where it proved that explanation and prediction could be based on laws which accounted for the observed phenomena as functions of comparatively few variables - either particular facts or relative frequencies of events.

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

'Economists are very good at saying that something cannot go on forever, but not so good at saying when it will stop.'

Not too long ago, my opponent made a prediction. He said I would probably win Pennsylvania, he would win North Carolina, and Indiana would be the tiebreaker. Well, tonight we've come from behind, we've broken the tie, and, thanks to you, it's full speed on to the White House.

'The price pattern reminds you that every movement of importance is but a repetition of similar price movements, that just as soon as you can familiarize yourself with the actions of the past, you will be able to anticipate and act correctly and profitably upon forthcoming movements.'

'There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.'

I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, 'This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!'

That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large, scientific method in most cases fails us. One need only think of the weather, in which case prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible. Nevertheless no one doubts that we are confronted with a causal connection whose causal components are in the main known to us. Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

Experience is the only prophesy of wise men.

[Even if the U.S. doesn't attack] Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion. [8]

This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.

So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

Back in 2000 a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true! [1]

7) Any damn fool can predict the past.

No matter how well you know what a person has done and what he thought of what he was doing when he did it and what he now thinks of what he did, it is impossible to be certain of what he will do next.

'There has been a good deal of comment-some of it quite outlandish-about what our postwar requirements might be in Iraq. Some of the higher end predictions we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark. It is hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army-hard to imagine.'

Never make forecasts, especially about the future.

The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.

I don't think that anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile

My gran'ther's rule was safer 'n 'tis to crow: Don't never prophesy-onless ye know.

On the night Test faced the Great One, this is what he'll see... twelve sharpshooters stinging, eleven eyebrows raising, ten spines a'bustin, nine noggins knocking, eight kicks a'kicking, seven punches punching, six suplexes smashing, five seconds of the people chanting The Rock's name ... four Rock Bottoms, three People's Elbows, on your two buck teeth, and an ass-kicking all over New Orleans!

Clyde: I knew as soon as we got off the freeway, we'd run into trouble.

I think I know what happens.

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

I know I ain't going to fucking live to be an old man. I know that.

The Human League, Someday all music will be made like this!........and it is!

Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.

The likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilisation will have advanced beyond all recognition - into colonies in outer space, for instance. In either case, evolutionary extrapolations from present conditions are likely to be highly misleading.

A rush of wind comes furiously now, down from the mountaintop. 'The ancient Greeks,' I say, 'who were the inventors of classical reason, knew better than to use it exclusively to foretell the future. They listened to the wind and predicted the future from that. That sounds insane now. But why should the inventors of reason sound insane?'

Civilization slipped into its second dark age on an unsurprising track of blood, but with a speed that could not have been foreseen by even the most pessimistic futurist. It was as if it had been waiting to go. On October 1, God was in His heaven, the stock market stood at 10,140, and most of the planes were on time (except for those landing and taking off in Chicago, and that was to be expected). Two weeks later the skies belonged to the birds again and the stock market was a memory. By Halloween, every major city from New York to Moscow stank to the empty heavens and the world as it had been was a memory.

'Oh, this will be an ass-whippin' you'll never forget.'

This will end in tears.