Kevin Kelly Quotes

The Chinese say, 'It's good to live in interesting times.'

We really can't forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can't.

The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumblebee can fly; that, perhaps, one should never trust an expert; that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of by those with an academic bent.

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the outcome he predicted yesterday did not happen today.

There is always something to upset the most careful of human calculations.

Life is full of ironies and paradoxes.

No one can escape the iron rule that once you make a forecast, you know you're going to be wrong; you just don't know when and in which direction!

The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open.

Forecasting is very difficult, especially when it involves the future.

Perhaps the safest prediction we can make about the future is that it will surprise us.

What is the point? We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly, cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong!

The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.

Vast ills have followed a belief in certainty.

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.

You know, the process, I think, is the story. And it goes back, again, to what I said about chance and about radical contingency, the idea that all of this is this well-oiled machine that's been reared up and, like, really articulated and thought about.

It is a simple procedure to calculate the number of seeds in an apple. But who among us can ever say how many apples are in a seed?

Prediction is difficult - particularly when it involves the future.

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

Random questions are the least random of all questions.

Many of the things which can never be, often are.

Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.

Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

When something happens people didn't predict, they find ways to explain it as if it were predictable.