Rick Perlstein Quotes

An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's.

If you have to forecast, forecast often.

Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

I shall go further and say that even if an examination of the past could lead to any valid prediction concerning man's future, that prediction would be the contrary of reassuring.

I try not to get involved in the business of prediction. It's a quick way to look like an idiot.

Never forget this simple truism: Forecasting is marketing, plain and simple.

We have not only made a nation, rough-hewn and popularly governed, the marvel of development among great nations; we have contributed to the uplift and elevated the standard of living; we have not only become leaders in finance and industry; we have not only become equals in education and rivals in art, but we are the inspiration and example of other republics, and ought to be, could be, influencing the idealization of the government of the earth. It justifies our pride in the past, explains the nation-wide turning to the party for the country’s restoration, and gives every assurance of glorious triumphs in the future.

The Wall Street crash doesn't mean that there will be any general or serious business depression... For six years American business has been diverting a substantial part of its attention, its energies and its resources on the speculative game... Now that irrelevant, alien and hazardous adventure is over. Business has come home again, back to its job, providentially unscathed, sound in wind and limb, financially stronger than ever before.

This crash is not going to have much effect on business.

The experts, for all their superior knowledge, rarely do better than chance in predicting future events.

Had you asked an expert on the Middle East what changes would be likely to tke place in 2011, almost none would have predicted the Arab Spring and none would have chosen Tunisia as the flashpoint.

A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have something equivalent in an additional decade.

Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties

Punditry is like weather forecasting: the winds can shift without warning. I remember when nobody would bet a McDonald's Quarter Pounder that Bill Clinton would win the White House.

I would never make a good economist. You know, an economist is a man that can tell you anything about — well, he will tell you what can happen under any given condition — and his guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's, too.

I never quite trust futurists because I think they're kind of telling us what they think our future should be.

It is the ability to make predictions about the future that is the crux of intelligence.

I cannot give any assurances. I'm not in that business. I haven't been, and I don't intend to get into it. People who try to make predictions about things or assurances often find they're wrong.

Pundits forecast not because they know, but because they are asked.

Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.

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.

Prediction is a low form of journalism.

Perhaps the safest prediction we can make about the future is that it will surprise us.

Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.