Ian Hacking Quotes

Not at all do I trust augurs, who enrich the ears of others, so that they can enrich their own homes with gold.

I'm not in the business of reading tea leaves. I don't have a crystal ball.

I can't predict the future and I don't have respect for people who try to.

I wonder that a soothsayer doesn't laugh whenever he sees another soothsayer.

People have always had this craving to have someone tell them the future. Long ago, kings would hire people to read sheep guts. There's always been a market for people who pretend to know the future. Listening to today's forecasters is just as crazy as when the king hired the guy to look at the sheep guts.

Too often do reviewers remind us of the mob of Astrologers, Chaldeans, and Soothsayers gathered before 'the writing on the wall' and unable to read the characters or make known the interpretation.

Right, you've got a crooked sort of cross..." He consulted Unfogging the Future. "That means you're going to have 'trials and suffering' — sorry about that — but there's a thing that could be the sun... hang on... that means 'great happiness'... so you're going to suffer but be very happy..." "You need your Inner Eye tested, if you ask me," said Ron, and they both had to stifle their laughs as Professor Trelawney gazed in their direction.

My mother reads tarot cards, actually, but I won't let her read mine.

They pay little attention to what we say and prefer to read tea leaves.

Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks.

Well, with prophecy you got to see what happens.

Prophecy is what we all have to go by now.

I have my cards read every time I pass a tarot-reader booth. I would be so embarrassed to have one of those 900 numbers appear on my phone bill, because I don't know how I would explain it to my business manager. It would almost be like saying, 'Okay, I'm white trash.'

Don't ever prophesy; for if you prophesy wrong, nobody will forget it; and if you prophesy right, nobody will remember it.

What are prophecies? Don't we hear them every day of the week? And if one comes true there may be seven blind and come to nothing.

I had a great grandmother who believed in so many strange superstitions. She used to tell the future from the things that catch on to the hem of your skirt when you've been sewing, and different colored threads would mean different things... Of course, all that influenced me quite a lot as a child.

I was brought up with psychics and tarot cards. My mum was always told I was going to be in a boy band and be famous as a singer.

Divining the future is a lot easier and cheaper than documenting the present.

None of us posses a crystal ball.

I have a weird propensity to know what's going to happen in the future.

I can't predict the future, nor will I. I'm not a fortune teller.

My mother watched the skies at evening for a portent of the morrow. A cloud that went over and then turned around and came back was an especially bad sign.

From now on, I don't care if my tea leaves spell 'Die, Ron, Die,' I'm chucking them in the bin where they belong.

I thought you said scrying was a bad idea.” “It's like vodka,” Calla said. “It really depends on who's doing it.

Woman is the most superstitious animal beneath the moon. When a woman has a premonition that Tuesday will be a disaster, to which a man pays no heed, he will very likely lose his fortune then. This is not meant to be an occult or mystic remark. The female body is a vessel, and the universe drops its secrets into her far more quickly than it communicates them to the male.