Charles B. Rangel Quotes

Today, if someone showed me a five-year plan, I'd toss out the pages detailing Years Three, Four and Five as pure fantasy Anyone who thinks he or she can evaluate business conditions five years from now, flunks.

People often say that it is easier to predict the way things are going to be 10 to 20 years in the future than to predict how it is going to be 3 years from now.

Allow me to inquire how man can control his own affairs when he is not only incapable of compiling a plan for some laughably short term such as, say, a thousand years, but cannot even predict what will happen to him tomorrow?

Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks they know where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.

How do Ferrari know what I'm doing next year when I don't know what I'm doing next week?

We are incredibly poor predictors of our future.

I never had a plan. I have to say, I'm very shocked when people start a company and say, 'In five years I want to launch a perfume, or in 10 years I want to have this.' How can you know?

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

Rash indeed is he who reckons on the morrow, or happily on days beyond it; for tomorrow is not, until today is past.

What is certain about the future is that even the best efforts to predict the conditions of future war will prove erroneous. What is important, however, is to not be so far off the mark that visions of the future run counter to the very nature of war and render American forces unable to adapt to unforeseen challenges.

Because of the nature of this industry, it's a bit dangerous to think far ahead.

Nobody understands how the world will change. The only way you can plan for the future is to have scenarios. You have to have the courage to take a leap of faith on one of them.

Trying to predict the future is a loser's game.

The regulations keep on coming. And we are trying to make decisions that we will be happy with for decades.

The more adaptability exists for a given kind of decision, the less risky it is to make plans for the future, and therefore the more likely it is that more people will make more plans in such areas.

It's all well and good to look back after the fact and see what we should have done, but we rarely know what path is best when we take that first step.

To predict the future we would have to know today what we will learn tomorrow which will shape our future actions

In order to be in control, you have to have a definite plan for at least a reasonable period of time. So how, may I ask, can man be in control if he can't even draw up a plan for a ridiculously short period of time, say, a thousand years, and is, moreover, unable to ensure his own safety for even the next day?

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

The realization that you can't predict the future -- and mold it -- could only come as a shock to an academic.

To deal with future we have to deal with possibilities. Analysis will only tell us what is.

We have the same problem as everyone else: It's very hard to predict the future.

Foresight is not about predicting the future, it's about minimizing surprise.

Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy.

A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.