J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?

We certainly will prepare consciously and professionally, but still you cannot predict the future.

I can't predict the future.

Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity: they don't know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be - there is the law of unanticipated consequences.

It is an endless procession of surprises. The expected rarely occurs and never in the expected manner.

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

I find in my career that I never know what's going to happen in two months.

The one thing I've learned in sports entertainment is that nothing is for certain, and you never say never.

How poor is the wisdom of men, and how uncertain their forecast!

Of power does Man possess no particle: Of knowledge-just so much as show that still It ends in ignorance on every side.

It is easy to make plans in this world; even a cat can do it; and when one is out in those remote oceans it is noticeable that a cat's plans and a man's are worth about the same. There is much the same shrinkage in both, in the matter of values.

You have to make smart decisions, but you never know what will happen in the future.

Contingency is rich and fascinating; it embodies an exquisite tension between the power of individuals to modify history and the intelligible limits set by laws of nature. The details of individual and species's lives are not mere frills, without power to shape the large-scale course of events, but particulars that can alter entire futures, profoundly and forever.

We always seem to be surprised by events, especially by catastrophes, but also by wonderful events. Look at 1990, the year that the Soviet Union collapsed and apartheid in South Africa collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down. I don't know anyone who foresaw those events. It seems to me that as a species we are constantly trying to adapt ourselves to the unexpected. In the meantime, we talk as if we are in control, and we're not. This seems to me to be the truth about the twentieth century.

There's no way to know what's going to happen.

We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood.

If ... the past may be no Rule for the future, all Experience becomes useless and can give rise to no Inferences or Conclusions.

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!

Our wills and fates do so contrary run, That our devices still are overthrown; Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

What men have seen they know; But what shall come hereafter No man before the event can see, Nor what end waits for him.

If we are wise, let us prepare for the worst.

Many are the things that man seeing must understand. Not seeing, how shall he know what lies in the hand of time to come?

All the skills which I have acquired during my sociological life allow me to diagnose and explain what is going on, but not to predict what will happen.

While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.

The greatest wisdom often consist in ignorance.