Jane Jacobs Quotes

The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate.

I'm a futurist.

To understand the difficulty of predicting the next 100 years, we have to appreciate the difficulty that the people of 1900 had in predicting the world of 2000.

If you have to forecast, forecast often.

I've become increasingly fascinated with social media to improve on traditional ways of preparing for and predicting the future.

The future will be determined in part by happenings that it is impossible to foresee; it will also be influenced by trends that are now existent and observable.

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

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

Predictions are hard, especially about the future.

It is difficult to predict technology more than 10 years out with any certitude, but what I observe is that change and innovation happens earlier and faster than we expect. We are constantly surprised at what technology can do.

No one predicts the future. No one tries to.

Change terrifies people. They like new, but they don't like new with change.

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.

All depends really on what kinds of assumptions you make. When you're forecasting things that will be happening 50 to 100 years in the future, it's really hard to predict what's going to happen that far out, so you have to make a bunch of assumptions.

We need to stop, and admit it: we have a prediction problem. We love to predict things—and we aren’t very good at it.

Sometimes people just feel as if we want to try something to see if we can shake things up.

We cannot innovate without opening the door to havoc.

Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.

Progress of any kind is always at variance with the old and established ideas and therefore with the codes inspired by them. Every step of progress is a change involving heavy risks.

The demise of the monolithic record industry has been, for a lot of people, really liberating and emancipating.

Science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe.

Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.

There is no improving the future without disturbing the present.

Lots of people were skeptical, but that's always true when you do something that hasn't been done before.