Nate Silver Quotes

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

Nothing ever goes as planned in China.

It's very rare in life to be sure about something - particularly when it's an issue.

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

Intelligence always carries uncertainties. That is the nature of the beast.

You can't prepare for something that you can't prepare for.

People who think they know what is going to happen next are fools. Surprises - or what the brilliant author Nassim Taleb calls 'Black Swans' - are inevitable. Some are likely to be desperately unpleasant too

Uncertainty is a permanent part of the leadership landscape. It never goes away.

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

In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain.

The ground swell is what's going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are cliches also, of course, and I'm sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

Sometimes in life, random things can blind-side you.

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.

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.

Most things in life come as a surprise.

Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity: they don't know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be - there is the law of unanticipated consequences.

I don't know that I'd necessarily want to see into the future. I don't want to know what's happening next.

The one recurring theme in my writing, and in my life in general, is confusion. The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you're going to find out you're wrong - that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out, those are the exceptions.

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

The unknown is the governing condition of war.

There is no sure solution to some dangers.

As far as I'm aware, you can't tell if something is going to be successful. Brilliant scripts often don't get picked up, and terrible ones do all the time!

A hustler has to deal with danger and risk. It's part of the game. You cannot control it all, nor would you want to. Chaos, unknown factors are not something to be anxious about.