Rebecca MacKinnon Quotes

There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip.

I don't want to set the world up for surprises.

It's something you hope doesn't happen. When you sign on to do a job, you hope you'll be able to get it done. But that's not always in your control.

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

Great power is setting a goal, working hard for it, and achieving it in exactly the way you expected with no consequences and no remainders after the long division is done. But does that happen to anyone? The unexpected always hitches a ride along with everything you planned.

There's always the risk that there are unknown unknowns.

Life doesn't always give us what we are expecting.

Things we do not expect, happen more frequently than we wish.

The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace.

It is impossible to foresee or define the extent and variety of national exigencies.

Sometimes you get lucky and things are as easy as you had imagined, but that's rarely the case.

The minute you think you've got it made, disaster is just around the corner.

You never know what events are going to transpire to get you home.

In the course of the reform, some new circumstances that we had not anticipated have appeared.

In this business, you just never know from day to day. It's one reason I held off getting too involved in entertainment. I like being able to plan, I like to know what I'm going to be doing.

History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.

The joys we expect are not so bright, nor the troubles so dark as we fancy they will be.

History is totally unpredictable.

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

Any plan conceived in moderation must fail when the circumstances are set in extremes.

History proceeds in zig zags through crooked paths.

Don’t ignore planning for unlikely events. Over long periods of time the highly improbable gets more probable to occur at least once.

… experience should teach us that it is always the unexpected that does occur!

… minor incidents—the kind you can never really foresee—combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal.

Much of what we're going to try will not work, and much of what does work will do so for unanticipated reasons.