Frank Abagnale Quotes

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

If you believe you have a foolproof system, you've failed to take into consideration the creativity of fools.

The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.

Predictability is the cousin of death: I don't necessarily want people to see me coming. You know?

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

We can't simply blame the engineers when things go wrong because, no matter how well they plan, things don't always go according to plan.

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.

When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.

One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected.

Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.

You just can't control your art in the future.

While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen.

No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.

Most things in life come as a surprise.

It is an endless procession of surprises. The expected rarely occurs and never in the expected manner.

You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in - in 2007, we just didn't know it was uncertain. It was - uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn't know it.

We call the fates of the Titanic and the Concordia - as well as those of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia - 'accidents.' Foreseeing such undesirable events is what engineers are expected to do. However, design trade-offs leave technological systems open to failings once predicted, but later forgotten.

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

Who likes surprises? Nobody I know likes surprises. But facts change on the ground.

I have a great risk of meeting a fool at home, but the candidate who travels cannot escape him.

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

Threats I have faced are unprecedented.

What's crazy about my life is that the biggest things that have happened just happen.