Neil Armstrong Quotes

It's the ability to foretell what will happen tomorrow, next month, and next year --- and to explain afterward why it didn't happen.

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.

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

Humans are terrible at predicting the future. We really overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term... If we can glimpse even a couple of years into the future, even that's difficult to do.

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

People don't realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but that's as far as we go. And I've had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome. There is no number large enough to account for that.

History shows us that people are terrible about guessing what is going to happen - next week, next month, and especially next year.

Events alone rarely provide much guide to the future.

I figure lots of predictions is best. People will forget the ones I get wrong and marvel over the rest.

Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.

Predicting the future is very difficult. As a historian I have trouble trying to predict the past.

People always overestimate how much will change in the next three years, and they underestimate how much will change over the next 10 years.

The ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year – and to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

Predictions are hard, especially about the future.

Nobody knows the future with certainty. We can, however, identify ongoing patterns of change.

I don't think any guy goes into a season worrying about the next season.

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.

Statistics were magic like this: they could tell you with near-certainty that a thing would occur, without a hint of when or where.

We're better in the rearview mirror than we are at predicting - 'cause you're never going to be right every time. You can handicap it. You can point to certain elements that make it work, and many of those elements come straight out of epidemiology, right?

Some things, like the orbits of the planets, can be calculated far into the future. But that's atypical. In most contexts, there is a limit. Even the most fine-grained computation can only forecast British weather a few days ahead. There are limits to what can ever be learned about the future, however powerful computers become.

You can't learn in school what the world is going to do next year.

I'm not making any bets on the future.

Real science is a very risky activity; people can spend their whole life working on a theory that doesn’t work out.

As chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers during the 1990s, I had to make projections about where the economy was going to be one, two, or three years ahead; frankly, I often found myself facing a cloudy crystal ball. Forecasting a few years out is hard enough; forecasting seventy-five years out is essentially impossible. Slight changes in life expectancy, immigration, wage growth, and interest rates could have large effects on the solvency of the (Social Security System.)