Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

I always embrace the worst-case scenario.

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.

Bad things can happen even to the best players.

I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.

The important thing to remember is war does not progress linearly. The future course of events is going to be very difficult to predict with a high degree of precision.

The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

When ideas are confronted with reality, there will always be surprises.

I don't have superstitions because I think sometimes they work against you because, if something happens to disturb them, you feel nervous.

You never know what's going to happen in the draft. You just wait until your name gets called and then things happen.

Everything cannot go right all the time.

I don't know what the future will bring.

Everything works out in weird ways in the NFL.

I had such a run of bad luck that you lose faith that good things are going to happen any more. I still don't answer the door because I went through so long expecting it to be a bailiff.

I grew up in Flint, Michigan so I'm used to broken promises so I don't look forward to anything. I look forward to the now. I don't even like planning trips more than a week ahead because you don't know how you're going to feel a week from now.

I'm just waiting for the day when my songs aren't flying. Because I kind of believe in Murphy's law - if something can go wrong, it eventually will.

I never have any idea how my opinions will be received, and more often than not I'm surprised when anything I say is controversial.

The thrill of not knowing what's going to happen, trained me to be prepared for anything.

Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.

When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.

To doubt is to have faith in the worst possible outcome.

But such is life, the silliest proverbs prove to be true, and when a man thinks, now it's all right, it's not all right by a longshot. Man proposes, God disposes, and there's always that last straw to break the camel's back.

Every disastrous accident alarms us, and sets us on enquiries concerning the principles whence it arose: Apprehensions spring up with regard to futurity: And the mind, sunk into diffidence, terror, and melancholy, has recourse to every method of appeasing those secret intelligent powers, on whom our fortune is supposed entirely to depend.

I base my calculation on the expectation that luck will be against me.